The same reassertion of the alcohol industry’s ownership of the Queer agora. The same mediocrity masked as debauchery. Even in far-flung Urumqi, even with drag queens dancing to whatever music was popular with young Uyghur gays, I imagined it would be the same shit as in Beijing and West Hollywood. I was twenty-three and already allergic to gay bars-and simultaneously found it impossible to avoid them. Looking out the window into the dark, I wondered if I had come to this place that seemed to me to be on the fringe of humanity because my life, too, had arrived at its furthest borders. As the dusk fell to night, I felt a sinking in me. Small canyons looked more desolate in the periwinkle of dusk, occasionally punctuated by clusters of windmills. I was delighted to receive such a precious gift, especially since I was, of course, quite hungry.īack on the bus, we passed large expanses of arid land.
#I wanna take you to a gay bar song kittens full#
Chatting with the locals, I explained that my parents were from North Africa, and, excited to meet an Arab visitor, the farmworkers gifted me with a shopping bag full of their inimitable sweet and tart grapes and refused to be paid. At the last stop I staggered behind on a tour of a traditional medicine factory and wandered into a vineyard. The long-haul bus rides to more traditional and scenic parts of the region had taken a toll. But by the tail end of that final tour we had exhausted all possible conversation. We ate together and took photos of each other and browsed the hokey Uyghur-themed gifts that people sold at all the gift shops of Xinjiang monuments. They appeared on my first trip to a large, picturesque lake called Tianchi and then we found ourselves on the same bus to Turpan the following day. For them, to go to Xinjiang was the most exotic domestic vacation conceivable. The son asked about everything outside of China. A military man on furlough, visiting from Henan with his mother as a belated birthday present to her. I agreed to this, wondering how else I’d pass the time here-worrying that I’d fall into some painful realization and never emerge from Urumqi.
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There were none for non-Chinese at that time of year, he said, flipping through a catalogue, so if he booked me a tour with Chinese nationals, it might happen that they’d turn me away and I’d have to eat the loss of a few dollars. The clerk and I looked at each other knowingly, and the conversation turned to tours. I stepped back, reflexively, so that the clerk could help the officer, who produced a couple of hundred yuan bills, Mao’s Mona Lisa smile upside down in disapproval, and then the two left. I envisioned they’d agreed, in a sort of verbal contract, that she was beautiful enough. Bright lipstick, a cheap perm, ruffled chiffon, and little left to the Perhaps the arid climate had made her so dry, perhaps age. The clerk was looking up my reservation when the elevator opened behind me and a middle-aged policeman, not unhandsome, and a dry-looking womanĪpproached the front desk. The lights were out for some reason-either a power outage or for the cool of the shade.
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The lobby of the hotel was modest, clean enough, and the building was very centrally located in what was once the more Han Chinese part of Urumqi, not too far from what had been described to me as the Uyghur zone. I had sex in order to feel alive and present. It seems paradoxical to me, now, that I vanished my body in order to have more sex-often internationally, collecting men like stamps from other countries. And that felt sleek, not taking up too much space.
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Everything but my eyes, nose, and mouth shrank until I was barely visible. The photos of me from the late 2000s reveal larger-than-usual facial features. The horrible parts of me-my wide, flat North African ass and my ill-fitting merguez fingers-seemed to vanish along with the rest of my body. I fasted because I thought I was becoming more beautiful than I’d ever been destined to be in this life. I fasted, in those days, regardless of time and place and filial piety. At the end of a day’s fast, store and homeowners put watermelon and sliced naan bread out on the roadside for the fasters. I had come at the height of summer and of Ramadan. I felt, on arrival, as though I were on the edges of civilization in a way that scared me, although now I often find myself in similar places-in the outermost suburbs of Cairo, in the hills of Tijuana. I was already taken aback by the absence of people. For a regional capital city, Urumqi was a small and slow place relative to Beijing, where I lived at the time. I stood at the hotel front desk, travel weary, my slow mind cooling itself from the dry heat outside. I’d read in a gawking travel publication that there was a single gay bar in Urumqi where the drag queens dress as Uyghur women in traditional outfits and spin like dervishes to poppy Central Asian music. I came to Xinjiang to see someone from before whom I anticipated I wouldn’t find.