They have been having furtive sex for several years, until Rasa’s grandmother peeks through his bedroom keyhole and discovers them in bed together and starts screaming and banging the door. But Rasa’s obsession is his male lover, Tamor. He has hovered on the edge of protest movements since his four years at an American college, where he wore a tight t-shirt and ragged jeans and hung out with Cecile, an entitled French student, and Layla, another alienated Arab. Rasa was an enthusiastic participant in anti-government protests until they were taken over by Islamic groups and participants were brutalized by the authoritarian government. Rasa lives with his conservative grandmother in an upper class apartment, working in a start-up translating company and assisting an American television news reporter. Guapa is a serious-very serious-novel about a closeted gay man in an unidentified Arab country shortly after the Arab Spring. Each new encounter leads him closer to confronting his own identity as he revisits his childhood and probes the secrets that haunt his family.Īs Rasa confronts the simultaneous collapse of political hope and his closest personal relationships, he is forced to discover the roots of his alienation and try to reemerge into a society that may never accept him. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend, Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar Guapa, who has been arrested by the police.Īshamed to go home and face his grandmother, and reeling from the potential loss of the three most important people in his life, Rasa roams the city's slums and prisons, the lavish weddings of the country's elite, and the bars where outcasts and intellectuals drink to a long-lost revolution. One night Rasa's grandmother - the woman who raised him - catches them in bed together. Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. Set over the course of 24 hours, Guapa follows Rasa, a gay man living in an unnamed Arab country, as he tries to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and social upheaval.

Guapa book