During his travels, Ali also met others similar to him. People seeking inclusion in America through sexuality. One, like a Kashmiri-American girl named Shazia, believed that she was actually a white girl, and proved it by being contrasted against black skin. Blake Nails had her regularly. Another, like a Persian-Swedish-American named Mitra, demanded that she would only be with white guys, because she was pure Aryan. Both girls eventually devolved into a glassy-eyed sadism. Shazia ended up a sugar baby in Las Vegas, getting five thousand a month from a forty-seven-year-old lawyer and accountant who liked to be forced to eat his own semen. Mitra got pregnant by an Egyptian plastic surgeon who lied and said he was Caucasian. She killed herself and left the baby in Tijuana.
At some point in the middle of the decade Ali Ansari started to wonder why there were no Muslim men performing in porn. He figured the answer was that there was no demand. No one got off on the idea of seeing a Muslim boning a white girl. He wanted to know why not. The answer he settled on was that America simply didn’t recognize Muslim masculinity. The only image of Muslim men America saw was of those at the receiving end of invasion, at the receiving end of the torture like at Abu Ghraib, or simply exploding themselves out of desperation. The Muslim was the butt of humiliation. Ali Ansari decided he wanted to change that.
And so Talibang Productions was launched. Ali envisioned a Muslim version of the interracial porn that he had made with Blake Nails. Husband humiliation. Cheating wife. Forced entry. Abduction. Inexplicable erotic romance in the men’s section of the mosque, with the entire congregation. He imagined nothing less than a revolution in the way the Muslim man was viewed by America.
In order to find performers, however, he had to do the hard task of wading into Muslim communities. He started by getting a hold of some cab drivers and chefs, but all of them were new to the country and wanted visa sponsorships before committing to anything experimental. Ali then turned to the second-generation youth, finding them at Sufi orders, Salafi mosques, progressive circles. He hit the big conventions, the ethnic speed-dating services that parents set up to get their children married off, and the lecture circuit where the Islamic pundits peddled books that blamed American consumerism for all the world’s ills. It turned out that finding Muslim guys eager to get into pornography was not very easy. Even more difficult was the persuasion that followed. He had to convince men who had attended mosques and listened to sermons about chastity their entire lives to unshackle themselves from their restrictions. It was next to impossible. Even the promise of touching naked white girls wouldn’t convince them.
In the end, the only group of Muslims he found who didn’t care what their community thought about them were those loosely affiliated with the Gay Commie Muzzies. They were open to performing for Talibang Productions. But as aspiring intellectuals they could only do porn ironically. It had to be meta. It had to be self-reflexive. It had to have something that undermined the very idea of “pornyness.”
At first Ali was resistant to these requirements. But as a playwright without players he had no other choice than to consent to the limitations that his performers imposed. Within a few months of working together, Talibang Productions and Gay Commie Muzzies put out their first video, entitled Gangs of Abu Ghraib. In it, a fictional and much hotter Lynndie England was put on a leash and passed around from cell block to cell block at Abu Ghraib prison. That was when Ali met Tot, who ended up playing the Iraqi prison guard who groomed Lynndie to share her body with the prisoners. The entire thing was filmed at Eastern State Penitentiary.
The film ended up being a modest financial success. There were ten thousand downloads and nearly a thousand people paid to subscribe to Ali’s video channel. He was pretty sure most of these subscribers were Muslim kids around the world. The bloggers hailed him for pushing back against the image of the Muslim male as abused, hungry, tortured, subservient. He had gotten the image of the naked victims of Abu Ghraib out of people’s minds and replaced it with machismo. Galvanized by the reception, Ali quickly directed The Terrorist, which was about a skinny Muslim guy with a small penis who started sleeping with white women and found that, compared to the men they had been with before, his penis was massive. Partly because of the uniqueness of the venture and partly because of the international network that the Gay Commie Muzzies possessed, Ali started making a good deal of money. Subscriptions made it necessary to come up with new projects, of which Osama and Ayman in the MILFline was the newest.
But while everyone agreed that Ali Ansari had the exceptional ability to turn the War on Terror into a joke, he hadn’t actually set out to be a jester. Deep down he still longed to make sizzling and serious works of interracial erotica, to introduce new shades into the American spectrum, to create a new sexual aura for the Muslim man. He firmly believed that until the Muslim man was also given the right to access the beauty of the white woman, all the platitudes of American equality would remain hollow.
During his narration, my thighs started touching against Candace’s. Her legs were light and delicate, belonging to someone inclined to flight, someone used to running, someone adept at escaping, very unlike Marie-Anne’s legs, which were powerful pillars, rooted, sedentary. I hadn’t been with a woman this light, this tiny. I wanted to pick her up and lay her down.
“Would you be interested in being in a movie?” Ali asked Candace. “There is some demand out there for hijab-domme. Putting white guys in leashes while wearing a veil. That kind of thing.”
“Leave her alone,” I pushed. “She’s not crass like you.”
Candace laughed. “Actually, I’m pretty crass. Which is why I first need to ask whether you sleep with your performers.”
“I keep it business. Now that we’ve taken care of that, what about gang bangs?”
“Sure. But only if it’s with nineteen guys and I represent New York.” She emphasized the number for my benefit. “But you know, even if Islam allowed it, I could never do porn. I can’t take birth control, and your guys can’t do condoms.”
We all laughed and the moment passed. But I held onto it. I feared that some kind of connection had formed between Ali and Candace; as if they both realized they shared something — the ability to take everyday motifs and make some kind of a social joke about them. I was grateful when Ali saw a pretty East African girl with a shaved head and went toward her to do his strut and worship.
Left alone with Candace, I let myself imagine being married to her, because marriage was the only way I had ever known how to understand a sexual connection with a woman. If Candace took me home, her parents wouldn’t make up excuses to try to keep us apart, because they would know that inclusion was better than exclusion. With Candace I could talk about how un-American I felt. We could even play word games about it. With Candace I wouldn’t have to believe that acts of prejudice against me were my own fault. With Candace my friendship with Ali Ansari and his theory of the American yin and yang wouldn’t be something I would have to hide. When Candace saw me wronged she would fear that the same thing might also happen to her. Marie-Anne didn’t offer any of that. How in the world had we lasted ten years? We were so different, situated in distinct levels of the American caste system. She came from the priestly class, from those who were presumed to be born with access to divinity. I was from something far lower. Perhaps even an untouchable place. My one hope had been to merge my dirty blood with her pure blood and dilute myself in a new generation. Even that hadn’t worked out.