Queer Publicity, Homophobia, and Sectarianism in Post-transition Lebanon

• In Event: 50 Years of LGBTQ Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference: The Politics of LGBTQ Identity and Practice

Abstract

In June of 2022, the public display of queer political symbols and the online circulation of advertisements for gay Pride Month in Lebanon mobilized an array of political, institutional, and popular actors in inter-sectarian and anti-gay political action. Happening just one month after the historic electoral wins of anti-sectarian MPs, both events held the promise of democratic transition, renewed queer visibility and queer activism in Lebanon. Articulating homosexuality as a violation to religiously-defined “nature,” homophobic actors framed queer publicity as a violation to laws protecting religious pluralism, a threat to inter-sectarian coexistence, and a danger to Lebanon’s postwar civil peace. In a move later deemed unconstitutional by the Lebanese Court of Cassation, the Interior Ministry released a memo banning all homosexual (sexual deviancy) gatherings and assemblies in the name of the “heavenly religions,” "customs and traditions," and the secular public order. Also sparked was a host of anti-gay mobilizations, ad campaigns and policy initiatives across sect and class. Interestingly, homophobia neither generated - nor aimed to generate - national solidarity around a common enemy. Rather, it incited modes of identification and action that reinforced particular communal symbols and causes. Taking this observation as its starting point, this paper asks the following questions: how is queer sexuality articulated as a specific violation to institutionalized religious pluralism? And what does that articulation reveal about the heterosexual structures and foundations of Lebanon’s sectarian political order? What new modes of political action and identification does homophobia incite? Finally, and in the wake of a "failed" revolution, what can the case of homophobia in Lebanon tell us about how citizens get divested from political alternatives and re-invested in crisis-ridden and defunct political regimes? By politicizing homosexual publicity as a symbolic violation to “all religions and sects,” sectarian actors simultaneously politicized heterosexual “nature” as a popular, cross-sectarian, and absolute source of political authority. In doing so, they invested heterosexuality with the status of an absolute symbol in political sectarianism, one whose inviolable authority is maintained by the sectarian plurality that holds it. Ultimately, and by politicizing heterosexuality as an absolute-in-common, I argue that homophobia reproduces sectarian differences and relates them in and against a global age.

Author

• Omar Safadi, University of Chicago