Introduction
If all the sects in Lebanon can raise their flags and declare territories as their own, then why can’t the queer community do the same? The community has been posing this question for a while, and in the summer of 2022, they decided to put it to the test. In Sassine Square, in the Christian-dominated area of Achrafieh, the NGO Beirut Pride put up a billboard filled with greenery for Pride month. The billboard revealed the rainbow colors and the message #LOVEALWAYSBLOOMS when the flowers bloomed.
This sparked a national backlash. Amid Lebanon’s multifaceted crises—banking collapse, currency devaluation, COVID-19, and the Beirut port explosion—sectarian leaders deemed the queer community the biggest threat. Attacks mounted from all sides. The "Soldiers of God" or “Jnoud el Rabb” group emerged during Pride month of 2022, reportedly tied to the Lebanese Forces. Claiming to protect Christian areas from “sinners” and “foreigners,” they tore down the billboard, posting videos accusing supporters of homosexuality as well as of civil marriage more generally of Satan worship. This resurgence of homophobia saw politicians, religious leaders, and new groups rally to threaten the LGBTQ+ community. Anti-homosexuality conferences took place, hateful social media campaigns spread, a public ban on LGBTQ+ gatherings was declared, and movies like The Minions and Lightyear were banned by General Security. The political parties in Lebanon could agree on one subject at least: the fear and hatred of the queer community.
However, there is more to this fear and hatred than meets the eye. This paper argues that the recent backlash against the LGBTQ+ community is not only the product of deep-rooted homophobia but is also part of a larger strategy to reaffirm state and sectarian power in times of instability and low confidence in state actors. In arguing this, the paper does not deny the effects of the deep-rooted bias against the community, but that the instrumentalization of this bias fluctuates based on the political, social, and economic context. This is proven by the fact that political parties are either less or more tolerant of the queer community and activism based on the derived benefits. Examples will point to this fluctuating tendency and will help analyze the causes behind spikes in queer crackdowns. Following the Arab Spring and Lebanon's anti-sectarian movements, political sects, fearing the loss of control they've held since the civil war, have scrambled to reassert their dominance. With the state seen as weak and sects no longer able to provide economic, social, and political stability, they position themselves as guarantors of security. Due to this state weakness, there has also been a rise in non-state sectarian groups who try to fill the gaps in the state by promoting their cause and capitalizing on sensationalized topics, especially that of the queer movement, to gain visibility. By instrumentalizing the deep-rooted homophobia in Lebanon, sectarian state and non-state actors were able to frame homosexuality as a threat that needed to be urgently addressed and prioritized over other topics. These threats were either tied to "protecting traditional values" and/or resisting "Westernization," depending on the sectarian group that invoked the subject.
How Queer Activism Developed with Anti-Sectarianism
Before exploring the Arab Spring in Lebanon and the LGBTQ+ activism within it, it is essential to point out a prior event that shaped what was to come. In 2010, a group called ‘Laique Pride’, which began as an exchange of messages on Facebook between friends in Paris and Beirut, eventually organized a protest in the name of secularism. Unlike the 2011 Uprising and the 2019 Revolution, Laique Pride was neither a revolution nor an uprising. It aimed to advocate for a secular approach in civic and private spheres rather than destabilize the entire sectarian system. Five thousand people marched from the Corniche to Parliament in the summer of 2010 with critical slogans and chants such as ‘What’s your sect? None of your business’ and ‘Sectarianism, Danger’. LGBTQ+ activists also took part in this march and put forward their interests; they marched with placards like “Queers for Secularism’ and staged a “kiss-in” between two women under the Rainbow Flag. Although their participation indicated a level of queer involvement in the protest, it still suffered from invisibility. Pride was appropriated to mean pride in secularism rather than LGBTQ+ activism. Queer advocacy was sidelined by the larger demand for secular freedom in personal affairs. This was evidenced by the fact that in one of the meetings, organizers asked that the rainbow flag not be raised to focus purely on a call for secularization and avoid risks of harm and distraction .
Although ‘Laique Pride’ symbolized an interesting turning point, this did not necessarily channel into the ‘Arab Spring’ in Lebanon. The Lebanese embodiment of the Arab Spring in 2011 did not have the same mobilizing force as in other countries. It lacked geographical reach (mostly taking place sporadically in Beirut), participation numbers (between a hundred and a few thousand people), and duration (lasting three months). Nevertheless, in February 2011, when Hosni Mubarak was close to renouncing power in Egypt, around 10,000 people took to the streets in Lebanon to call for the end of sectarianism in Beirut. Moreover, the uprising took on a gendered tone with many feminist activists and groups linking the dangers of sectarianism to their impact on gender. For example, they successfully revoked the honor crimes article in the criminal code in August 2011 and mobilized against rape in January 2012. In this context, queer activists and civil society groups began forming alliances with the feminist movement to highlight the overlap of gender rights and the need to protect the queer community. The movement adopted this intersectional approach and denounced the patriarchal essence of sectarianism and the power overexerted on vulnerable groups like women, queers, refugees, and migrant workers. Although the Arab Spring in Lebanon did not suddenly give the LGBTQ+ movement its much-needed visibility, it established a fertile ground on which the movement could network and advocate.
