In a PalFest Podcast, Baconi suggests Fire in every direction: a memoir (2025). is the first gay memoir by an Arab writer. Baconi is a Christian Palestinian whose parents fled in the nakba first from Haifa first to Beirut then Amman, where Tareq grew up. He recounts his early, formative life.

His mother Rima was a fiery Palestinian activist, arrested at meetings at university, his father Fadi too cowardly, always pleading with Rima to stop, resigned to exile. They escape civil war in Lebanon for Jordan, where they bring up three sons and a daughter, Tareq the youngest.

Rima's bohemian brother Khalo married and emigrated to Brazil but came back regularly to visit. He doesn't seem to actually do anything for a living, lazily mouching off his sister. 5-7 year old Tareq would join him in his seista every day. What follows is an inspired description of their not-so-innocent sexual play.

Uncle Khalo: Do you want to be my pillow today? He mumbles drowsily, not once opening his eyes. You can get between my legs if you want. An electric current shoots through my body, reaching my spine. It is hard to breathe. My mind has conjured what i wanted him to say. I flip over and diver under the covers towrd his feet. Khalo dutifully opens his legs. I put my head between his thighs, with my feet up against his chin. He closes his legs on either side of my hed and I snuggle closer, burrowing my face into his boxers, feeling the cotton fabric against my cheeks. I am cut off from the world, existing in my own haven. His thighs press against my ears, muffling alll sound. It is pitch dark,, and I feel nothing other than his breath on my toes. I inhale into the space between his legs. It is musky and humid, with my breath and his smell. I lie awake, reveling in the sensations washing over me. My own giant next to me in bed, offering an entire universe to explore. A universe I will return to time and time again, in a game we call pillows throughout those months.

The other graphic incident that rings true for the proto-homosexual: he realized he wanted to lose to the weaker/younger Issam so Issam would have to dare him, offer him a challenge. He was aroused by wanting to be told what to do by his lover (e.g., smell his socks). I.e., he's masochistic, wanting to abase himself, submit to another boy. He asks for more sadistic punishment. Finally, Issam said, 'Smell my underwear.' Perfect, so Issam buries his crotch in Tareq's face. I was presumptuous, arrogant, knowing with untested certainty that I could get Issam to do my bidding, even when my bidding was to do his. But nervous, also; pillows had to remain unwitnessed in darkened rooms, where I thrived.

Even then, in his childhood 'innocence', he knew he was becoming a kind of monster. Darting shadows begain accompanying me everywhere in Amman. Throughout any day, masochisticlly, I committed to confronting the darting shadows. Never to provoke, just to take note of them. Like a harvester walking through the fields, plucking their crops and shoving them into a bag slung over their shoulder. A bag that bulged and grew heavier with each harvest. Reaping the shadows, hating them, etching them into my mind, carving them into my skin.

Tareq looks back on those days fondly but also in a state of mourning, realizing he had snuffed out his growth to manhood, lost in his perverse universe, despised, hating himself, masochistic (as in S&M). He doesn't dot the 'i's', but he's a textbook case of how a boy ends up 'gay'. Mother fixation, weak father, older brothers, youngest child.

He is bullied at school as a limp-wristed faggot. The power those kids have over me respects no boundaries, not even time. I imagine there is stillness in their mind, chaos in mine. Do they not know that I, too, find these gestures monstrous? That I, too, want to shed them? To be on the other side of the circle instead of standing here in the middle? His friends Maya and Issa reemerge from their hideouts and come over, pretending that nothing has happened. I am grateful. There is the last shred of dignity in that pretense. At recess, he reads a book on a stairwell window ledge, trying to disappear.

Tareq's knight in shining armor was Ramzi, who took pity on him when he was bullied and humiliated. Ramzi was macho. He fought to defend his sister's honor. I could never act the way he did. Maya: Boys are idiots. Idiots or not, I had just witnessed Ramzi being the man Baba [father] told us we needed to be. Fighters who stood up for one's honor, like Baba pulling mama out of an angry horde. Or like Mama, even. I had no fire. The smallness of our people, who went around proclaiming obedience to king and god, like hamsters on a wheel. Ramzi constant struggle to preserve an honor that appeared irreparably fragile. I was amazed by the ease with which he lived. The way he existed in our world even as he railed against it. I could barely break through the authoritarianism with which i policed my own thoughts.

Even his adopted country Jordan is cowardly, phony, like Tareq.His mother Rima had political commitment and an impulse to confront, his father Fadi an aversion to challenging power, acquiescent to the status quo. I am drawn to Ramzi's world, to what he is sharing with me, craving to be a part of it, to inhabit it. I know this is my brothers' world, and that it was Baba's before them.

But he is prisoner to his cartoon fantasies. I want to be his [Ramzi's] plaything. The creature whose sole purpose was to bring him pleasure. A vessel, an empty shell. Make me as good as you are. Or just: make me. His freedom in acting the way that he did with Mustapha [the bully], without fear of eliciting mockery, was as foreign to me as his lust toward the girls at school or his fistfights in the playground. An emancipation of the body—mine was rigid and controlled, primed to deflect unwanted attention. Ramzi's mask made him stronger, mine made it hard to breathe. I never deluded anyone that I could live up to that ideal and was spared the expectation.

He slept one night beside Ramzi. Ramzi: I'm horny. Tareq: Oh, yeah? Show me. His dick glistened, a drop of pre-cum oozed onto his tummy. I wanted to lick that moistness, to take him into my mouth. Ramzi's presence was immaterial, just as khalo's had been, to my own desires. This was between me and his body. No sooner had I reclined into my mattress than the bedroom door swung open ... his dad popped his head in. I became consumed by his presence, his way of being, his wit and confidence, the absence of doubt in his head, his ability to command rooms and people. I looked at him with insatiable envy—not the ill-wising kind, but the one full of hunger and desperation.

