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Back in 2016, while the United States was still celebrating the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage the year before, Jordan was busy trying to shut down the Arab world’s first LGBTQ online magazine, My.Kali. Khalid Abdel-Hadi had launched the magazine eight years earlier as a 17-year-old Arab Muslim gay man in need of an outlet to express himself. In the intervening time, My.Kali had grown to reach more than 100,000 monthly readers from around the world.
As a teenager, Abdel-Hadi kept a diary of his thoughts and feelings, but his family and schoolmates were always opening it. He couldn’t be out even in what was supposed to be the most intimate of spaces.
In 2007, he and some friends decided they needed to create their own outlet if they wanted to find their voices. “At that time, you really needed to dig deep on the internet to find stories about gender and sexuality. It wasn’t as easy as it is today,” he said. “ My.Kali came from a need, not a want—the need to express oneself.”
Being obsessed with magazines from a young age, Abdel-Hadi desperately wanted to exist in one. He tried interning at local publications—mainly coffee-table magazines that covered local events, fashion, and décor—but he was rejected for being “too out there,” he says. He and his friends decided to put him on the cover of the first issue—a teenage Abdel-Hadi posed shirtless next to the headline “Alert Miss-Attitude.” Within days, Jordanian media exploded with coverage of the magazine, outing Abdel-Hadi as the gay founder of the region’s first-ever LGBTQ magazine. Many blurred out Abdel-Hadi’s face; others blacked out the whole image, considering the picture to be gay pornography.
My.Kali is now the only LGBTQ media outlet left standing in a region where queer and trans people are still widely rejected, which puts a big onus on the magazine to keep lifting up the voices of Arab LGBTQ people. That’s why Abdel-Hadi plans to bring a new structure to the magazine, which will explore music, art, fashion, and politics in depth and with a broader reach. “The roots of the magazine are in Jordan,” he said, “but we are a regional magazine that tries to include people of all genders, sexualities, and nationalities.” It might be better for LGBTQ people in the Arab world now than it was ten years ago, but the fight to be heard and recognized continues.
VICE Arabia contributed to this story.
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