. But I also knew from experience that to be queer, Arab, and American is to be constantly under siege: a minority within a minority, doubly marginalised from Western society for being a racialised security threat and from your own Arab community for being an abject, sinful deviant, supposedly ‘invented’ by the Western world. The balancing act sets you up to fail: every space you enter doesn’t want you, or asks that you drop off pieces of your body at the door. Have we always fallen through the cracks like this, I wondered. Was there no room for the queer individual in Arab history? Have people like us simply never belonged?
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