April 1999

I open the pages of my diary as if they are the heavy, creaking doors of an ancient temple, and enter with my head lowered in reverence, stepping cautiously about the rubble. Has there been an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a war?
For the first time in months, if not years, I felt free from having to report to my diary, and I lived as freely. I began writing a short story and this work kept me artistically satiated. Writing e-mails to friends quelled my need to communicate with others.
I lay low for a while also in a social sense. But when I returned to my American friends they welcomed me with open arms. They said I inspired them and made them happy. "If only you were as good to yourself as you are to others," they said.
My relationship with my aunt Jackie is as solid as ever. We are more affectionate.
Friends and I took a boat and a drug and howled at Golden Gate Bridge as we sailed under it. It was early evening in the Bay and the lights everywhere were just beginning to come on. They twinkled feebly. Our faces retained the deep yellow of the setting sun. The hills literally rolled. Everything, including the sunset, felt so near we might have snatched the scene within our hands. We embraced in the wind, and smiled into one another. Standing at the rail Anna and I kissed innocently. We made our way below deck and danced to the DJ. Time flew.
It is difficult for me to admit, but last night, when I was drunk and stoned, I called Jack- the older man with the gentle blue eyes and soft lips. I arrived at the doorstep of his palatial home in the Castro with my heart pounding in my chest. He was welcoming, eager. I asked if I could take a shower. He provided me with clean towels and gave me privacy. The hot water felt good against my skin and I washed as if I were in my own home, a young man without the struggle of shame and doubt.
In bed we were at first tender until our separate hungers found each other and together created a frenzy of vehement kisses, violent caresses. When he elevated my legs and my toes touched the wall behind me, my body still warm and slightly damp from the steaming water, he began to nip my skin; and his hands, which are otherwise like silk and gentle, slapped my buttocks. I ached with a pain and an erection that were both my own and pleasurable.
I was so intoxicated by the moment, as well as the awareness of that moment containing us, that I allowed him to penetrate me. But my pleasure vied with my homoerotic fear of death and I forced him out, turned away. Jack assured me that he is healthy, but my personal rule, though lackluster in so many ways, is to never believe the man!
The healing needs to begin.
I need fold with love and set aside this abrasive cloak that was once placed over my spirit because Christian Assyrians cannot bear the idea or image of nudity- spiritual or physical. Until I begin to accept myself as a sensual being my life will remain in the balance, my decisions marred and endangered, and my sense of self broken and precarious.
The issue isn't whether Jack is "healthy" or not, but my doubt and near-debilitating fear regarding my body, my sexuality, my decisions and impetuous rebellions against shame, Christianity, and the damning seeds of homophobia, which I continue to foster no matter how parched my own needs, my true path.
It is about embracing where I come from, embracing it so hard, so near that it suffocates beneath my will to find my own way, no matter how harrowing the notion of independence.
I have to set aside my prodigious ego and understand that I come from pain- a pain we queer Assyrians do not simply and naturally outgrow, but carry with us to each new level of awareness, and to our triumphal personal relationships, engendering our every field of success with mines of self-loathing.
This pain travels with us under pseudonyms, and constantly assumes a new identity, adroitly fitting the scene, speaking the language, walking the walk. Like a virus it adapts and mutates, builds resistance to our comparatively futile attempts at outsmarting and denying it. Just when we think we have shirked it some place along our travels, it greets us at the door to our homes.
Ten years after my suicide attempt I still find myself expressing an unresolved need and pattern to destroy myself.
I always thought I wanted to be famous, but now I am coming to understand that what I have longed for all along is acceptance, community, solidarity, an inkling that my pain is universal, my plight human, my fate typical, not freakish.
Evening arrives and the yard cools suddenly, but the neighboring children are tireless; they splash in the pool. In Marin children play in sparkling pools. In Chicago, on Damen just off of Devon, the immigrant children play in the dirt…
The apple tree across the lawn sprouts new blossoms, while my own limbs welcome bruises, which I notice when my arms are extended in a dance with a phantom wish.
Now the children cry because the mother sternly calls them in, and although it is dark I choose to stay a little while longer to see if I may find an answer as to why I insist on dragging myself through the streets of hell, willingly drinking the lava that burns my heart to ashes?
In my sleep I dream of the short story I have been writing. One more draft, a seventh, and "The Necrophile" will be completed. Maybe this is why I feel melancholic tonight, for what will I do with myself when the story ends? Do I, too, end?
… and galleries in which the many faces of emotion hung in haphazard interpretations, a balance of vital colors, some of which have no names… my own sadness as bountiful as poetry written in Arabic… the deluge composed oil rainbows on asphalt thoroughfares, flamboyant patterns that seemed inspired by a madness for Jazz… my moods were methodically threatened like a dilapidating pier on the edge of a tumultuous ocean…
Kerwin sends the contract for "Male Lust". I sign it quivering on the inside with joy.
