Adventures in Uzbekistan: Queer Woman Puts Away Labyris to "Pass"

Note: This article first appeared in the Bloomington Beacon, Southern Indiana's Glb newspaper.

When preparing for an extended stay overseas, one pictures what life will be like and how one will cope with the problems that inevitably arise. For a woman traveling to a Muslim country, especially a queer woman, the number of things that can go wrong begin to increase exponentially. Even knowing that there is little gay life to be found or that homophobia is common did not prepare me for being completely cut off from "gay society".

Having been out for quite a long time, I had forgotten the traps that fear and isolation build. In Uzbekistan, where I stayed during the summer of 1997, being gay means fifteen years in jail. Islam, something of a state religion, as Christianity is in pseudo-secular America, is reviving among many young people whose parents during the Soviet years were never able to study religion openly. While sodomy has officially been stricken from the law books in Russia and some of the other former Soviet states, in Uzbekistan homophobia has well-socialized roots in parts of both Islamic and Soviet culture.

I didn't spend much time worrying about this as my friends who had traveled in Turkey and Egypt reported finding gay bars and queer folk in major cities. I believed that in Tashkent, the largest city in the country, I would find some queers to befriend and be befriended by. After years of dreaming about Uzbekistan, nothing was going to intrude on my excitement.

Islam plays a large part in my re-search; while most Americans thought it would be onerous to conform to the "Islamic" dress standards for women, the shift in clothes was not difficult. I'm used to viewing all clothing as "drag" which needs to be adapted to changing situa-tions. While I could wear my "American drag", wearing a conservative dress help-ed me blend in. Given that men have to wear long pants despite 115? heat, I thought my skirts quite comfortable. Not all the changes were so easy; for instance, I had to stop wearing my labyris, which I wear it constantly in the US. In Uzbekistan, despite my answers relating it to Kazakh warrior women, I found that many people, particularly the religious, were hostile to its distant similarity a Christian cross. I discovered that Russian women often wear crosses not as a symbol of religiosity, but as an ethnic symbol in a country where Russians are part of the old and disliked elite. Putting it in the back of a drawer became symbolic of my willingness to "pass" as a Muslim girl as my 'brothers' wanted.

A labyris, shaped like a two-headed axe, is a symbol of the Amazons, a "tribe" of women warriors described in Herodotus. The actual history of these women is more interesting than their mythology, for archeologists have been finding remains of women warriors in burial sites in Kazakhstan in the steppe. They apparently did everything the men did in battle and were buried with their weapons. While Herodotus said they took men only to have children, the real women warriors lived in their tribe like any other warrior. Whether they had children or took husbands has not been thoroughly studied.

Lesbians have been using the symbol for some time. It is especially interesting that in Russian, one of the words for "lesbian" is "amazonka."

In Uzbekistan, a man is usually either a woman's family member or her potential lover; the gray area of just being friends is hard to negotiate. Calling someone your "brother" or "sister" means you have a very close friendship, similar in fact to our use of the word in the gay community.

Social life was full of traps. Everyone assumed I was anxious to be married, as an Uzbek woman would be at my age, and most people felt free to question me about bearing children. My 'brother's' best friend, a playboy who was handsome and knew it, was more than eager to score a conquest with the American girl. I was invited to the homes of academics only to feel uncomfortable with their biases against Uzbek businessmen, my 'brothers'' occupation. Used to feeling isolated from the urban gay world while in the Midwest, I struggled to cope without gay newspapers, magazines, or movies.

I tried to create my own little queer cultural sphere. For a while I wore freedom rings. They drew questions, too, but the answer, all wrapped up in political activism in the United States, never raised an eyebrow until I started teaching English. I took them off after being taunt-ed by the homophobic Americans who also taught at my school. Fearful of the repercussions in my class and causing problems for my Uzbek family, my "cultural sphere" was rapidly became just my Walkman, endlessly playing a sad song by a Russian group that I had in-stantly recognized as gay. I made friends with a pirated-tape vender, one of the few people in Uzbekistan who treated me like just another person, showing him my Ru Paul tape, trying to explain why Ru looks the way he does, until I realized I was alienating one of the few people who didn’t see me as a walking bank account.

I also started testing the limits. I asked my 'brother's' playboy friend if he knew anyone gay. My 'brother' had let slip that a touristy restaurant near the center of Tashkent was a gay hang-out, especially in the early evening. How could he know that, I wondered. I walked around the neighborhood and park that adjoined it. With an art school across the street and two bookstores catering to Russian readers, not to mention a kiosk which sold condoms, all the elements seemed right. I began spending time watching people and listening to European dance music in a nearby cafe while I sipped a Coke and read Uzbek magazines. My gaydar went off several times: one group of women "read" like lesbians, but when they sat down to talk, they spoke German and were discussing music; I decided they were just foreign tourists. Around the edge of the cafe were benches where men often sat and smoked. Several times my 'dar went off with them. Sometimes I had no idea why, other times I would notice things like purple shoelaces, which had to be fabulously hard to find, or the way a guy never glanced at any of the short-skirted Russian girls who traipsed by. Unfortunately, I was too nervous to approach any of them, since I had a good idea how uncomfortable they'd feel with someone identifying them, not to mention how insulting I would appear if it turned out I was wrong.

By the time I left, my home life had degenerated: my 'brother' went on a two-day spree of calling me every gay-baiting name he knew in both English and Russian. His older brother eventually forced him to be nice to me. (His elder brother was very accepting, even asking about my former girlfriends.) So he tried to make up, saying he wanted me to "just be normal". I started to cry as I told him I am normal, whether he liked it or not. I couldn’t wait to leave the country.

If I am to continue in my Ph.D. program, I have no choice but to go back to Uzbekistan. The research was thrilling, and now I at least know what I’m up against. Just as I will never again take a hot shower for granted, I will never again take for granted just how much gay culture we have access to all the time, even here in the Midwest.