Adam Ashraf El-Sayigh

Adam A. Elsayigh is an Egyptian playwright, dramaturg, producer, educator and translator. Through his producing and creative practices, Adam interrogates issues of immigration, colonialism and the experience of queerness in the Middle East. In 2017, I started writing a play titled Drowning in Cairo. The play was based on real life stories and people I had connected with living as a gay man in Cairo, Egypt. Drowning in Cairo dramatizes the lives of three Egyptian men who were arrested on the Queen Boat in 2001, a real-life raid on a gay nightlife location in Cairo. Telling the story of the men’s lives from 1997 and 2017, the play reveals how they come to be shaped by the homophobia that queer people are so often placed within. That homophobic violence is evident in both the 69 countries that continue to criminalize homosexuality, as well as with BIPOC queer individuals here in the U.S. BIPOC queer experience here in the U.S. is unique in its intersectional oppression, for both people’s queerness and their ethnicity. I soon realized that there was no space for a play like mine. LGBTQ+ stories are actively censored in Egypt through systems of authoritarian government. On the other hand, as a new immigrant here in the U.S., I didn’t feel like the American theater was interested in making space for queer plays beyond the “LGBTQ+ theater canon” which was comprised of primarily white plays like The Boys in the Band, The Laramie Project and Angels in America. While these stories were