Ahimsa sends the following e-mail:
Querido Emil,
Just wanted ta say that I love u n thank u for all yr support y para tu presencia muy bonita en mi vida. Have been helping Amy Sonnie review n reshape her anthology recently n had a chance ta read yr contribution ta the book. It's the journal excerpts u read in November at A Different Light. Yr work is so powerful, love, powerful n healing. It speaks ta me, it does. We need yr voice. I want a book from u. In time, I know it will come. Please keep writing. It makes me feel not so alone ta have another who is blood-kin ta me addressing similar work n similar issues. ("We are the ones we've been waiting for," June Jordan.) Slowly, Emil, I am beginning ta meet brothers both within n outside of our community (n within our larger community of queer colored/mixed folk) that r doing the work, living the life, n dare ta share the truths of our lives, we r producing the work we have always wanted ta read, the leaders we have always sought. I am glad ta have u as my brother n as my sister as we move inta the new millennium. Remain blessed.
Brother/sisterly yrs,
Ahimsa
After some thought I send the following e-mail to Linda of All Out There:
Dearest Linda,
I don't know what you normally post on "out there" but I had a bit of an idea this morning as I was preparing to go to work. How do you feel about a weekly installment of a young queer Assyrian's diary- mine actually? I started writing it at the age of sixteen and never stopped. It is a place where I heal as person and grow as writer. Perhaps we could start from the first entry and post five or so a week; excerpts which I will edit for their relevance regarding issues that have to do with being young, Assyrian, queer, and just human, I guess. I really don't know about this sort of thing, or how much effort it would be on your part, or if you ever considered such a thing as a part of your site. Think about it. Let me know.
Emil
Linda responds:
Hello azzizza Emil,
I love your idea. I will do all the work. You just send me the text in an e-mail and I will do the rest. I think it's a fantastic idea and I can't wait to incorporate it as part of OUR Assyrian gay and lesbian website.
Send me the stuff. I will be waiting.
Love,
Linda.
Been spending four hours a day typing out portions of my handwritten diary for All Out There- an emotionally and physically taxing task. At the end of the four hours I always feel as though I'm sleepwalking, stepping out of the haze of the past, a little dizzy, and walking into the present. When friends call they ask, "Were you sleeping?"
I miss my relationship with the present, with the people here, now.
Mitra and I decide to go to The Metro for gin and tonics. Again we are intimate and close. We sit close to each other and are physically demonstrative, and naturally so. Mitra looks about the bar and says the lone figures make her sad. 'I am often those men,' I confess. I tell her I am grateful for her company. We drink. We laugh. And we confess that we are madly attracted to each other. I kiss her on the cheek and thank her for trusting me and being courageous. I love that she never begins her confessions with, "Promise you won't tell anyone," because she already knows I wouldn't. We recall a recent formal at which Mitra and I had danced flirtatiously- she in a silky and flowing dress, twirling ostentatiously, and I broad-chested and chivalrous. Mockingly so, of course!
Watching a breathtaking sunset with friends atop Mt. Tamalpais, sipping beer and smoking, talking and bantering, I cannot shake the knowledge that elsewhere in the world people live in war and fear, in hunger not only for food, but for spiritual, religious, emotional, and sexual freedom.
Amy Sonnie sends the contract for "Revolutionary Voices". It shakes in my hand.
At the restaurant I pour water in the glass for a lively man who is telling his dining companion about a recent trip to the Congo, and how scarce the animal life has become there. He speaks earnestly, with a thick, textured Australian accent.
Sara turns to me at work and says, "You're ageless."
The idea of sharing my diary with others, comforting and entertaining others with it dizzies me.
Two students go on a shooting rampage at their high school, killing and wounding dozens.
Are our youth bored?
It feels like in America nothing unites us, and that on a national level we lack a binding force.
I don't want to read.
I don't want to write.
I don't want to smoke.
I don't want to talk to anyone.
I don't want to watch television.
I don't want to listen to music.
I don't want to masturbate.
I don't want to think.
I don't want to breathe.
Yet, I want to reach well out of my body and touch the entire world!
Lying here in my great big bed that punctuates my loneliness, I step entirely out of my body and slip into a no-place, a distant non-destination triggered and elevated by imagination, and a restless wish for adventure. I hover thus for a long while, floating in acute unconsciousness, until something in the house jolts me back to this place- my life; and find I possess pebbles in my hand, white sand from a nameless shore, and the taste of sea salt on my lip, traces of someone's cologne on my body…
Imagination…my visa.
Smiling.
Linda says that she and her partner cried when they read the first entry in my diary. While I thought this was certainly an overreaction on their part, I tried to understand what it might be like for other queer folk to tap into a well of pain that is their own while reading my diary. Maybe this is one such purpose of my writings- to reconnect readers with their own story. Not mine.