“This Arab is Queer:” An interview with Elias Jahshan

Queer Arabs exist, and queer Arabs have always existed. These should not be controversial statements—recent UN estimates place the population of the Arab world as approaching half a billion people, with millions more in the diaspora, and of course a percentage of them identify as being part of the LGBTQ+ community. And yet, their stories rarely make it to the mainstream, and are often downright ignored by those in the West. 

The existence of queer Arabs wasn’t news to 38-year-old journalist Elias Jahshan. Jahshan was born and raised in Sydney, Australia, to a Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father, and now lives in London. In 2022, he edited This Arab is Queer, published with Saqi Books. The anthology features unique essays from queer Arab writers: author and filmmaker Saleem Haddad visits a former lover in Beirut and reflects on their decision to leave Lebanon in the first place; Hamed Sinno of the indie band Mashrou’ Leila writes about music as an act of resistance; an anonymous Egyptian writer struggles to reconcile the moments of joy she feels in her life as a queer woman with the fractured relationship she has with her mother. The essays range wildly in style and content. 

At a time when the lives of LGBTQ+ Arabs are either being erased or weaponized to justify a deadly ongoing assault against Palestine, This Arab is Queer is a crucial testament to the rich diversity of queer life across the Arab world and diaspora. I spoke to Jahshan about his own unfolding identity as a queer man, the experience of editing the anthology, and the use of pinkwashing to downplay war crimes. 

How did your family end up in Sydney?

My dad is Palestinian. He was born in 1938 in Yaffa. When the 1948 [Nakba] happened, it was traumatizing for him. He was a ten year old boy. He had to leave home because of the armed Zionist forces. After Yaffa fell, the state of Israel was declared. 

My dad’s family lived in Ramallah for two years before ending up in Amman. He moved to Australia in 1964. In the 1960s it was fairly easy to get a visa to Australia. Different story now. 

On the way to Australia, they stopped over in Lebanon for a bit of a holiday. My dad's cousin, twenty years older, was getting married in Lebanon. The person my dad's cousin was getting married to was my mom's sister. That's how he first met my mom. Three years later, that aunt and uncle moved to Australia, and my mom followed her sister. It was not an arranged marriage, but my dad's mom nudged him and said, "Look at Georgette, look at Georgette, isn't she pretty?" They got married in the 70s.

When did you start identifying as queer?

Probably in the past five years or so. I use it interchangeably with gay. It took me a while to unlearn the heteronormative connotations that come with saying you're a cisgender gay man. I don't really subscribe to the whole gay culture, because when I think of the gay culture, I think of white gay men. “Queer” is so much more diverse, and there's beauty and joy in diversity. 

When did you start identifying as gay?

Oh, gosh. I came out to myself when I was twenty, but I [experienced same-sex attraction] as young as twelve. I had just started high school. It was the end of summer. We had our annual school swimming carnival. Without realizing it, I was checking out all the boys in their speedos. I didn't realize that was an awakening for me until I got older. Throughout high school, I was in denial. I kept trying to fight it. I felt a lot of shame. 

I felt shame on two fronts. There was the stigma that comes from being gay in my culture, and also growing up in a working class area of Sydney. There's this idea of being the Aussie bloke who sort of does all the hard, hands-on work and acts [as] the breadwinner. All these stereotypical ideas of what it means to be a man. Sport is a cult in Australia. I know sport is big everywhere, but in Australia, it is legitimately a cult. I didn't realize that until I moved to the UK. I don't give a shit about sport!

Sydney is a massive city of about 4 million people. It's a divided city as well. It's not like in London, or New York or even Melbourne where the gay community has kind of dispersed all over the place. In Sydney, at the time I was growing up in the late 90s, early 2000s, the gay community was very much converging around a couple of suburbs. Things have changed now, but when I was growing up I never saw any out people. Never heard of any lesbians raising families, as you do now. 

Having that division, people thought, "We're nowhere near that, so we can't be influenced by it." The whole idea of the annual Mardi Gras festival in March, which is our version of Pride, presented on mainstream TV, didn't help either. It was always constantly presented as being full of sexual deviants. The people you saw in these parades were all white people. 

Up until I was sixteen, I was mostly dealing with racism, trying to figure out who I was. I constantly hid the Palestinian side of myself and just pretended I was Lebanese. I don't believe in the half/half thing anymore. We had our own issues with racism in Sydney. There was this whole big panic about Lebanese gangs. There was one particular gang, one particular guy, and the media made it sound like the whole community was responsible for it. 

