Queer (in)visibility and the production of queer space in postwar Lebanese film

The appearance of the very first Lebanese films to openly address homosexuality at the beginning of the new millennium can be seen as a response to an increasing exposure to globalized queer narratives in Western media. But a closer analysis of these films reveals their importance in responding to the new social contexts and realities arising in the 1990s in Lebanon after a 15-year-long Civil War. I argue that queer self-expression in Lebanese films of the post-Civil War period is shaped through deep engagement with local social, political and cultural issues at a moment when the Lebanese were searching for a new sense of national unity beyond sectarian difference. Using queer theory, queer of color critique and my own experience as a young Lebanese gay man in the early 2000s, I look at the interplay between queer visibility and invisibility in relation to shifting boundaries between private and public spheres as they translate into the filmic space. I analyze two pioneering works of queer Arab cinema: How I Love You (2001) by Akram Zaatari and Cadillac Blues (2002) by Mazen Khaled. Through a close analysis of these films and the queer communities they allude to, I show how the production of cinematic spaces of queer desire circumvented sectarian logics and geographies.