There is a historical paradox: the last decades, not the preceding centuries or millennia, seem to shape the present. The homoerotism of 8th century poet Abu Nawas, the medieval love between Hind and Al-Zarqa - a history of queer desire in the Middle East vanished under the rug of a briefer history of desiring the Middle East. Arriving colonies or American corps, Baudelaire's exoticism or Hollywood's, a struggle for independence or a fear of foreign interference - East vs. West, an inevitable by-product, arguably as old as the Greeks' possessive longing for Troy. Damage is done. The struggle for gay rights in the Middle East cannot turn a blind eye toward this binary. To achieve gay liberation, Beirut cannot be Washington or London - same fight, different grounds; in fact, perhaps a different fight altogether because it has London and Washington in its satellite.
Background
The background around Lebanon's unique position between East and West is too massive to cover within a short article. To set the stage, I start off with Saadallah Wannous's Drunken Days (1997), a play set in 1930s Beirut during the French occupation. A vivid scene introduces us to a Lebanese family of four young siblings, who surprise their old father with a tailored suit, a tie, and a Gatsby-style hat. The immediate refusal of the Lebanese father, wearing his traditional sherwal attire and typical tarbush hat, contrasts with the zeal of his four children, who celebrate their modern and clean-cut looks, signé designers, as well as their fluency in French and their excitement for social advancement. This scene exemplifies a kind of intergenerational clash of civilization within Lebanon akin to the country's gay rights struggle, one that ties, though wrongly, progress with westernization.
A precedence is women's rights. In Women's Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Progress Amid Resistance, Kelly and Breslin (2010) have noted how women's rights in Lebanon have been historically negotiated along Eastern vs. Western lines; a clash that borrows imaginary models from both hemispheres and that charges advocates of full women's rights as 'too westernized'. On the other side, the opponents of women's rights, women included, are charged to be inherently backwards and 'too Eastern' - the same complaint addressed to the traditional father in The Drunken Days, whose refusal of western standards comes at the price of refusing to bow down to the winds of modernity itself.
