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 growing exposure to globalized queer narratives in western media. But a closer analysis of these films reveals their importance in responding to the Lebanese national identity crisis a decade after a 15-year-long civil war had fractured the country. In this paper, I argue that queer self-expression in Lebanese films of the post-civil war period is shaped through deep engagement with local political questions by attempting to define a sense of national belonging that transcends sectarian differences. I analyze two pioneering works of queer Arab cinema: How I Love you (2001) by Akram Zaatari and Cadillac Blues (2002) by Mazen Khaled. I show how they reflect an impulse to connect, through queer desire, the country’s fragmented public space patching up the nation’s failures to create a meaningful and stable unity. 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 build on the concept of “shame” by Dina Georgis to understand how negative feelings of self-repudiation helped shape queer subjectivities in early Lebanese queer film narratives. I use Gayatri Gopinath's insights into queer remappings of space to examine how art can challenge official discourses about national space and citizenship. As Gopinath suggests, “queer modes of affiliation, desire, and embodiment” can point to “alternative possibilities of organizing social relations in the present.” The films I analyze show how, through even short-lived and brief encounters with the unmarked “other,” queer Lebanese men were reversing and undoing, to a certain extent, the violence of separation, displacement, and dispersal caused by the war and its aftermath. BIBLIOGRAPHY Georgis, Dina. “Thinking past pride: Queer Arab shame in Bareed Mista3Jil.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 45, no. 2 (2013): 233–51. doi:10.1017/S0020743813000056. Gopinath, Gayatri. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Marks, Laura U. Hanan Al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image. Leonardo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2015.