Like in the rest of the Arab world, the Arab Spring had a visibility effect on queer activism. This was evident in the Hirak movement of 2015 and prominent in the Thawra of 2019. In 2015, protests erupted over a garbage crisis caused by sectarian elites' inability to solve waste management, damaging Lebanon’s environment and tourism. The #YouStink movement evolved into #WeWantAccountability, where activists who aimed to widen the focus of the movement, including queer activists, condemned sectarian leaders and demanded an end to corruption. While not putting their specific grievances at the forefront, queer activists collaborated with environmental and feminist groups, organizing joint meetings and actions that tackled issues like homophobia, patriarchy, and sectarian dominance, while pushing for gender equality and challenging male-dominated protest leadership. Growing connections fostered new political alliances like ‘Beirut Madinati’ (‘Beirut is My City’) and ‘Kollouna Watani’ (‘We are All the Nation’), which challenged the sectarian elite while addressing neglected issues like environmental justice, citizen wellbeing, and women’s and queer rights. Leading up to the 2019 Revolution, grassroots queer activism continued to build with protests being held that fully focused on LGBTQ+ rights, declaring that ‘The Only Disease is Homophobia’ and coalescing with feminist protests more visibly. Simultaneously, new political alliances continued to advocate for abolishing Article 534 criminalizing homosexuality and attempting to compete with the traditional elites in elections. Although the activists did not manage to repeal the law, they indirectly influenced the opinion and decisions taken in court. Since then, at least six judges refused to prosecute cases linked to Article 534, slowly narrowing the legal ambit of the article. In a pivotal 2017 case, a judge dismissed charges against nine men, affirming consensual same-sex relationships as protected freedoms—a decision upheld by the State Prosecution and followed in later cases, gradually narrowing the article’s scope.
The revolution in 2019 took on a heightened level of mobilization. Although it started with a governmental proposal to enforce a WhatsApp tax, this was the choking point rather than the main cause. People felt betrayed by the corrupt system and wanted it to fall altogether. Given that this revolution cut across classes, areas, and sects, the large fight for social justice attracted vulnerable groups across Lebanon. This allowed queer activism to envision a new kind of involvement that linked the toppling of the system with the advocacy of queer rights.
The fact that the fight targeted the fall of the whole system – All Means All – made room for greater unity. The state’s targeting of the community was seen as yet another failure of the elites to protect citizens. Helem, a prominent LGBTQ+ organization, set up tents to both take part in the revolution and promote the rights and safety of the community. They put up a rainbow-colored banner with ‘All of Us Means All of Us’ written on it. Thugs destroyed the banner quickly after, foreshadowing the event led by ‘Soldiers of God’ a couple of years later. By fighting invisibility, LGBTQ+ activists faced a new challenge: hypervisibility. Moreover, the risk of sectarian division could also be found within queer groups. In an interview carried out in 2015, an activist stated that: “the way that sectarian politics works here is amazing, because sometimes it seeps into the LGBT community itself, much less so than the rest of the country… You also notice that there are a lot of LGBT people with a heightened sense of confessional and religious belonging.” This indicates that the sectarian division tends to be reproduced even among the groups who are fighting it, albeit to a far lesser extent.
Sectarian elites maintain their power through the exclusion of groups that do not fit into their idea of religious, gendered, and social norms. They maintain their control over their communities by making them seem that they are and should remain homogeneous. Anyone who falls outside of this imaginary homogeneity – refugees, migrants, queers – cannot possibly belong. Since the revolution questioned the concept of belonging by revealing the divisive nature of sectarian identities, the elites felt more threatened than ever. This came along with other very evident failures on the economic, social, and security levels. The queer community did not halt their activism after the ‘Thawra’. Although the revolution came to an end, the dismay with political elites did not. As such, queer activists continued to criticize the homophobia at the root of a patriarchal, controlling system. In return, the sectarian elites use this hypervisibility to criticize this ‘out-group’ and reunify their members by promoting the fear and hatred of the queer community.
How the Approach to the Queer Community is Used as a Political Tool
To understand how different sects mobilized against the queer community, it is essential to first understand how leaders of these sects use and change their approach to the community to push their interests forward. Their discourse and actions toward the community have varied based on the context and power of the respective sects. Such discourse and actions have not always been negative; at certain points, the sect leaders noticed the potential advantage of advocating for the community and anti-sectarianism more generally.
