MANY covert operations are launched in Pakistan but few can have been as daunting as a gay person trying to date in a country where homosexuality is banned.
But journalist Natasha Noman discovered that being a lesbian in Pakistan brought heart-thumping drama and hilarity.
Natasha, 29, talks about her dating experiences in a sharp new comedy, Noman’s Land, at
Edinburgh’s Gilded Balloon.
In her one-woman comedy, she tells the audience: “Pakistan lesbians aren’t getting laid. They aren’t even talking about sex.
“The only time people talk about being gay in Pakistan is with other gays they have known most of their lives, in a locked room drinking sh***y wine and watching Bollywood movies to drown out all the gay talk, which still can’t be that gay.”
Pakistan’s law criminalising consensual same-sex relations dates back to October 6, 1860, under the colonial rule of the British Raj. And little has changed.
The daughter of two development economists, Natasha lived in Oxford as a child but also travelled the world and spent a year in Pakistan when she was four. Her father is Pakistani and her mother is English.
She returned to Pakistan when she was 22 to work as a journalist.
The dangers she faced in the job didn’t ruffle her as much as the prospect of antagonism
from male colleagues in a such a patriarchal country.
She said: “Some of them hadn’t worked closely with a woman before and were wary. Many were incredibly kind and took time to teach me the tricks of the trade. Some were wonderful and others were complete ar*****es.”
Pakistani laws are tougher on gay men as the attitude to lesbianism is that it isn’t real. As a result, women can pass their relationships off as friendships.
Natasha couldn’t be openly gay and it took her months of cultivating friendships before she found some she could trust enough with the information.
She said: “I told them and they were lovely. They started compiling a list of all the known lesbians in Pakistan – about six people, which included me.”
As a joke, one of them suggested Natasha went on social media hook-up site Tinder.
She said: “There were three lesbians on Tinder in Pakistan. I think two of them might have been men but one woman was attractive.”
Natasha contacted the “attractive” one and met her for dinner, where the conversation was not typical small talk.
She said: “Her father had been a hostage of the Taliban and had recently been returned. We chatted about the ransom and negotiating his release. It wasn’t the usual chat about work and whether you like chocolate.
“My inner monologue was telling me, ‘I really shouldn’t be using Tinder in Pakistan.’”
They went on a few dates but had to be furtive in their meetings and communications.
Text messages and emails were carefully worded to ensure they couldn’t be construed as anything other platonic. And when they were face to face, they couldn’t be openly flirtatious or affectionate.
Natasha said: “You have to do your best eye work and flirtatious laugh. That’s as far as it can go.”
Finding somewhere to have sex was a huge challenge as, for security reasons, neither girl lived alone. Her friends loaned her their apartment for a night, to allow them to sleep together.
Unfortunately, after that first sexual encounter, they didn’t contact each other again.
Natasha laughs: “I’m not sure what that says about either of us.”
She came out to her parents eight years ago. Her mother accepted her sexuality easier than her Muslim father, who struggled with it initially.
Her parents were not religious and celebrated both Christmas and Eid at home, so she benefitted from their relative liberalism.
She said: “My dad is now remarkably supportive and has seen the play and laughed. I realise I am really fortunate.
There are people I know in the Pakistani community who would be excommunicated.”
After a brief romance, Natasha felt dating in Pakistan was more trouble than it was worth. She said: “It was an adventure for me and while it was hilarious, it wasn’t worth the headache of doing it all again.”
Although she hopes the play will make people laugh more than anything else, she admits the draconian laws of Pakistan offended her.
She said: “It did feel abhorrent and it angered me. I had the luxury of being able to leave but my gay friends didn’t have that. I can never conceive of living in a country where you can never truly be yourself.”
Her play deals with concessions foisted on people forced to hide in the closet.
Natasha said: “There is a line between compromise, which life demands of everybody, and then compromising oneself.
“Where do you draw that line? Some people find they don’t want that battle on a daily basis and I know gay people in Pakistan who ended up capitulating to the system and marrying someone
of the opposite sex. They were absolutely miserable.”
Natasha worked for the Friday Times in Karachi – a left-leaning publication which is often critical of the Taliban and the Pakistani government.
She said: “The price for maintaining their journalistic integrity is death threats in perpetuity.”
Natasha was supposed to spend a year in the job but had to leave after nine months because of two assassination attempts by the Taliban on reporters from TFT and GEO TV, a political news station she also worked for.
Part of the reason she wrote the play was to show a different side to Pakistan. She wanted to tell that behind its war-torn image, ordinary lives are being led.
She said: “It is a complex and humane country and people are trying to do their best with what they have. People don’t wake up ready to fight the Taliban.”
Natasha hopes there is an appreciation for the freedoms we enjoy.
She said: “A lot of my Pakistan family had never been with someone who was openly gay before because people didn’t come out in previous generations.
“My cousin said that, in coming out, I had helped other people to do the same. I hope so.”
● Noman’s Land is on at the Gilded Balloon from August 5 to 15.
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