Over the rainbow
In June2016, wearing a baseball cap and holding a rainbow-hued Maple Leaf flag, Bassel Mcleash attended his first Pride parade... and found himself marching next to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Overnight, the Syrian refugee—who’d landed in Toronto only a month earlier—became an inadvertent poster boy and an unwitting target for those opposed to taking in not only displaced Syrians but all LGBTQ2 people fleeing persecution all over the world. Here, Mcleash, now 31, reflects on that moment— and what came before and a er.
My sense of my sexuality didn’t come forward until I started going out alone, trying to find people that I could understand. Around 2005 or 2006, I was studying at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus, near Sha’lan district. Close by was the In House Café, an a ernoon hangout for gay people. A er dark, all of Sha’lan was mainly a gay area. You could meet all kinds of people— poor, rich, in charge, not in charge, businessmen, whatever. We’d stay out till 2 or 3 a.m., walking, cruising, checking people out. We might rent a house with a pool, get a sound system and hire a DJ, and we’d have a rave of 2,000 or 3,000 gay people. Being gay was illegal in Syria, so if one policeman got a whiff of the situation, he could either arrest us or join us. Still, we felt safe. One time we dared a drag queen to go out and buy a CD wearing only a bikini. And she did it. In a conservative country, that was legendary.
In Sha’lan, we had 20 or 25 “families.” Your “mom” was the person who introduced you to the society. He or she would tell you where to go, what to do. We’d have a rap sheet about every person—a list of exes, a list of potentials. Each family took care of its members like they were a real family. That gave our lives as gay people more meaning.
It was like that until 2011. Sha’lan was one of the high-level areas with a lot of embassies, so there were lots of bombs, assassination attempts, gunshots. If we wanted to meet, we would only meet inside, in safe places. Even so, in the community some people got kidnapped, tortured, raped or selected for cleansing.
In 2012, I was working at an aviation services company in Damascus, but a er the bombings started and the assassinations increased, the CEO decided we needed to move the office, so we went to Egypt. During our second month there, he went back on his agreement to pay us a proper allowance, so we all le . In order for me to get a work permit, I had to provide proof of my HIV-negative status. When they did the first test and it came back positive, it became impossible to get a job, unless it was under the table. A er that, I worked for a couple of months in a café in downtown Cairo that was owned by a lesbian couple. I used to sleep there also. A er the second revolution, around June 2013, there were more crackdowns on LGBTQ2 people. During a celebration for Egyptian Valentine’s Day in November, there was a raid where 14 people got arrested. More raids started happening in private places. It’s been like that in Egypt ever since.
I applied to the UN, but they told me, “No country will accept your file.” I applied to Rainbow Railroad [a Toronto-based organization that helps LGBTQ2 people at risk of harm in their home countries]. It took about a year before I learned I was accepted. It was Dec. 1, World AIDS Day. I walked into the Cairo call centre where I worked around midnight, and the first message in my personal email was from Rainbow Railroad. I stood up and gave my two weeks’ notice. It took five months to get my documentation. I arrived here on May 26, 2016.
The whole situation in Toronto is hard to adjust to. When I was at the Pride parade, I thought, “Is this really happening? Am I really here? Am I really in the middle of the government of Canada?” It was a rare chance to meet someone in the seat of power. But the celebration of being gay is not really my thing. I mean, yeah, I’m gay, but I’m not only gay. We have a proverb: for each place, its own way of speaking. That is, for each location, you have a certain personality. So for me, I have time to be gay and to be my own self, but I don’t have to apply it 24/7. Things like that [have shaped] my perspective: I think the fear made us really understand the value of our sexuality. There are some people I connect to in the community here, but it’s not like what I had in Syria, not at all.
A er me being in the news and all that, I got a lot of death threats. I don’t think that they got to me at that point, but they did later on, when a lot of the people who used to be my friends and support group started slipping away. I was in a neurotic situation where I was not able to go outside. I had a fear of being in open spaces, and in crowded spaces. I still do sometimes. It was especially hard because I didn’t really know who was making the threats. If I had known who it was, I would be able to memorize their pictures and take care. But the anonymity made me really afraid of every face that I looked at.
Do I regret it? No! No, no, no, no. I regret the outcome, but I don’t regret being out, being on the news, doing a TEDx Talk, having all those things. The backlash would happen, no matter what I said.
At the moment I’m working on myself. I have my psychotherapist, I do PTSD groups, I try to do anger management. I try to be a more decent version of myself. I want to be a stepping stone for others. I’ve decided to therapeutically write my life story in a book, talking about the difference between my experiences in Syria, in Egypt and here. And if it has the success I’m hoping for, I can start my own organization. I want to buy a house, and if someone is on the street, or being abused or neglected, they can come stay there. They can learn, they can get rehabilitated, they can get psychological and addiction treatment, whatever they need. Being alone here makes you vulnerable to every kind of abuse. And humans are social animals. If we don’t have that social connection, we are not going to be able to survive.