In the diaspora, unheld conversations about sexuality are tangled up with other forms of unutterable discourse about identity. I’m one of those diasporic Arabs who enjoys a special kind of privilege from the benefits of these overlapping silences, something that produces, as it does with all privileged people, a miasma of guilt and self-doubt, a nauseating, tedious, third-culture self-analysis that is in danger of resulting in heavy-handed poetry about pomegranate seeds. The particularly grotesque identity twist is found where straight passing meets white passing. As a pale and unaccented Pale…