Unlearning fear: My queer life in exile

A wide green lawn filled with Pride flags fluttering freely in the air. We dance around them, expressing ourselves through clothes, makeup, and flags, wishing one another well. Peppering the lawn are small tables selling handmade crafts made by our small community, alongside colorful flags representing different gender and sexual identities. Police vans and officers ring the lawn, there to protect us, not threaten us.

I woke up unusually early, having spent the night restless like I used to be before a school trip, picking out my clothes with care. I fussed over the small details: socks, hair clips, makeup shades, the color of my nails. I don't usually care about details; I am a chaotic person who throws on the first thing within reach. But this day was special. It was the first Pride parade I had ever attended in my life. In Egypt, I had never dared to even imagine organizing a march, not even in the distant future.

A shade of recognition

When I first set foot in the African country I chose to settle in, a foreign friend gave me an unexpected gift: an introduction to a small queer rights initiative. It was my very first contact with the community I belonged to. I emailed them, and they wrote back inviting me to their office without asking for proof of my identity. There, in a modest office in an unassuming neighborhood, I found a Pride flag adorning the door. It came as a shock. I was still in Africa, in a country that recognized neither same-sex marriage nor gender transition.

Their warm welcome gave way to tears as they listened to my story: the travel ban, the interrogation by National Security in Egypt. It felt like exaggerated sympathy. My story seemed so ordinary compared to those of my friends, some of whom had spent months in detention. Perhaps our feelings had gone numb amid the brutality around us, until psychological torture and being stripped of rights in an unfamiliar country felt easier than physical torture and the total denial of rights back home.

In Egypt, it is hard enough to come out as a human rights defender. The contempt only grows if you defend women's rights too, met with accusations of enabling vice, betrayal, importing Western agendas that don't belong in our society. As for defending the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, that's an admission no one dares make, or they face prison, and maybe worse.

Learning to conceal

In Egypt, I worked alongside colleagues in queer rights initiatives, helping facilitate workshops on sexually transmitted infections and prevention, digital security training on using technology safely, sessions on mental health and wellbeing, and art events to showcase our creative work and handicrafts. I remember our joyful gatherings, our modest activities compared to what I saw abroad, and I wonder: was any of this a crime that warranted such relentless police persecution, all that hiding, caution, and operating underground?

We never attempted to challenge laws or push for legal reform the way feminists or LGBTQ+ groups do in most countries, as things ought to be. What crime had I committed that justified a travel ban and an interrogation? Though the official reason for my trip was clear, they stopped me and questioned me about my identity and sexual orientation. The moment I got my passport back from National Security, I decided to seek asylum. And that is what I did.

I left Egypt against a rising tide of hate speech and racism against refugees in the country. Social media campaigns incited against African refugees in particular, demanding their immediate deportation as unwelcome guests, accusing them of violent crimes and vandalism, and stigmatizing them with HIV, even as wars raged in their home countries. Those voices planted a persistent fear and anxiety in me: what if that racism seeped into the country where I had sought refuge? A thousand “what ifs” ran through my mind.

Yet the campaigns we underestimated, which I had dismissed as mere state-backed troll farms stirring up public sentiment, turned into hunting people in the streets, locking them up, and deporting them. In the process, refugees died from harsh conditions in detention.

Between asylum and escape

What if things changed, if racism seeped in here, and the public and police treated me the way refugees are treated back home? Here, I introduce myself as a political refugee and an activist defending human rights and LGBTQ+ rights: in public spaces, to strangers, in print newspapers, and in television interviews. Back home, I never dared whisper that dangerous secret to my closest friends, or even to the women I dated. Caution was the first thing we learned in our workshops, shared and facilitated across queer rights initiatives.

The rules of concealment were drilled into us at every meeting: hide anything that reveals your identity or your work, or else you and everyone around you will be arrested. Many colleagues in Egypt used aliases to protect themselves. We never asked one another where we lived, what we studied, how old we were, or even our real names.

A simple question between friends about where someone lived, asked only to figure out directions or share a ride, felt perilous in the deep culture of concealment we grew used to. The consequence could be arrest, a public smear campaign, or lifelong ostracism. So we thought carefully before answering, and in the end, we often didn't answer truthfully.

Where I live now is not paradise. There are people here with deep-seated homophobia, especially among the older generations, dripping from their social media comments. Nor does it stop at words. During last year's Pride march, a group of Muslim fundamentalists attacked participants, prompting organizers to choose a venue this year far from conservative strongholds, under police protection.

Even my relationship with the police shifted over time. At first, the sight of a police uniform or patrol car sent me into a panic, even if it was just a traffic cop: the lingering toll of repression and its news. Then something happened that shifted how I felt. I asked a female police officer for directions to a bus stop. She took my arm and walked with me. Terror hit me so hard I nearly fainted; my vision blurred for seconds. Then I found myself standing in front of the bus. I realized her English hadn't been good enough to explain the way, so she had decided to escort me to the stop herself.

Fellow human rights defenders here assure me that the police are friendly to activists, and that the government supports them. But my mind refuses to believe it. Perhaps what softens the exile, the loneliness, and the flight from arrest, leaving my work, family, and friends behind, is this small breath of freedom in displacement: a place where defending human rights is not a crime punishable by law and society, not a shame to be buried, but a pride we carry, respected by the state and the people alike.

(*) A version of this article first appeared in Arabic on Sunday, July 26, 2026.