I exist. Yet, for my entire life, my existence as a queer Egyptian has been routinely denied, even wholly erased. “These people only exist in the West” was the commonly believed fallacy, referring to members of the LGBTQ+ community. The misconception felt genuine; I had never seen a representation of myself in my country, and so I thought that maybe there was no one else like me. That was until I saw the first representation of a bisexual Egyptian woman. It was 2009, I was 16 years old, and there was a new film out in the cinemas called Bedoon Rekaba, meaning Uncensored in Arabic. One of the …

Read More