Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed

Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021

This essay offers a rare, transnational perspective within HIV discourse, where narratives from the Global South remain largely marginalized. Moving between Cairo, Melbourne, and Berlin, Awadalla reflects on the emotional and political tolls of navigating life as a queer migrant, caught between collapsing healthcare systems, stigma, and exile. Drawing on personal memory and lived experience, the piece interrogates public health, the limits of asylum, and the broken promises of the Global North. It also traces a vital moment in Egypt’s HIV and queer rights organizing—its fragile gains and abrupt reversals—foregrounding voices and struggles too often left out of dominant accounts. Intimate yet sharply political, this essay complicates what it means to survive, and whose stories get to define the archive of the epidemic.

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