Dear Western people. Stop strictly framing the experience of queer Palestinians to death, violence, and homophobia (I use queer as an umbrella term to refer to the broader LGBTQ group). Queer Palestinians deserve a representation beyond colonization, occupation, apartheid, human rights violations, and as of late, genocide. These things we experience alongside all Palestinians, regardless of their queerness. Queer Palestinians are worthy of a representation that humanizes them, and their communities, and focuses on the common joys and struggles that they also share with queer communities worldwide.
When asked when I first realized I was queer, I say, “as far back as I can remember.” When asked what it was like growing up queer in Palestine, I share that I loved playing with girls’ toys; I was a flamboyant child who loved feminine clothes. When I reached adolescence, my only sexual and romantic attraction was towards the traditional male-presenting body. I faced bullying in middle school, though words like “homo” or “fag” were absent. My classmates didn’t know what homosexuality was, but they rejected any deviation from the classic form of masculinity that they considered acceptable.
Talking about the closet in relation to queer Palestinians, most people assume that we never feel safe to disclose our sexuality. However, I came out at the end of high school, in 2007. I told the college counselor/psychologist who I came to know well. She was rather supportive. In the following couple of years, while in college, I told a few friends from my high school and town, including my cousin and other members of my extended family. In my first year of college, I came out as queer to the guy I had a crush on throughout middle and high school. That did not go well; he cut all ties. Every queer Palestinian I know has experienced this kind of one-sided adolescent love. Around the same time, I was introduced to Palestinian queer organizations, AlQaws and Aswat, which create spaces and advocate for queer Palestinians. In parallel, I met the Israeli queer community in Be’er Sheva where I lived as a college student. Despite their good intentions, I did not exactly fit as I was the only Arab kid. The shared queerness I had with them was insufficient – there were cultural barriers. I kept joining communities, nonetheless, until I had a beautiful loving queer social life. I was loved. In my earlier career as a high school teacher, I came out to the staff at the schools I worked at, and in both schools the principals were understanding. No matter how homophobic and transphobic cultures and societies might be, there are always exceptions, safe allies, and even safe communities. For queer folks living in places where it may be unsafe, like Palestine, queers still find their people. In fact, queer Palestinians are experts on creating safe communities, despite the cultural and colonial barriers that they endure in politics, education, law, civil society, and other public/private spaces and institutions.
Yet, in Western discussions about queerness in Palestine, many choose to ignore these experiences that are common to queer people worldwide. Yes, there is homophobia in Palestine but as I got older, I realized that I had imagined it to be much harsher than reality. Within my family, I first came out to my sister – through an email. Next, I came out to a cousin who is close to one of my siblings and asked them to inform the rest of the family. They were shocked and upset, initially they resisted and tried to convince me it wasn’t okay. They had already grappled with my atheism – which they eventually accepted – alongside other ideological and behavioral differences, so when I came out it seemed as if queerness explained everything. I think my male privilege also played a role. It certainly gave me the freedom to do as I pleased, leave the community, stay out late, and go to parties without anyone questioning my lifestyle.
I come from a conventional Bedouin Palestinian family in the south of Palestine-Israel. Since I came out, they have never shown signs of violence, even during moments of extreme distress. Despite being devout Muslims and culturally conservative, their concerns revolved around two things: the impact on their relationship with the community and the worry that I might never have a family or children of my own. Over time, they came to understand that I had made my own choices.
I don’t view my family as any less welcoming, or my experience as different from the average queer experience in families around the world. I also don’t believe that conflict within a family means there is a lack of love. My family’s homophobia is not so different from the experiences many Western families face with LGBTQ+ issues. In fact, their response was relatively mild compared to what some of my Western friends have faced. My family life has its ups and downs; it’s not perfect, and it probably never will be, but I’ve stopped striving for perfection. They are proud of me, we stay in regular contact, and I spend a month with them every summer. Now that I live in the U.S., my nieces and nephews eagerly count down the days until I return after I announce my arrival. My experience is far from unique in Palestine, and our stories deserve to be heard. It’s time to challenge the limited and misleading portrayals of queer Palestinian lives that the West clings to: it’s time to amplify the diversity of our experiences.
