Beyond the Cairo 52

For the past 4 years I have been working with Helem, the Lebanese LGBT rights organization, which has been one of the most enriching and frustrating experiences in my life. It’s also been extremely challenging, pushing me forward intellectually and forcing me to constantly rethink my positions on sexuality, sexual rights, gender, the whole LGBT thing, and what it actually means to be doing this kind of work in our post-911 world, swept up as it is within the ubiquitous framework forced upon us by the “war on terror” and its handmaidens, human rights and democracy talk.

Through Helem, I joined the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies, a bi-regional network of organizations and activists in the Middle East/North Africa and South/South East Asia working on the premise that sexual, bodily and reproductive rights are basic human rights, and all people have the right to make free decisions on matters relating to their sexuality, body and reproduction free from discrimination and coercion. After having worked on these issues since 2001, many members of the coalition felt the time was ripe to start documenting some of the major issues that have emerged in the realm of sexuality and sexual rights, and hence was born the idea of taking case studies from a number of countries that challenge mainstream notions of Islam, gender, and sexuality, to reclaim the normative and weighted questions that frame them, and to hopefully propose a new, more radical way of thinking through these issues.

It seemed natural to focus on the emergence of LGBT organizing in the Lebanon case study. On surface level, Helem remains the first and only LGBT rights organization working openly in an Arab country. It has received a substantial amount of media attention for that fact alone. But apart from that, Lebanon itself, the place in which Helem situates its struggle, presents a fascinating location for an emergent discourse on (homo)sexuality, being a sort of petri dish for the region where the war on terror, the US-led experiment in Arab democracy, a ruthless market capitalism, and the instrumentalization of human rights all meet and intertwine. As Sayyid Mohmmad Hussein Fadlallah so eloquently put it:

“I myself have likened Lebanon to the lung through which the problems of the area breathe. Thus, Lebanon was not created to be a national home for its citizens but as a laboratory for international political experiments in the region. Lebanon is a listening post for monitoring all the political trends that exist in the Arab world at least, perhaps even in the Islamic world. It is this function, rather than aspirations for democracy, that explains the political freedom enjoyed by all parties and flags represented in Lebanon. The freedom facilitates the observation as well as the interference, with the experiment sometimes requiring the heating up of a conflict between groups or trends to see how such matters can be managed or played out.”

I find it useful to think of Helem and its work in this light. Although one runs the risk of removing all agency from the activists within Helem, it does serve as a reminder that they are not acting in a political vacuum, and there is a mutually constitutive dialogue between all the different actors and institutions that have a stake in this, whether directly or indirectly.

It also adds a regional/international perspective to the issue. The growing nature of transnational activism and the almost claustrophobic interconnectedness of the world have played a very important role not only in Helem’s work but also in its self-image, the way it presents itself locally and internationally.

But Helem is not the only thing making waves in the region. In Occupied Palestine, Aswat has been doing lesbian, bisexual, and transgender work. In Lebanon, Meem was founded in 2007, a new lesbian group that began as a project within Helem and then split to form its own identity. In Jordan, there are stirrings of an underground movement, at least enough for the media to start a smear campaign against gays and lesbians. From North Africa to the Gulf, there is a new consciousness emerging that wasn’t there before, where LGBT people are now forging spaces where they can reflect on their own situations and lives. They are starting to think about the future instead of being terrorized by the present.

Since the infamous Queen Boat arrests in Cairo in 2001 in which 52 gay men were arrested, tortured, and tried, there has been a palpable increase in crackdowns on homosexual activity in different countries in the region. Many of these arbitrary arrests have been reported in the local and regional media as government crackdowns on mass “gay weddings”, revealing a deep-seated anxiety over the disruption of social norms and an imagined breakdown of the family. The Western media has also quickly picked up on this trend and report with some regularity on the lives of “oppressed Arab gay men and lesbians”, often reproducing crude stereotypes that pander to simplistic dichotomies of the “free west” versus the “oppressive east” in a manner reminiscent to how the white western feminist movement views women in the so-called developing world.

What brought about this rise in explicitly queer organizing, how it was brought about, and its ramifications are the central focus of this research project. Any analysis of (an already politicized) sexuality in the Arab world must be situated within a specifically geo-political and economic context; the production of knowledge on sexuality is highly implicated in the broader global politics that have engulfed the region. In the case of Helem, a multitude of factors have converged to allow both its foundation and its continued operation, including, but not limited to the influence of international NGOs (particularly donor agencies) and the creation of the “global gay citizen”, the growing transnational character of queer organizing, the rise in “democracy and rights talk” following the “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon and the global the war on terror, the creation of the gay consumer in Beirut, and the growing crisis on the debate on modernity, identity, nationalism and culture in Lebanon and the Arab world at large. Through an exploration of these factors, the research will dissect the types of discursive practices on sexuality this convergence has created and how they are received, embodied, reproduced and/or challenged by local organizing practices, as well as looking at more localized constructions of sexuality.

While Lebanon will remain my main area of focus, I think it’s also important to look at the movement in ideas, the conversations that are happening across borders. Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan make an interesting combination. In the first two countries, there are formally recognized organizations working on LGBT rights. In Jordan, it remains informal and largely underground. Amman lies between Beirut and Haifa and serves as a more or less neutral meeting point for the two, and it would be helpful to attempt to trace the sorts of conversations that are happening between these three cities. We’re also dealing with three very different political systems: Lebanon’s laissez-faire state (too little state) and relative freedom of association, Jordan’s ruthless dictatorship (too much state) and crackdowns on social and political organizing, and Palestine’s occupation (no state) and the location of Aswat within the lands of ’48 in Haifa.