I am Almoz

 I am Almoz. I am a belly dancer. I am also queer. 

Hear the untold story that needs to be told. Let darkness unfold and let the powers that be be shamed.

I have suffered so much because of who I am. I barely made it across the country in order to find and get to my safe space. My deliverance from this miry clay of a waterless pit of despair was nothing short of miraculous.

I have faced shame and stigma all my life for being me. There are still untold amount of people out there (all around the world) who remain petulantly unwilling to accept queer people, people like me. They desperately seek any petty excuse to attack us, even going as far as getting physical.

During Trump administration, and subsequently during Covid, I, along with many others in my community, have been suffering the worst setbacks of increasing homophobia and transphobia the likes of which we hadn’t seen for a long time. It came quickly as a shock. It was as though people had suddenly changed their minds about us. Anti-LGBTQ has now come into its emboldened vogue. It is now cool to be racist, and being a misogynist, and a homophobic bigot has gotten quite fashionable as of late. People have lost their sense of humanity and their hearts have become calloused. Why? What is this new propaganda these people been poisoning their minds with? Why am I hearing about many people embracing anti-feminism, a warped view I hadn’t even  heard about until Trump came in? Why has it become commonplace to be rude and indifferent and inconsiderate and obnoxious? 

The warm smiles I had been getting from strangers of a time before 2016 have now of a sudden turned into cold dead hateful stares of ignorant masses of people on the streets as their freakish gaze follows our steps. The endless eyeballs sticking all over my body from hundreds of staring strangers is an experience of indescribable traumatic pain. I become combination of the centre stage and the main spectacle. The eyes that stare stick to you like barnacles on the bottom of the ship, and it feels as though spider legs and monkey fingers are crawling all over your skin, picking at your flesh. They just won’t leave me alone.

Nothing in the evolution of our brains has primed us to cope with the reality of living in the world that treats us like freaks to be stared at, a world in which we are constantly discriminated against and watched and harassed and even killed. Yet being treated like a freak is my daily lived experience. That will not change any time soon and that is despite living in the 21st century.

During the last couple of years alone I was physically assaulted on the streets for being queer on not once or twice but on several occasions in four different cities. I also lost friends one by one for coming out, my family left me, the graduate school I was studying in for my career expelled me for my queer identity because it had offended several religious people who held to conservative views - both within the student body and in the faculty - I had had no idea that I was in such an overwhelmingly conservative environment. And thus I also could no longer work as a youth pastor in my church and was suspended for that too - lot of people in that “church” had known about my identity and had hated me for it. I used to enjoy the luxury of just laughing it off, brushing it aside and dismissing such people as having absolutely no brains over which to concern myself and that these small-minded ignorant fucks are pathetically petty. Trump had changed all that so that now such low-lives have now been empowered to spew their poisonous hate and encourage the greater culture to be violently antagonistic to us. Finding an acceptable place in the church is extremely tricky business and oftentimes we get nothing more than insincere empty platitudes that later morph into outright acts of violence against us every time the opportunity arises. So is the church the place for love and acceptance and truth? In my experience and in my training as a theologian the exact contrary invariably turns out to be the case. Christian colleges are festering cesspools of hateful propaganda despite appearing liberal. This hypocritical facade has been deceiving the masses of people who had been led to believe that we have it good and that we are now demanding “uber rights”. Whereas in reality all we have ever wanted are our basic human rights. I was also at fault for trivializing Trump’s accession to power as though his brief term of office would have had absolutely no impact on my life. I became comfortable and confident that my whole career aspirations would go without a hitch. I would very shortly learn my lesson the hard way.

My career abruptly ended in complete collapse and I wound up homeless for months: I had to move from one city to another to another; I felt like an outlaw always on the run! During this whole time, no one stepped forward to help me. Gone were the days in which I had revelled in my role of a token friend to my cis-hetero “friends”. Learn from this example how being a token friend isn’t anything that is good for us, that during hard times they’ll just fizzle out and leave you on the streets to rot as they had already had their fun and excitement, they could now just discard you like an old worn-out toy they grew out of - it is as though we never had feelings of our own or a life of our own, but one by one they will discard you after you have served their selfish purpose. Let it be remembered that treating queer people as token friends is selfish, unloving, hurtful and completely detrimental to our emotional health and hence to our whole community.

Before this one ceased to exist as I had know them

Now during lockdown, a new series of horror stories has been unleashed our way. We had NOT seen this coming.

During this space of time Covid happened and at the time I had been living with extremely toxic and abusive people. I was told that I shouldn’t come out of the house to be seen by neighbours and so bring embarrassment for my obvious gay appearance. The abuse would even escalate into physical violence and so I had to run. The people I had been living with took all my queer clothes, all my apparel and all my dance paraphernalia amounting to $15000 worth, and burned it with fire! 

I had called the police on them but as usual of them they were largely indifferent and often treated me with contempt and mockery and dismissal: they were basically cis males who characterized me as just one of those “social justice warriors” and that I simply needed to “grow a pair”! They would neither believe me and even when they did they would tell me repeatedly that there was nothing that they could do about it except giving me a ride to the nearest shelter, where it is notoriously unsafe for people like me. And so I had long given up the hope that the police would ever even be interested in helping me. I was left completely to own devises and so I had to cook up a solution to my predicament really fast because the abuse and hate crimes committed against me was getting more and more savage.

My whole identity was being erased. I was fearing of losing all that I had worked hard and sacrificed for. I was now purely on survival mode. My dwindling circle of heterosexual “friends” would tell me repeatedly to go back to the closet “for my own safety”. How altruistic were they really? One of them even eventually confessed to me that they had found me an “embarrassment” for walking around like a … total faggot. They told me that transitioning into this life is just simply very degrading and that I had diminished myself for succumbing to my, what they perceived as, degenerate effeminizing impulses (whatever the fuck that means). And instead recommended me that I get into mixed martial arts, sex, and Jordan Peterson. Why am I the last to know that this was their true character all along? Why hadn’t I seen this in them before? Where is all of this garbage new mentality coming from?

