I Won!

Every year, at school, grade 10 students have to choose a theme about society in Lebanon, and work on it for the rest of the year. Everybody picks theme like, poverty, homeless people, drugs, alcohol, but nobody ever tried to work on homophobia.

When someone in my group suggested this, I jumped from my seat and got all excited, the teacher said it was great, but the stupid responsible of the project had doubts.

So I grabbed my 10-page research about discrimination in Lebanon, and went to his office, and talked about how people get beaten up, how people go to jail, how parents send their own child to some creepy gay-to-straight camps where they use drugs and things I don't even want to know about.

He looked at me, the way you look at a stray dog in the street. He is so homophobic! He asked so many useless questions, he wanted to know every detail. He started to ask me about statistics and he even tried to give me other alternative like "How can different people cope in the Lebanese society". I told him different was too wide, he told me homosexuality was too narrow. I told him we had ideas, he told me it was stupid.

I got mad, I insisted, told him it was our project, it was something everyone was interested in, and it was something actual! I told him about gay teen suicides, I told him that we could make a change, a real one. I told him this subject was unique, no one ever did that before us. We were going to be the first stupid to work in this area, even if it is so taboo in Lebanon. And when I stopped talking, I realized he was looking at my hand.

He told me there was a reason why no one ever treated this subject. I asked him: "Are you this reason? Anyway, there's a first time for everything."

He looked at me with his pitiful look again, and told me to make wider researches. And then I left, I went outside and screamed: "I WON!"

And I continued screaming for like 5 minutes before people started asking me questions, I got too excited and started talking nonsense.

 

Then I realized I had a rainbow on my hand! (My friend brought a Ben10 pen -it's a show on Cartoon Network- with 10 different colors! A Ben10 pen during an Arabic lesson can be very entertaining… Don’t judge me!) Was he looking at this the whole time?

Anyway, this made me happy for the rest of the day, and I know I'm going to work on this project really hard! I am already taking Helem's center address, and phone number to contact them later. But what most surprised me is that everyone is really excited about it!

My friend even tried to choose this topic. When he said: "Maybe we could work on homosexuality!"

The teacher answered: "Yeah... but there are some people who like them so we can't." (Eh... bass fi ness bi habouwon!)

What did he think they wanted to do? Go kill every gay man they find?

Akhh.. Stupid homophobes.

My face right now! :-)