Being Queer in Beirut: A Fragmented Journal Entry

It’s been nine months since I moved to Beirut. I am still in the same tiny room that I rented when I first came here. I thought it would be a pit stop, something temporary, yet here I am.

I haven’t been able to find work gigs, so I haven’t saved up any money for this month. Last week’s party was a mistake. I should’ve thought twice about the outfit I chose – riding two buses with all the looks and catcalling wasn’t much fun. I could feel the eyes piercing into my bare legs as I kept tucking on my shirt to hide myself. Mum kept calling me, and I had to come with a thousand lies as to why I couldn’t pick up all day.

The party was weird, and it didn’t really feel good to be there. People seemed to know each other and know their ways around one another – a dynamic I haven’t been able to jump into, yet. I couldn’t talk to a single girl there, because I couldn’t loosen up on one beer. And a single beer was all I could afford because I had to save enough money for a taxi back – buses stopped operating after 6:00 pm. I never really understood how to approach a girl in these parties – am I being flirtatious enough or am I crossing a red line? Everyone was intimidatingly queer – cool, slim, witty, and drunk. And I was me – all that they weren’t.

Looking back at this in light of who is included and who is excluded within these queer spaces, the question of identity becomes less about the who. Instead, it shifts towards a how and a why, an unravelling of the dynamics of belonging and alienation. Such questions become problematic because they reflect a hegemony that persists even in queer discourse: the assumption that some identities are the problem.

Alienating certain identities from spaces of belonging reproduces the compulsory heteronormativity that made queer safe spaces necessary in the first place. If queer individuals were not excluded from the rest of society, why would they feel the need for their own spaces? The excluded, or the ‘other,’ exists only in relation to a dominant identity that defines the ‘other’ as an outsider and not ‘us’.

Thus, the question of exclusions of queer people from queer spaces shifts to: how does queerness become normative, and how does anti-normativity get reproduced within a normative framework? In my years of trying to make sense of queerness in Beirut, I have come to recognize the role of consumption in fostering a sense of belonging within queer groups. That is not to say that queerness cannot be analysed socio-politically, but rather to shift the analysis to an economic perspective that better situates experiences of marginalized queerness within the postmodern, capitalist spheres of Beirut.

I went out with a girl today, whom I met at a French language class a while back. We both liked Camus, which helped us move from cute, awkward smile exchanges to having a proper conversation. She was coming to Beirut for a couple of days, and expressed how she wanted to go somewhere where she could hold hands with a girl without anyone looking twice.

Except, everyone looked twice. Nour wore the hijab, and though I didn’t think it would be a problem, Nour’s hijab was made a disturbance to the status quo in what seemed like a queer café-turned-bar-after-four. I could see all eyes on her. Even when she asked for tea, the waiting person told her they don’t serve hot drinks after 4:00 p.m.. And when she ended up ordering a soda, they stared with a ‘just that?’ – knowing well enough that she wouldn’t be getting a cocktail, but they had to make it clear to us that they knew, and minded.

In non-Western societies, queer sexualities and gender expressions operated differently before the arrival of colonial powers. Homosexuality wasn’t even a concept; rather, we had forms of what could be best called homoeroticism, considering the limitations of the English language to express forms of relationships so alien to its culture.  However, the universalization of queer rights as part of the international human rights framework brought with it the imposition of Western queer categories – lesbian, gay, bisexual, etc. – into non-Western forms of queer identity. This standardization of gender and sexual categories denies and erases the other formulations of queerness that preceded Western colonization in many parts of the world.

The categorization of sexualities narrows queer recognition to mere ‘visibility,’ creating a cycle where queer culture is commodified, and queer individuals are pressured to conform to particular practices of consumerism in order to be seen as part of that culture. Being queer thus becomes defined through the presence of both the consumer and the consumed—products, lifestyles, experiences, etc. Through an ongoing cycle, capitalism commodifies queer culture to transform it into consumed goods, selling a lifestyle that required constant maintenance and thus, constant consumption.

Linking recognition to consumerism creates a culture that thrives on stereotypical images of queerness, producing and reproducing stereotypes through this consumption. Take gay men, who are often depicted as flamboyant, stylish, hardcore party boys in mass media. This image has come to define the gay market, which reproduces this image through mass production of the consumable goods that constitute this lifestyle, thus denying other ways of being gay. Here, the capitalist system and mainstream queer culture reinforced one another in a symbiosis of economy and culture. This is, of course, not to claim that the significance of the queer culture lies solely on its role in the capitalist cycle of production and consumption, but to try to understand the manifestations of capitalism in communities and groups.

In the context of Lebanon, the commodified queer image, which is very limited in its representation of class and cultural diversities, has excluded queers who are more religious, less wealthy, conservative, migrants, refugees, and all other layers of people who are non-normatively queer. Maybe this would explain why Nour’s sexuality keeps getting questioned in queer spaces – because a hijabi lesbian isn’t the typical image that pops into one’s head when thinking of lesbians.

I think I am starting to understand the map of Beirut (well… almost). Most queer spaces in Beirut are located in the cosmopolitan and gentrified neighborhoods, spaces that are inaccessible to anyone who can’t afford the middle-class lifestyle, one that has become exceedingly expensive and out of reach to many in the wake of the 2019 economic collapse. This forces queer individuals who want to partake in a certain space into a position of vulnerability, as they are pitched against the outer, heteronormative, and often homophobic, Lebanese societies. Of course, I don’t enter these neighborhoods through a gate, with a guard assessing whether I look adequately “cool” to gain entry. But the fact that I struggle to afford the transport costs required to reach these places, while even the cheapest cocktails start at $8.00, tells me who is welcome and who is just an extra.

“You can’t always be sure that you won’t be seen by someone you know from the outside.” A friend told me this on the day I arrived – panting and out of breath – after chasing down Bus 15. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that I may have come across my landlord and his wife enroute. My friend continued, “Always carry a jacket with you!” They sounded a bit like they were scolding me for the many times I have been in such situation, in clothes that made my queerness perceptible in public; “there are so many limits as to how you can express yourself, how it has become limited because of standards, and how privileged you have to be to express yourself in a non-normative way. You know we don’t have a car to go to parties. We have to be driven there, so we can’t change in a car – so why bother to begin with!”

Exclusion from queer spaces begins way before we even arrive at their physical location. The standards of acceptance force us into an “either / or situation”: either embody the stereotypes and risk our safety and security before arriving, or conceal our identities and face unacceptance and microaggressions within the queer space. And I always found myself trying to find a loophole or a strategy that could give me the best of both worlds.

In gentrified Beirut, queer spaces further gentrify the city by establishing certain areas as havens from everyday struggles. These spaces aim to showcase Lebanon’s modernity within a region marked by conservatism. Beirut is portrayed as a progressive city, contrasting with the rest of the Arab world, which is depicted as resistant to change. Not only does this image reinforce inequalities and exacerbate social segregation in Beirut - it also feeds into the Orientalist discourse on the inferiority of the Arab culture, where anything Western is hyped, and anything else is shamed and to be further pushed away. Thus, spaces become built on the basis of exclusion; they exclude the “unwanted” queers to create an attractive site of investment for foreign investors.

The queer spaces I found here were not the refuges from heteronormative oppression I had envisioned, but were instead carefully curated. My imagined freedom had been hemmed in by expectations on how to present, whom to befriend, and where to belong. Queer freedom in Beirut did exist, but it demanded a capital, both social and financial.

After all these years, I have come to realize that (un)being queer at home felt easier than being queer in Beirut.

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.