I just could not get through with them as to what danger my life was in now as a queer person. And when I was out on the streets they ignored me and treated me as though I was just a low life bum despite all that I had done for them and all the times I had sacrificed myself in order for them to succeed. I even helped one of them write an entire novel! I did not ask for anything in return. The church I was part of abandoned me on the streets and showed me their true colours: no empathy, no kindness, no mercy, no compassion, no love! They are the enemies!!!

 I just had to leave town again because now the local teenagers were chasing me down the road with their van, laughing and taking pictures of me and yelling “faggot”, and “bitch” - they would go on terrorizing me like this for months! I had to flee to my brothers old friend who was willing to take me in in her mansion in Florida - at the time I simply had no idea about the abhorrent levels of conservatism even existed in our whole continent! I sure learned my lesson. I was promised a position as a youth pastor in their church and in my naïveté and desperation I accepted right away without hesitation only to flee into the arms of another monstrosity.

The woman who took me in in Florida out of pretended sympathy only added to my sufferings by treating me like a household servant; and had to clean her home free of charge for two weeks in order to earn my keep. And then for two consecutive nights… she raped me!

There were times when I thought was actually in mortal danger and felt my life threatened. I fled Florida like a battering ram and made it swiftly back across the country to my home in Canada. After having to sustain further abuse by others living with me, a miracle suddenly presented itself and I was saved against all expectations and at the near loss of all hope of surviving this brave new world.

For safety reasons I shall not divulge as to where I had finally found my new lodging after years and years of not being able to afford an apartment of my own. One bedroom apartment - amidst the rising costs of living and the astronomical spike in rent prices - had long become my Shangri-La: a dream nigh unobtainable.

But through faith, hope and love I persevered and struggled through, and braved the life-threatening storms of hateful chaos around me. It is amazing how resilient we are; our tenacity in the face of growing hatred of queer people and the unimaginable pain we had to go through in triple isolation during lockdown was astonishing beyond words. We are tenacious and resilient and we will get through this too. This too shall pass!

How did I get through all that? Being completely abandoned by all and left completely alone, I had to fight, I had to make it through, I had to traverse through that dark valley of death before providentially making it on the other side. I thought I was completely done for and so have many many others like me besides.

The Trump era has been a hellish nightmare from which we are still unable to wake up. How did humanity suddenly find itself back here again? Our culture had just stopped to a new low.

It was a rude awakening. A disturbing reminder that as queer people we are alone in our struggles and that the systems and governments and churches and the cis-heterosexual demographic as a whole are NOT the places to turn to for help; the mainstream culture in reality does not care about us. We cannot have recourse to people and groups who don’t give a shit whether we live or die. It is apparently perfectly ok for us to suffer in the most painful, violent and humiliating manner; it is apparently a “good thing” that we are out on the streets - again apparently because we were “wokefying” the suburban neighborhoods too much.

We cannot rely on systems of oppression for sustenance anymore than trusting our whole lives to a hungry lion. They had turned their backs on us and expressed their indifference. We are left with only their knives stuck to our backs.

Those reading this, particularly those who are cis heterosexual are more or less be typically disinclined to believe a word I just wrote in this short but potent history. I’ll bet many had no idea such hate was even allowed to not only rear it’s ugly head again but also to let it go unchecked and letting off our victimizers, abusers, and rapists, Scott free, sometimes even cheering them on or giving consent to acts of violence on the sidelines - that is not to mention the amount of gaslighting we had to take during this whole time! According to the church in which everyone is supposedly “welcome” we deserve this treatment, we had brought it on ourselves. I had seen the church giving consent to stigma and hate, I have heard the cis-male and even female pastors themselves - out of the horses ass itself - pissing and moaning about the Me Too Movement and how horribly pernicious it is as though not caring how I would feel about hearing them speak like that. Shame! For shame!

We will never forget this deplorable and shameful episode of American history that left us in hell and gave empowerment to hateful people all around the country. After Trump my home and native land was no longer recognizable to me; everybody seemingly suddenly became an asshole for absolutely no reason in the world!

In my deepest solitude I still scream inside of me: “Why? Why? Why? What did I do? What did we do?” The world has never given us a satisfactory response as to why but maybe history one day will…or not.

We are at a point where we are now feeling the most vulnerable. We are scared of what is going to happen next. The anti-LGBTQ legislation and it’s concomitant rising Homo/transphobia doesn’t seem to end. It just keep going and going: enough is enough already! It is a curse and this little man had been a plague to our community ever since he had clownishly come into power. They would rather have a total misogynistic pig run the country than a competent woman! To their everlasting shame!

Let the infamous memory of this man perish into dust forever and let his self-glorification turn to dung and worms, here today, suddenly gone tomorrow!

Only time can tell. The uncertainty of the future may be unnerving, but as I’ve learned through all this, we must be patient and bide our time in quiet alertness and safety: we gotta survive this one too, otherwise…may God help us!!! I will keep on dancing! This is patient endurance.

I am now very gradually trying to recover what I have lost and to revive my spirits, Ive decided to start dancing again! I have been parted from this most beautiful art form for over a year now. The prospect of losing this dance elicits a profound sadness in me, a deep sadness of losing something very precious in my life. Dancing is what I now need the most; I don’t want bellydancing to be missing in my life anymore; even the mere thought is so painful to me. I will survive and I will dance the beautiful dance!!! Thank you. 

Almoz recovers.