4 Beirut: Your Charm Bewitches Me, Your Beauty Seduces Me

BEIRUT

Thousands of cats scamper around the streets of the city. My personal Beirut is blue and used, a gift from Rasha. I had never possessed a dildo before, nor did I masturbate frequently. Rasha, on the other hand, is an expert of blended climaxing. A skill she acquired at the age of nine. To her, I am an alien. The penis-shaped machine she gave me is equipped with two rabbit ears for clitoral massaging, they look like tiny cyborg fingers. Rasha indulged in a silver egg-shaped vibrator, discrete enough to be slipped in her underwear. Beirut is too large to handle anywhere but indoors, like the thousands of felines who roam around the city as if they were degenerating simulations of themselves.

They mill around dumpsters, university campuses, and restaurant kitchens. At night, their mating cries span audible and inaudible waves; the raspy cry of Rosemary’s Baby combined with the song of a whale. In heat, one-eyed cats with severed tail ends are always and only ready to fuck or fight. After that, a nap and cuddle.

HOTELS

Pink and purple neon brightens the facades of fancy hotels sprinkle throughout the Ain Mreisseh district. The sea is only a few meters away from the Phoenicia, the St Georges, and the Holiday In, all landmarks – of war, reconstruction, and hedonism. In the pre-war years, celebrities like Omar Sharif or Dalida were photographed basking on the edges of the Phoenicia’s oval swimming pool. The St Georges’ bar was infamously frequented by spies you might find yourself in a Gerard De Villier’s detective novel like S.A.S Vengeance à Beyrouth.

Shortly after the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, different militia groups opened the ‘hotel front’, waging war against enemy factions from abandoned hotel floors. Rumors have it that in brief hiatuses from fighting, snipers would run off to nearby brothels for a quick fuck before combat resumed.

PHOENICIA

Years ago, I cheated on an old boyfriend with an Algerian politician. He was older. I was skinny and wore cowboy boots regardless the season. The politician said he was attracted to me, because I smelled ‘hormonal.’ He also said he was a sex addict. I understood that, though what he meant by ‘hormonal’ wasn’t clear to me. It didn’t matter, I nodded in approval and followed him to room 208. Sex workers roamed the hallways of the Phoenicia hotel or sat cross-legged in the lobby, when they weren’t behind closed doors engaging in sex for reasons that don’t have a whole lot to do with hormones. Most of these workers were blondes, from Ukraine or Russia. Some were from Morocco. All were ‘artists’ whose services were exchanged for petro-dollars and jewelry was purchased at Harry, an in-house high-end boutique.

ARTIST

According to the General Security (a Lebanese intelligence agency), an ‘artist’ qualifies as: ‘a masseur/ masseuse,’ ‘a barmaid,’ ‘a waitress,’ ‘advertising female’ or an ‘art practitioner.’ ‘Artists’ lives are highly monitored. If you are a female artist you must ‘perform a daily artistic show from 10:00 p.m. until 05:00 a.m. and get one day of rest per week. You must ‘stay in your room from 05:00 a.m until 01:00 p.m (rest hours)’ ‘and you are forbidden to stay in any place other than the hotels and authorized houses unless for exceptional cases decided by the General Director of General Security.’ I’m not an artist. After having sex with the politician twice, I made sure to snatch all the ‘all-in-one shampoo & conditioner’ I could find in the marbled bathroom of suite 208. When I left the Phoenicia it was 04:00 a.m.

MARSA

I was nervous. The testing was anonymous. A doctor with reddish hair invited me into a room with baby blue walls. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked. I told him about D. Though I had been careful, you can never be 100% sure, right? D. was notorious for having fucked half of Paris. ‘Did you use condoms?’ ‘… Yes… Does oral sex count?’

D. had a beautiful cock, as if going in and out of holes had sculpted his dick to perfection. He also had a tanned ass and thinning hair. We usually hooked up late at night, after his shift. The red-haired doctor smiled, showing me a silicone dick larger than average. The doctor asked if I knew how to put on a condom. ‘You have to make sure no air slips in. Try now,’ he said. After successfully passing my condom application test, the doctor pricked my finger, extracting a drop of blood. A few minutes after asking me to wait outside, he called me back. My test was negative. I thanked God and D.’s cock. On my way out, the doctor handed me a leaflet:

‘Marsa is a sexual health center based in Beirut, Lebanon. It has been operating officially since February 2011. The purpose behind the center is to provide confidential and anonymous services related to sexual health. Services are provided to the public in a friendly environment free of stigma and discrimination against age, sex, gender and sexual orientation.’

In a city thriving on stigmas and taboo, Marsa is a safe place.