Our History is Queer
Talking about queer Arabs, including queer Palestinians, many people in the West are unaware of the rich queer history that existed in our cultures long before the West colonized the region. When I was 19, I had the privilege of learning about homosexuality and queerness in classic Arabic literature, including poetry, during a lecture organized by AlQaws and delivered by a Palestinian queer professor of Arabic literature Housni Shehada and given publicly for years later.
Arabs have recognized homosexuality as both a desire and a practice since ancient times, and they maintained a rich discourse around it in their literature, arts, and public life. This understanding of homosexuality was quite different from how we perceive it today; it was not a practice that resulted in classifying its practitioners into categories centering around a desire and turned into a social and political identity. Often, it was a practice combined with other practices with the opposite sex, and at times, it was exclusively homosexual. Many classical poems from the Abbasid and Andalusian eras discuss homosexuality, though this doesn’t mean it originated with these civilizations. Homosexuality was recognized long before Islam, and even some of the Umayyad caliphs were well-known for their relationships with the same sex.
For example, a wealth of literature from the past depicts images of older male adolescents or young adult men who have not yet grown facial hair, referred to in Arabic as “amrad”, and compares them to both young women and older, muscular men. These depictions are so prevalent that, as Islamic doctrine evolved, it established rules around the companionship of these young males, further highlighting the prominence of homosexuality in public life during that time. Some of these literary works are just as, if not more, erotically explicit and proudly narrated than many sex-positive and sexually liberated works in the West today. Among the poets who wrote about these themes are Abu Nawas, Ibn Abi El Baghel, Yazid Bin Moa’wiyah, and El Khalifa Al Amin as appears in Desiring Arabs. These names are popular enough across the Arabic speaking world that I encountered their works in high school literature, but I was never taught about the queer aspects of their writing. Discovering the queer elements of their works opened an entirely new world for me as a queer Arab; it was the first time I engaged in a queer reading or participated in a queering activity.
The rise of colonial Western influence and the growing dominance of Islamic cultural values in the region suppressed the representation of queer Arabs in our historical records until recently. Since the Arab world shares a cross-border collective pop culture, queerness has begun to resurface in the works and public statements of artists such as the band Mashrou’ Leila, who challenge the gap in our documented history. Several Arab celebrities, including Maya Diab, Elissa, Jad Schweiri, Ahmad Majdi, Sherif Madkour, Carole Samaha, and Cyrine Abd Elnour, have expressed pro-queer support, either explicitly or by subtly incorporating messages of queer love into their work. Beyond contemporary Arab figures or classical literary works – that might feel distant in time – I also encountered many queer Palestinians as a young adult, who provided me with a sense of community, belonging, rootedness, and support. They became a source of advice and connection for me.
To understand this historic gap in the representation of queer Palestinians, it is important to consider the decline of homosexual acceptance in the late 19th century as the Ottoman Empire weakened. This decline may have been linked to the criminalization of homosexuality in the Western world around the same time. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s first president, introduced reforms that stigmatized same-sex relationships as a means of stabilizing the remnants of the empire (Murray). During the British mandate of Palestine and Transjordan, their criminal code that proscribed homosexuality became law in Palestine in 1936. This code remained in effect in Jordan until 1951 and applied to the West Bank at that time. Since 1951, the Jordanian Penal Code, which also covered the West Bank, stated that there was “no prohibition on sexual acts between persons of the same sex.” Since then, the Palestinian Authority has neither legislated for nor against homosexuality. This creates two key implications: first, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (and Gaza), sexual activity between members of the same sex is not illegal; second, the experiences of queer Palestinians today is inherently tied to the complex legacy of legal frameworks from foreign occupations—Ottoman, British, Jordanian, and Israeli. While Palestinians in Israel may seemingly be legally protected under false Israeli claims of queer rights and democracy compared to those in the West Bank and Gaza, the queer sociocultural experience of all Palestinians remains largely similar. Same-sex marriage, for example is illegal in the State of Israel as well as in the Palestinian Territories. Recent polling by the Pew Research Center suggested that 56% of Israelis are opposed to gays and lesbians being able to marry.
