Meem--an organization for queer women and transgender persons in Lebanon--published the book Bareed Mista3jil (Urgent Mail) in 2009.1 With a new focal point on Arab women, which Meem groups under the umbrella of "queer," we hear the stories of people who are absent in historical discussions of homoeroticism. While the forty-one narratives in Bareed Mista3jil address a number of themes such as family, emigration, and activism, this paper focuses on the intersections of religion and class with sexuality. In the metanarrative of this book, Meem presents religion, tradition and conservatism outside of the queer public space that this organization creates and allows for; however, as a book, Bareed Mista3jil shows the complexity and diversity of people's embodiment of their sexualities and gender identities. For example, in Bareed Mista3jil there are stories about some women who are more challenged as pious individuals by their being part of a queer public space than they are by their own families. Likewise, the narratives of lower and working class women show that the queer public sphere in Beirut is both a place of immense support and a source of intolerance. The tension between the metanarrative and the multiple and complex stories allows us to address the challenge of talking about homoerotic desire in the context of the Middle East. In this paper I use the stories of queer women and transgender persons in Lebanon to talk back to hegemonic understandings of homosexuality, challenge presumptions about the incompatability of piety and (homo)sexuality, and confront notions of who and what spheres are capable of being tolerant of different expressions of sexuality and gender identity. While Bareed Mista3jil is not an ethnography, in many ways I use the narratives to do anthropological work and complicate understandings of what it means to be a queer subject in Lebanon. Using this text as "both [a] source for and object of analysis"2--the forty-one narratives in Bareed Mista3jil become the informants of an ethnography about queer identities in Lebanon. 1 Meem, Bareed Mista3jil, (Beirut, Lebanon: Meem, 2009). 2 Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society, (California: University of California Press, 1992), 5.