LA GUEULE DU MONDE AND THE SHAMELESS

In the self-portraiture series ‘In Your Home’, Rasha Kahil photographs herself naked in other people’s home. At a desk, cross-legged on a lounging chair, next to China Ceramics, underneath the kitchen sink. In some photos, she glances straight at the lens, in others, her gaze wanders off. Kahil might be posing for a possible intruder, the viewer, or for herself, but by documenting her naked body in private spaces, she is disrupting a familiar set up. In Your Home has caused Kahil great trouble in Lebanon, but I won’t linger on about this here. On the blog, La Gueule du Monde, she writes and posts photographs of friends and lovers. Rasha Khalil recently retired her blog and started up a Tumblr ‘The Shameless’.

In the self-produced news magazine XI, Khalil lures the reader into a world of trash-erotica; ‘He looks at me. I acquiesce with my eyes and we continue without a rubber. I don’t mind. I’m on the pill, and careless. He spits on his hands, slimes up his dick before he enters me again. I can feel the rugged texture of his fat dick even more now. And I like it that way… after another 10 minutes of heaving and grunting and flipping and tossing, he comes all over my back and my ass.’ XI came about very spontaneously says Rasha Khalil ‘I was intensely frustrated one day, and it all came out flooding out into eleven blush-inducing sexy stories.’

LET IT BE

In 2008, Akram Zaatari one of Lebanon’s foremost contemporary artists, curated three sessions of videos for Beirut’s contemporary art biennial, ‘Home Works’ on the subject of sex. Zaatari, himself the author of more than 40 videos, is known for exploring issues pertinent to postwar Lebanon, has also dedicated some work to the study of sexual practice, notably in his two videos Crazy of You (1997) and How I Love You (2001).

Akram Zaatari’s film and videoprogram, Let It Be was the outcome of a year’s research on how video and film serve to imagine, describe or comment on different aspects of sex. He describes the works as ‘personal annotations that reflect the concerns, habits, desires and fantasies of their makers’ Let It Be was grouped into different sections. The third session was a tribute to the American artist William E. Jones, who has made several works that take pornography as the raw material from which to create videos and films that look at the way people relate and think about sex.¹

The last and most graphic screening was screened semi privately in Bernard Khoury’s office, an industrial loft painted red and black with futuristic shell-like sculptures descending from the ceiling. The day of the screening, familiar and unfamiliar faces filled the space. As the program proceeded, the atmosphere got increasingly tense. The man sitting next to kept wriggling his legs and playing with his phone until he stood up and left. H., the guardian of an art gallery located in the same building stayed by the door, monitoring who went in and out. He smiled, though he seemed agitated and kept running to the bathroom. By the end of the program, only a handful of spectators remained in the audience.

^{1 – Courtecy Unearting Desire}

READING GROUP

Every Saturday, 98weeks’ feminist reading group convenes in a Getawi apartment. We’ve been reading Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie, a book on the technologies of gender in late capitalism that challenges ideas of nature, reproduction, and gender. Women and men in Beirut (those who can afford it) inject thousands of dollars into exalting and preserving their bodies: plastic surgery, Botox, personal trainers, strict diets. They emulate ideals of femininity and masculinity until these collapse under the weight of a silicone overdose. Lara Kay is an example of how emulation can turn into campy subversion. In a short home video, Kay gives viewers beauty tips. ‘Most of the women have a problem, and the problem is the hair’, she says, lipstick smeared over mouth. Her solution: saliva. She demonstrates by wetting her fingers and patting her disheveled hair.

BRIBES DE CORPS

To become an artist, Huguette Caland (born 1931) had to leave her native Lebanon, her children, and husband. She now lives in California where she continues making art. In 1973, she created Body Fragments (Bribes de corps), an erotic series of quasi-abstract paintings evoking body parts: An ass, the opening of a lip, the space between a pair of thighs. In one of the canvases, two purple ovals are separated by a trumpet-like shape that suggests a red and pulsating vagina.

In Caland’s paintings, the body can’t be contained. It sprawls outward, spilling straight into the viewer’s space.

CINEMA ROYAL

Cinema Royal opens at 9:00 AM. Like the Plaza, Saroula, or Montreal – once popular movie theatres featuring action and B films – Royal plays erotica and porn, and is frequented by workers or wealthy gays on the hunt. In the 1970s, the Hawarian brothers, Avo and Yervan, ran the cinema. They were painters and painted posters for films and advertisements. They loved Indian films, especially the films of Shammi Kapoor, Dharmendra, and Jeetendra. The posters they painted depicting the films’ major scenes were magnificent. Those alone were enough to draw people in. VHS finally killed the film market. So the brothers introduced a new formula. We’d show an action film, followed by a martial arts film, then an erotic film, and finally a porno.² A little less than two years ago, the police raided the Plaza, arresting 36 men. Premised on Napoleonic law, article 534 of the Lebanese penal code criminalizes ‘unnatural sexual intercourse.’ The men were subjected to humiliating ‘medical’ controls before being released. In response, performer and artist Alex Baczynksi-Jenkins made, Yet see him through my eyes (2013), a montage of scenes from Arab cinema ‘representing narratives and moments of queer desire and intimacy’.