It's impossible not to see all this as a growing neurosis. Imagine Ramzi's father catching him in the act? Where was his mother when her brother Khalo was inviting little Tareq to spend the afternoon sleeping together? His father? Tareq is like a spy, a traitor to his best friend. Cognitive dissonance on steroids. What I had—what I was—needed to be erased. He was the boy I could never be, or, as we grew older, be with.

Author Tareq writes all this beautifully, inspired. The reader is swept up in his tragedy. Yes, tragedy, as he is fashioning his personality around a denial of Ramzi's and all his classmate's reality, inserting something lethal into them/him.

Ramzi was no lech. Ramzi's passion for Tanya was all-consuming. The brightest of flames, not to be sullied in the same way as other girls. Not diluted into lust, closer to idolization to be a man worthy of her love, he projected a possessive masculinity. My love for him was depraved. We were both obsessed—his obsession with her becoming fodder for my obsession with him. But it did not in any way resemble his. My love was unworthy of being requited, admitted. I knew Tanya brought him joy. I wanted him joyous, passionate, blissful, aroused even if not directed at me. My desire was conditional, permitted only if it stayed within the realm of the unspoken.

In a letter from Ramzi just before their break-up: Even if you are gay, I will love you still. Tareq: It was hard to believe he could ever love a part of myself I reviled. His acceptance made me despise him.

From self-hate to self-acceptance

When his secret is exposed, his mother suggested his father might have gone through this when younger. Father: You need to learn to control your mind, to bend it to your will. Your mind is a scary place if left to its own devices. Therapist: Yes, there is this in nature. A dog humiliating the other. A show of strength. Degrading.

He clearly rejects the advice, already aware of western gaylib at his favorite coffee house downtown. My trust in Mama and Baba had been premature, as it had been with Ramzi. No answers. Like a recovering alcoholic, every day well-lived was another day I had not slipped. He escaped to London. Suddenly, in a few quick sentences, he's having casual sex with nameless women, then a string of nameless lovers. This is unconvincing, as the reason Tareq falls in love with guys is he's not attracted to women. And if he is now bisexual, why not just give up on the sin and be a happy straight? The comparison to alcoholics is spot on. Homosexuality is much like alcoholism, a weakness in character (genetic? Who knows?), and recovery means a lifetime of struggle.

But not for newly liberated Tareq. One exits one\s truth by creating an alternative one. With Sam as with lovers to come, we existed in a suspended state of utopia. By default fleeting, disconnected, exclusive sheltering us from our lives only for as long as we sustained its sanctity. I hated my God for failing to absolve me. Sam turned my talk of shame and zeib and honor into signs of a community of love and protection, tradition and meaning. In return for my insight, he gave me freedom. His father at first rejects him. Exiles him. The heavens shake when two men lie with each other.ⁱ Then relents when Tareq is successful and a British citizen.

But a kind of 'happi end'. Baconi turns to politics to assert his sense of manhood. He becomes a fighter for Palestine, following (fixated in a good way by) his mother's political activism. Where I felt banished before, this land has brought me back to my people, where I belong, and for whom I fight. At the same time, he didn't tell his grandmother Tata, respecting knowing that his homosexuality would break her heart. Much of my life has taught me how to make parts of myself invisible to suit those I love. He writes a well-received study Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (2018) and What Now: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future (2026). (And as a gaylibber and Palestinian, he of course gets a nice Wikipedia page.)

It is heartening that rank-and-file gays are solidly behind the liberation of Palestine, even in the heart of US, though not in the hearts of Israeli gays, who are notable by their absence and by their complicity in pinkwashing Israel's genocide. 'Gay' may be a social disease, but like alcoholism, you can still function and find acceptance in society. And let's not forgot – heal. Though in a kind of perversion of a perversion, healing (reparative therapy) is outlawed in WikiWorld. 

Tareq found a way to be manly, though he admits to PalFest he is worried about how his tell-all memoir might cripple his activism. I noted that the positive reviews and blurbs of Fire in every direction were either by women or non-Arabs/Muslims. Christianity has accommodated more or less to gaylib, but Islam – no. Baconi's life as an adult, openly gay man leaves the reader unconvinced and I suspect his limp-wristed gaylib memoir will not convince any Muslims. His description of early childhood seductions and the formation of his isolated, unhappy outcast sel are indeed compelling, but his 'happily-ever-after' vague life with his handsome, successful husband rings false.

I don't blame him, as he lived his life hiding behind masks, so it makes sense that if he wants to embrace his gayness, he would don a new happy-face mask. The power of positive thinking. Hoping it will manifest in life. If you have to accept your disability, loving it is one way to deal with it. But it doesn't make for a convincing memoir. Or true happiness, if that mask is false.

I look at Baconi as a little boy left to his own devices by an absent father, the youngest son with older straight brothers, with an inspiring, courageous (manly) mother and a feckless uncle. Artsy Baconi created a feverish, exciting world of touch and smell that stamped him, fed his nafs ammara, though even as a boy he came to see it as dangerous, lethal, contrary, filling the world with shadows, forcing him to flee bullies and an accusing society. Real-life Tareq looks like he's mourning a funeral. His profile as a gloomy outcast fits his narrative. 

Tareq can rest assured that his activism will not suffer. Muslims who strive for the liberation from imperialism welcome all allies, and Tareq can play an important role as ambassador in promoting gay support for the great Truth of the 21st century.