On the eve of the brutal war on Gaza, the evening in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, began like any other in a churning, vibrant, and reckoning Arab diaspora. It kicked off with something extraordinary: a film about a Coptic Orthodox drag queen as part of the 2LGBTQ+ Ottawa Film festival. In the deeply cloistered and devout Orthodox community as well as the Arab, and Arabic-speaking worlds, public and proud representation of Egyptian, Arab, and Coptic queer experiences are almost unheard of. Produced by Fae Pictures, the movie, Queen Tut, premiered in Canada for the first time, offering the first and only representations of a devout Coptic Orthodox drag queen coming of age in Toronto. Even with some representational missteps—for example, the use of Lebanese actors in place of queer and available Egyptian actors, and the gentle mimicry of inaccessible scenes of the Orthodox Church and its priests—the film still packed an emotional punch. In one scene, the gentle and weepy Nabil, the Coptic Egyptian protagonist, imagined coming out to his mother who had just passed. In others, he wrestles with his Orthodox piety under the pained and judging gaze of…
Palestinian Solidarity, Hot Beats, and Coptic Drag Queens: Transgressive Joy on An Ottawan Dance Floor
January 12, 2024
