Being gay and alcoholicThree out of 10 gays in US are alcoholics, and I am one of the gay alcoholics -- thankfully have not drank a drop in the last 23 months.
I had to cross the Atlantic to come out with a vengeance and publicly declare myself as being gay, escaping imminent harm in "Cluster Fuckistan" --Pakistan. No one can come out in Pakistan as gay -- a highly closetted gay friend was angry with me about my earlier article on prominent gay Pakistanis--, though in neighboring India things are fast changing and there have been gay pride marches in recent years and a lot of gay visibility.
The other main blessing of coming to the US was that, alas, I accepted myself as being an alcoholic.
Yes, I clearly remember the evening when I drank for the first time. It was November 1979 and I was 20. Those were some of the toughest days in my life. As a 20-year-old gay man in Pakistan, I was unwilling to accept myself as homosexual and did not know whom to tell about my heart's inner desires. To me the male organ is the most beautiful thing on earth, more beautiful than Niagra Falls -- I could not tell this to anyone.
The self-repression was extreme. I used to tremble.
For quite some years, in my late teens, the 7Up bottle, made of glass, was one of my favorite sex toys. What if the bottle had cracked down there, I shudder to think today. Just two years ago I was a reporter in the picture pretty town of St. Mary's County in Southern Maryland when I heard something similar. A 14-year-old boy had to be transported to a hospital after the handle of a broom got stuck in his rear. The police report said the boy was sweeping when by "accident" he shoved the broom handle in his rear. I only smiled and told a colleague, "If that is the case, believe me lot of people would be cleaning all the time."
The fear of being exposed as a homosexual was overwhelming back in Pakistan. What if the community, friends and famiy finds out I am gay?
So the bottle came in handy, to numb my feelings. I mean not the 7UP, but alcohol bottle. From June 1990 until my flight to the US October 2000 I used to drink daily, from dusk to post-midnight.
The dumbest things I did, while I drank, I shall share momentarily.
There were some dry patches in between, especially after I married a woman from a wellknown Sindh family, called Soomros. I would never had married, but for one dream in my adult life in which I saw a woman. All my life, since I was eight, I dreamt about men. There was just one single wet dream in my life in which my partner was a woman. I thought maybe I never experienced a woman and my desires would change with due exposure.
I did of course delay my wedding as long as possible. First all my peers, classmates and cousins my age, began to tie their nuptial knots. Then my nephews and nieces began getting married. I began feeling like a blacksheep.
That single dream in which I saw the opposite sex gave me some hope that I might be able to change my sexual desries and should give marriage a try. So when I decided to marry a woman, I was drunk, drank most of the time I was married for two-and-half years, and on the day of divorce I was dead drunk. After that, I drank even more.
Had I not been drunk, the following story, in Piqua a smalltown of only 20,000 people, might have been avoided.
Gay-bashed among the American Taliban[Editor's note: A Pakistani immigrant's rosy view of freedom-loving Americans is shattered when he was frank about his homosexuality and was viciously attacked in the small Midwest town he was coming to call home.]
PIQUA, Ohio--The happiness, the relief, the triumph in knowing you are out of harm's way -- only those who have escaped imminent injury by crossing borders or oceans to America can understand my elation upon reaching this land. Though not American, I was truly proud to be in America.
"Yes, children of decent fathers can turn out to be weirdos," the intelligence officer from Pakistan's dreaded Inter-Services Intelligence agency had said to me outside my apartment in Karachi. His meaningful smile told me that Pakistan's premier spy agency, angry over my writings against the nation's nuclear and jihadi follies, had begun blackmailing me over my gay sexuality.
Soon afterwards, I escaped to U.S. safety after winning a journalistic fellowship. Barely 10 months later: "Jesus Loves All." Member of a Protestant church, I carried the handwritten pink placard at a nearly 1,000-strong rally of a religious leader in the local football stadium. Then, as the clerics and the gathering looked on, I spun the placard to its other side: "Gays, Lesbians Bisexuals, Transgendered and Blacks.
Perhaps such in-your-face protest was wrong, but I felt justified in my anger: I went to the "religious crusade" after being badly wounded in a gay-bashing incident. The featured speaker, whom I will not name here, lamented that "America is becoming the drug and homosexual capital of the world."
I was incensed all over again -- why put a person's sexuality in the same dirty basket as drug addiction? Imagine a man who for half of his 40 years suffered with silent shame over his same-sex preference in a Pakistani society of medieval values. I even got married, in part to conform to societal norms, but mostly to challenge my orientation and try to return to the mainstream. No dice.
So in America, in celebration of my newfound personal freedom, I decided to come out of the closet. I no longer hid that I was gay. I felt safe. But I discovered that Taliban-style attitudes are not restricted to Afghanistan and Pakistan. They exist tenaciously in American towns like this one.
Sometimes tolerance prevails in small towns; other times the dark fears and hatreds of the "American Taliban" -- vicious fundamentalists -- are resurgent. "This town once had the reputation of being a little bit like San Francisco," said one resident, Ray C. Others agreed, recalling more live-and-let-live days.
Just a block from a statue of the town's founder had sat the town's openly gay bar, Water-on-Main. Outside stood a statue of a female pink poodle, which relieved its bladder male-style -- with one leg raised.
Those days are gone.
Today, gay-bashing seems to be acceptable, and out of fear, many people here remain in the closet.I am leaving Piqua with some fond memories, but also with a police report, and the emotional and physical scars it outlines.
An officer writes of coming to the department's lobby to hear of an assault. "Upon arriving, I made contact with Ahmar Khan ... Four white males in a sports car had seen him walking and had yelled 'hey faggot' at him. Mr. Khan, who is openly homosexual, advised that the four males had then stopped, exited the vehicle, and one of the subjects, a white male with a muscular build, struck him in the face with a closed fist."
The operation at the local hospital lasted more than two hours. My jaw was broken in two places. For 50 long days I was on a liquid diet, unable even to eat Gerber's baby food.Those who attacked me have yet to be brought to justice.Before leaving Pakistan, I imagined white Americans were the embodiment of liberty.
Whenever I had thought of America, I thought of freedom, and when I thought of freedom, I pictured white Americans -- the Founding Fathers, all U.S. presidents to date [until the Obama revolution recently] , most in Congress. And I had considered that small towns like this one must be "pure America" -- standing for freedom of speech and expression -- since most here are white.My mistake. I don't mistrust all white Americans now, nor all small-town Americans. I'm just much, much more careful.
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