I was about sixteen when 9/11 happened. It intensified everything. Funnily enough, when the racism intensified, it finally pushed me into claiming my Palestinian side. That kind of freed up space in my mind to deal with the gay side.

Why did you feel you had to hide your Palestinian half?

The stereotypes I had to deal with of being Lebanese were nothing compared to the stereotypes I had to deal with as a Palestinian. The media landscape in Australia was extremely parochial, very provincial. The way we were portrayed as the bad guys versus the good guys, that binary was just awful and dehumanizing. 

When I would tell people I'm Palestinian, so often the first thing people would ask me was, "Oh, do you like throwing stones?" Because of course the image we were fed during the second intifada, people were throwing stones at the Israeli tanks.These people had no idea why these stones were thrown, and the context behind why the Palestinians had no army for themselves. 

There were a lot of suicide bombings happening in the second intifada as well. Hala Alyan wrote in a recent piece in the New York Times that Palestinians shouldn't have to constantly audition for your empathy. I think I hid the Palestinian side of my identity because that was the only way I could be seen as a human being. Now I realize that was the wrong way to go about it.

How did you start getting connected to a larger queer Arab community?

I had just gone to visit the Middle East for the first time ever, when I was 26 years old. Just going there in many ways radicalized me—not in a religious way, but in the sense that I became far more proud of my Palestinian side. 

I traveled around Lebanon. I had the privilege of being able to go to Palestine, although I was held up at the airport for three hours both ways. I felt far more comfortable in my own skin as an Arab man and also as a gay Arab man. I went to a gay bar in Beirut called Bardo, which has since shut down. That experience kind of woke me up. It was like, this is actually quite cool. It was very affirming being in a space with other queer Arabs, and just existing and living life and talking shit with your friends, having drinks and dancing. 

As soon as I got back to Sydney, I learned about a regular queer Arabic music party called Club Arak. It's been going since the 2000, but I only discovered it in 2011. Those parties completely changed my life in so many ways. I found my community at home in Sydney. It was so liberating to just be myself and, at the same time, celebrate my culture without having the aunties and uncles in the background judging me. Having that safe space just meant so much. 

Club Arak is still my favorite party of all time. It only happens once or twice a year. Now living in London I always miss it, and I have a major sense of FOMO whenever I see pictures on social media. I’ve since found my own community of queer Arabs in London. 

I love that you are talking about celebration, because with your book, This Arab is Queer, one thing that's so great about it is the diversity. I'm not just talking about it in regards to identity, although there is a huge range of ways to be Arab and queer, but in the experiences. There are stories of trauma and homophobia and family tension, but there are also stories that are joyful, and a few that are really sexy. What did you learn while editing this collection?

I guess what surprised me the most was, as an editor, I did not tell these writers to write about these topics. I just said, write whatever you want. The only requirements were that it had to be non-fiction, and it had to be something that hasn't been written before, and the idea of being queer or Arab can be touched on directly or indirectly. Most importantly, I didn't want them to feel like they had to pander to a particular audience. I didn't want them to have to think, "Will the white readers understand?" 

All the submissions I got were so remarkably different, with very little, if any, overlap. As an editor, that's a massive relief. The last thing I wanted was chapter after chapter of the same thing again and again. It was a really nice, amazing thing to have this breadth of stories we could cover in such a small space of eighteen chapters. I would have loved to have more, but for budget reasons and time reasons we couldn't do it. 

I learned so many things in that process, but probably the biggest thing was how the publishing industry works. I work in journalism every day. Editing personal, courageous pieces of work is so different from editing journalistic articles. There was no rigid style guide apart from the grammatical stuff from the publisher. I had to be conscious of how much I edited these writers' works, because they were so personal. It was a huge honor and privilege. It's not something I took for granted. 

What has the response been like, in both your communities and the larger world? 

For the wider, general, mainstream response, it's been really great. I've been really chuffed and happy and humbled by the positive response. 

The other great response to see has been from queer Arabs. The number of times people have sent me direct messages, or Tweeted at me to say, “Thank you so much, it's so great to finally see myself in this kind of book.” I should highlight, this is not the book of queer Arabs. But I think this is the first time that there have been so many different stories collected in one anthology. This book first and foremost was for the queer Arab community. 

The response by the wider Arab community has been really positive. It’s no secret that there's homophobia in the community. Having this amazing positive feedback has been really great, because it challenges the idea that we're all homophobic, as a lot of racist right-wingers like to say. It challenges the idea that we're alone. 