Weeks before the Laique Pride March in 2010, Nabih Berri – president of the Parliament and leader of the Shi’a party Amal – supported the end of political sectarianism. During the March, and despite the signs of support for the queer community, Berri spoke in favor of the March: Protestors received this news with surprise and suspicion. The reason for this politician’s support became clear; since the Shi’a community was the largest in Lebanon, allowing people to vote for one bloc would surely grant his movement more power. The Amal party was hoping for a power grab under the guise of democratization. Given the potential gain in power that could arise from supporting the demands behind the March, the party tolerated the possibility of being associated with queer, feminist, and anti-sectarian activists. Hezbollah, a Shi’a party that used to have great paramilitary power, also demonstrated the capacity for tolerance of queer activists when they perceived political benefits could be reaped from their presence. Evidence of this dates back to 2006 when Israel launched a ground attack on Lebanon. The NGO Helem – an LGBTQ+ organization – provided relief for displaced people from the South. This allowed the Southern community of Lebanon under Hezbollah’s authority affected by the war to access humanitarian services and thus lessen the pressure on and disappointment with the party’s actions. The organization even received an official certificate of recognition from the Shi'a party, while other political parties also congratulated the efforts of Helem for sharing their burden of responsibility during the war. However, this tolerance dropped when Helem’s perceived usefulness in preserving the parties’ popularity subsided. Elias, a former member of Helem having worked on this project, claimed that: ‘It is always like this. They use marginalized people during the war or the revolution. They use you and then after this, you are not a priority and they won’t change the law on LGBT rights. Even Hezbollah thanked us for what we were doing and now this year [2017] Hassan Nasrallah (ex-leader of Hezbollah) was talking publicly about gay men and he called us ‘a perversion’. We were shocked.’
This is also true for Christian parties who displayed tolerance, even open acceptance at times, of the community when they perceived that such support could minimize the threats to their position of power. One such situation occurred as a result of the Arab Spring, whereby new anti-sectarian alliances were formed and risked toppling the existing political order. These alliances have grown in importance, reach, and popularity since 2011. Moreover, they positioned themselves more formally on the side of queer rights. For instance, during the 2018 national election, the non-sectarian alliance ‘Kollouna Watani’ supported the decriminalization of homosexuality. As a reaction to the risk of losing popularity, the Kataeb, a notable Christian party, declared in their manifesto that they aimed to ‘abrogate all legal provisions that criminalize homosexuality’ in case they won the majority. Post 2019, in the face of a multi-faceted crisis in Lebanon, the crackdown on the queer community presented yet another example of the lack of consideration for human rights in Lebanon. To differentiate itself from the other parties denouncing homosexuality, The Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) declared its support for personal freedoms amidst the wave of backlash against the LGBTQ+ community in the summer of 2022. By purporting to be tolerant of activists’ right to advocate for the community, the FPM could position itself as an outlier and human rights ally and regain support from an increasingly frustrated population. Their promotion of personal freedoms was nowhere to be seen when they tried to put a stop to Mashrou’ Leila, a Lebanese queer rock band, labeling the band as deviant and forcing them to cancel their concerts. As such, they resorted to ‘pinkwashing’ when this approach had the potential to restore their position of power in a tense social, economic, and political environment.
How the State Failure Led to the Increased Tactical Use of Homophobia
If sectarian elites have been leveraging the queer community as a political tool over the years, either positively or negatively, then how does this explain the most recent backlash against the community? How have they tactfully played on homophobia, and why are we witnessing a rise in new groups trying to follow suit?
Although the crackdown on the queer community is far from new, what we have witnessed in the previous years seemed to specifically target queers who faced other vulnerabilities too. The middle to higher-class members could access private queer-friendly spaces, spaces that were relatively exclusive and were not open to queers from lower social classes. In 2012, members of the Internal Security Forces raided a cinema, located in the Armenian neighborhood Burj Hammoud, situated in Beirut, where 36 people were arrested and taken to the police station. There, they were tortured and forced to undergo anal examinations. Another raid took place in 2014, this time in a sauna in Beirut where 27 people – both clients and employees – were arrested, many of whom were Syrian refugees. These indicated a selective tolerance for queer spaces; while spaces exclusive to the middle- and high-class in Lebanon were mostly left alone, spaces for the working class and refugees were raided without fear of sparking a community backlash. Moreover, such raids were also used to penalize them for other reasons. After the raid in 2014, the public prosecutor ended up using this as an opportunity to arrest them for a range of criminal offenses.