To watch Yet see him through my eyes, one had to sit on grimy chairs, intruding upon the rituals of its clientele.

^{2 – Courtecy Vartan Avakian and Bidoun magazine}

QUEER GEOGRAPHY

Released in 2014, Queer Geography is a publication edited by Danish artist Lasse Lau. It documents workshops in three different cities; Tijuana, Copenhagen, and Beirut. The Beirut section features an unpublished conversation on Let It Be, with Akram Zaatari, Stuart Comer and William E. Jones as well as Lebanese artists and activists expressing, either in image or text, representations of non-hetero normative desires in urban space.

ASHTA

Ashta. The inflection is on the ‘t’. Because it follows the hushing consonants ‘sh’, the effect is detonating. Then comes the post-coital ‘a,’ lingering in satisfaction. Whoever says ‘astha’ does so with a smile, and for good reasons.

The word delights in the mouth, earning its multiple usages in Lebanese vernacular. Shou ya ashta? (‘What’s up sexy?’), shouts a thug roaming the Corniche (Beirut’s seaside walk) as he brushes passed me. I tell him to ‘kol khara.’ In this classic pick up line, ashta stands for ‘sugar-apple,’ a cone shaped, seedy, and fragrant fruit with a creamy off-white flesh. All things ashta are creamy. Its most impressive adoption being in ‘fruit cocktail’, a science of its own. Ramadan Juice, Makhlouf or Bliss House, are all masters in preparing chunky seasonal fruit salads served in a large plastic cups and topped with ashta, almonds, pistachio, and honey, sometimes, candied fruits, but mostly ashta. To say that a ‘cocktail avocat’ is sweet is a euphemism. It is almost as saccharine and nauseating than its sister expression, Shou ya ashta?

EXCALIBUR

Two male friends visiting Beirut want to have fun. Something involving women. A strip club? Yes! I hail a taxi. ‘Where are you going?’ He asks. ‘Maameltein’ ‘Jump in.’ Tucked between the town of Jounieh and the Casino du Liban, Maamaltein has developed into a cruising stretch full of ‘super nightclubs’ and seafood restaurants. From the highway I can see the bay’s colorful glow. The driver drops us off at the main road. We walk until we stumble on a white neon sword piercing through Excalibur’s ‘a’. ‘You can’t get in,’ says the bouncer. ‘Why? ‘You’re a woman. Only female sex workers and male clients are allowed.’ ‘But we’re tourists!’ ‘Fine… just say you don’t speak Arabic.’ In shady areas, away from the stage, men try striking up conversations with dancers in broken English.

KING FRIES

I’m strolling on Hamra Street, a pedestrian area replete with shops, shops, and a few cafes. Back in the days, Hamra was known as the urban and intellectual headquarter of the Middle East. Poets, politicians, and people from all walks of life would linger in cafes, plotting revolutions. So I’ve heard. Today, Vero Moda, Caribou, and H&M have opened shop. They’re here to stay. So is Malek El Batata (King of Fries), a grim little hole in the wall where potatoes are fried, day and night. I order a French fries sandwich with coleslaw and my friend orders nothing. Next to us, an old guy is chatting with a younger guy with his hair pulled back in a ponytail. He’s wearing a D&G t-shirt eating a chicken sandwich. ‘Let me tell you how it works,’ whispers the man with the ponytail in his ears. ‘I charge $30 for a Filipino and $20 for an Ethiopian. You give me the money, and I make the call.’ The older man says he will pick up the girls tomorrow, King of Fries, same time.

UNCLE DEEK

Every other day, I run by the sea. Men, women, dogs, and kids, stroll, play, jog or sell boiled corn. When I’m done, I stop for a bottle of water at Uncle Deek, a small grocery known for its coffee: A mixture of Nescafe and sweetened milk served in maroon cups. To buy water, I must walk the narrow space between the sidewalk and the row of chairs parked next to Uncle Deek’s entrance. Elbow to elbow, men sit on the chair, occupying most of the pavement. They glance. ‘A small bottle of water, please’. ‘With sugar?’ ‘What?’ ‘I’m joking,’ says the cashier, winking as he hands me back my change.