I read an interview you did with the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. And you said that queer Palestinians are "gaslit with a litany of cliches, such as 'Israel is a safe haven for the LGBTQ+ Middle East.'" Can you expand on the problems with that belief?

Oh my gosh, where do I begin? If we were to look at it from a purely objective, legal perspective, then yes, the legal statutes in Israeli legislation do offer more protection compared to the Arab world. But that's kind of as far as it goes. Just because there's some legal protection doesn't mean homophobia is magically gone. People constantly gaslight me with that as a way to one, drive a wedge between me and the wider Palestinian community, and two, [to] pander to all these pinkwashing tropes. Pinkwashing obviously is a way to distract from Israel's war crimes. 

Could you define pinkwashing for the reader who might not know?

I think the person who has defined the best way is Sarah Schulman. She wrote something for the New York Times back in 2011. Even though the term pinkwashing had been used before by queer Palestinian activists, it was the first time the term appeared in a mainstream media outlet. Schulman is Jewish and anti-zionist. She provided a really good definition [of pinkwashing]. Basically it's propaganda, a public relationship tactic to distract. It employs or weaponizes queer identity and queer culture to distract from Israel's war crimes, occupation, [and] discrimination. 

People say, "Israel's a safe place for queer people." Yeah sure, but what kind of queer people are you talking about? Who exactly? There are definitely queer Palestinians within the 1948 borders of Israel, and they are still second class citizens. There are still sixty-five pieces of legislation within Israel that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Just because you're queer doesn't make you magically exempt from all these things. The Israeli authorities don't care about your sexuality. They care that you're Palestinian first and foremost, and everything else is irrelevant. 

For sure, there's definitely homophobia and transphobia in my community. Don't get me wrong. But it's funny how trolls constantly bring this up like it's some new revelation. When people say, "Israel is a safe haven for queer people," they're implying that homophobia is exclusive to our culture and our culture only, and they're using an orientalist trope of the angry Arab man that's incapable of being progressive, which is so racist and so backwards and demeaning. No culture is free from homophobia. It's everywhere.

In that same interview, you talk about the concept of coming out as a Western concept. How does queer liberation in the Middle East and North Africa differ from queer liberation movements in the West? 

I don't know if I can really answer that question because I grew up in the West. I don't know if it's my place to describe what it's like, the liberation movement in the Middle East. But just because queer liberation moved in a certain direction in the West, you can't expect the same thing to happen in the Middle East or anywhere in the Global South. There are so many various reasons for that. One is the legacy of colonialism and the imported homophobia that came with colonialism, and traditional moral values that came with Christianity via colonialism, imported through that way. A hangover of sorts. 

It's also that the culture is different. One thing that's often weaponized against Middle Easterners is people saying, "I'd like to see you have a pride parade in Gaza." Since when are pride parades the litmus test of a country's liberation movement? There's so many different ways to go about gaining freedom and liberation, getting the freedom of equality that we all deserve. To sort of try to impose [one specific version of] that on other countries is a form of imperialism and modern colonialism.

We have to listen to the people on the ground. Listen to their voices, and follow their lead, rather than talking over them or inserting ourselves in a discourse or a movement that is not about us. The best thing we can do in the West is listen, and give the space and platform to those people whenever we can. We have to listen to how the queer community on the ground is leading the movement. 

You've given audiences eighteen queer Arab writers to read. Who are some other activists or writers do you think people should be listening to? 

Where do I begin? In Palestine, there's a group called alQaws, the Arabic word for rainbow. They're an NGO that advocates for and works with the queer Palestinian community. There's also Aswat, another group in Palestine, and they're more feminist focused but they're inclusive of the queer community. In Lebanon, you've got Helem, the Arabic word for dream. They're often at the forefront in the media when it comes to putting statements out about the queer community.

There’s Bashar Murad. He's an openly gay Palestinian singer from East Jerusalem. He led some of the Eurovision boycotts when Tel Aviv hosted back in 2019. In Jordan there's a magazine called My Kali with a lot of writers. In Tunisia, there's a group called Mawjoudin, from the Arabic for "We Exist." They speak about issues across North Africa. There’s a huge drag scene in Beirut.

I think there's one thing your work has shown is that there's no one way to represent the queer Arab experience. 

I say this in every interview, at every event. I don't want people to think this book is a definitive text.