Yet, against the backdrop of such truth, the overall Western (and Israeli) model, which persistently relies on a legal rights-based framework to assess queer experiences globally, often imposes Western modes of queer resistance – such as visibility politics, coming out, and Pride – on queer Palestinians as universally desirable, and then weaponizes these frameworks against all Palestinians. My research on queer Palestine suggests that focusing on legality or visibility politics fails to do justice to queer Palestinian experiences. These queer visibility issues are far less significant than the sociocultural impacts rooted in Palestinian communities, the ongoing Israeli occupation, and the corruption within the Palestinian Authority. To truly understand and address queer Palestinian lived experiences, it is crucial to avoid overemphasizing legal or visibility reforms without considering the full historical and contemporary context.
International human rights organizations that monitor queer rights globally are themselves Western entities. Their notions of queer justice are shaped by the Western sociopolitical psyche, which means their discourse is inherently flawed when it comes to fully capturing the lived experiences of queer people, especially in contexts where colonial and sociocultural factors are more complex than what Western ideas of imaging a better queer future can describe. These Western notions and approaches to reform cannot simply be transplanted or applied universally; they must be critically re-examined and adapted to the unique contexts in which queer people live.
Moreover, one cannot discuss homophobia and queer visibility in the Arab world without recognizing that freedom of speech and expression in the region – queerness included – is severely limited by the nature of governance in most Arab states. These limitations are often imposed by local political elites, including the Palestinian Authority, who are supported and funded by Western governments. In this dynamic, both Arab and Western political classes contribute to the repression of personal freedoms, maintaining a status quo that affects all areas of life, not just the queer community. As Palestinians experience genocide, we do them a disservice by demanding their queerness be made visible without acknowledging that the lack of visibility is also a result of neo-colonial Western control.
Unlearning Amidst a Genocide
Queer Palestinian liberation cannot – and must not – be achieved through a colonial or genocidal plan of action aimed at full annihilation of Palestinians. For most queer Palestinians I know, such liberation is outright unwelcome if it comes at the cost of perpetuating violence. Let me express just how deeply I believe in this: if I had to choose between two scenarios, one in which I would receive a perfect, full-scale Palestinian queer liberation matching the utopia I have envisioned my whole life – but only in the aftermath of a genocide and a violent colonial project – or endure being disowned, threatened, beaten, or even killed by my own family and community due to homophobia, I would choose the latter. This is how strongly I would rather face personal hardship than support the Western violence pretending it is there to save me and my queerness from my people as it ethnically cleanses us all.
Is homophobia a persistent problem in Palestinian society? Yes, unequivocally. Do I want it resolved by any means necessary? Absolutely not. So, if you are not Palestinian, stop speaking on my behalf and the behalf of the many queer Palestinians I know. Instead, listen to queer Palestinians – ask us what we think and what we want. Ask about our mental health and wellbeing, ask how you can fund and empower our activism on our terms. Share our stories respectfully and give us a voice on your platforms if you truly care. Otherwise, you are simply using Palestinian queerness to justify a Western imperialist agenda, where concerns about queer safety and rights are insincere at best.
The world must understand that queer Palestinians are loved by many in their communities, just as they are also rejected by some around them. Palestinian communities are not the enemy of queer Palestinians. The queer Palestinian experience with homophobia mirrors the broader global homophobic status quo, and it can improve much faster if we free Palestinians from occupation and colonialism. Palestinian queers are diverse, with different religious, political, professional, and cultural affiliations. The occasional news stories about anti-queer violence in Palestinian society, which Western media often romanticizes for its own benefit, do not tell the full story of queer Palestine. Queer Palestinians also have “mediocre” experiences with homophobia—less dramatic, often milder, and sometimes comparable to those in the West. Queer Palestinians experience joy, they have dreams, and they want to feel seen, valued, and dignified. We throw incredible parties in Palestine; I’ve dressed up and attended many, kissed guys there, felt silly, and felt human among those people. Join me in amplifying these moments, so we can build a new, more nuanced narrative of queer Palestine.
Izat El Amoor