Following the 2019 revolution and the onset of multiple crises, selective tolerance toward the queer community and activists gave way to widespread intolerance This occurred at the same time that people in Lebanon vocalized the need for the government to address the severe economic and political instability urgently. Ever since the Arab Spring, distrust in the sectarian system has been spreading and growing in Lebanon. The 2019 ‘Thawra’ led to a collapse of public trust in the system, and with sectarianism no longer taken for granted, sectarian leaders sought to regain influence. They did this partly by scapegoating the queer community, in addition to other vulnerable groups, framing them as a high-level security threat, and thus an issue of primordial national importance. A similar trend can be seen with Syrian refugees where many of the countries’ issues were blamed on the refugee crisis, leading to forced return, sporadic outbreaks of violence, state abuse, and dismissal of their human rights. Several examples indicate a hyper-focus on blocking the queer movement at a time when parties were called to address other priorities, which may have been a distraction to conceal their incompetence in addressing those priorities In August 2022, the municipality of Saida also canceled a concert it deemed morally indecent and replaced it with an anti-homosexuality conference. The event was promoted through the #Notnormal campaign, where speakers voiced fears that Western influence on the psychological, cultural, and social character of Lebanon threatened traditional ways of life by introducing "vices" like homosexuality. It was called a disease that had to be remedied or destroyed. Hassan Nasrallah, previous Secretary General of Hezbollah, released a speech in the following year, using the same discourse that accuses the West of imposing its deviant ideas while urging people to use derogatory terms when referring to the community and calling for them to be killed. With increased exposure to globalization, there is a heightened societal anxiety about Westernization eroding traditional values, fostering an online and social climate rife with homophobia. Hezbollah, feeling the pressure of these shifts, asserts itself by claiming to shield its people from external influences that threaten the heterosexual way of life. Additionally, Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi banned any gathering by members of the LGBTQ+ community, thus pleasing both the Christian and Muslim communities and strengthening his position in the cabinet. By inciting their respective community members to exclude LGBTQ+ members, they can somewhat re-knit their sectarian following, based on excluding the ‘other’. Sectarian leaders succeeded in positioning themselves as protectors of their communities.
Moreover, the political vacuum allowed non-state groups to fill the gaps and gain popularity by resorting to the same sensationalist tactics adopted by standard parties. In 2022, several political parties simultaneously targeted the queer community and quashed efforts of activism. This occurred at the same time that the government was not taking measures to address the compounding crises in Lebanon. In June of 2022, the ‘Soldiers of God’ were starting to be known for their Christian militancy and their fight against different vulnerable groups like the queers and the Syrian refugees, while other campaigns were simultaneously being conducted. No difference was made between exclusive and open queer spaces – all were a potential target for the group. After the ‘Soldiers of God’ took down the Pride billboard, they made many threats against the community residing in the area. Given that this area was considered a relatively safe space for the community, there was a high concentration of queer people. Thus, the Soldiers of God posed a large risk to their safety. They went so far as to raid a bar where a drag show was taking place and held people hostage. They framed themselves as defenders of the Christian community in Achrafieh, determined to prevent its decline. In a climate where homophobia is already present and Christians feel existentially threatened, this strategy works. The “Soldiers of God” see the queer movement as yet another threat to Lebanon’s social fabric and used the public's fear to strengthen their influence and power.
This failing sectarian system and the political vacuum that was created have had dire consequences for queer activists. Both state and non-state sectarian actors voice their agendas more freely and aggressively. The objective is twofold: first is to (re)gain power by depicting vulnerable groups as threats and acting on this threat, second is to distract the people from failures elsewhere.
The Way Forward
Although Lebanon, notably Beirut, has been viewed as a refuge for queers in the Arab World, homophobia remains deeply entrenched in the country and cuts across all communities. Nevertheless, trends can be witnessed that help break down the instrumentalization of this homophobia to suit vested interests. While members – especially the activists – have always been targeted, attacks tended to be focused on particular queer spaces up until 2019 that were open to the public and thus attracted members of other vulnerable groups. This could be seen in the open spaces raided by the ISF before the revolution and the exclusive and open spaces raided or threatened to be raided post-revolution. Moreover, stark fluctuations could be witnessed in the tolerance levels of state and non-state actors, depending on the perceived political benefits, as evidenced by the actions taken by Soldiers of God, the Kataeb, Hezbollah, Amal, and others, While queer activists have made significant advancements in Lebanon, these advancements remain blocked by deep-rooted homophobia and its instrumentalization to serve the interests of the sectarian groups. The recent war with Israel and the readjustments in the government leave the queer question and how it is yet to be instrumentalized open and unknown. However, one question remains essential to address: in a country where all political parties raise their flags proudly over their territories, why shouldn’t members of the queer community have the right to do the same?
The views represented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Arab Reform Initiative, its staff, or its board.
