Struggles for LGBTQ+ rights emerging from Muslim majority countries and Muslim minorities in the global north have been critiqued as a product of western sexual hegemony, crystallizing an orientalist opposition between anti-imperialist posture on one hand, and LGBTQ+ rights discourse on the other. Joseph Massad’s discussion of the gay international in “Desiring Arabs” has had major influence in supporting this opposition, both in the global south and in the global north. Much was written on the efficacy of his critique, in part due to its disconnection from material reality and its disregard for feminist analysis of gender and sexuality . However, his reliance on Foucauldian conception of power and his history of sexuality have had impacts on their own. Other than its disregard for the colonial management of sexuality , it historicizes state control of sexuality in relation to moments of moral panics, as opposed to moments of economic and political crisis . In turn, this disconnection between sexuality and class leaves behind key components of the management of sexuality in an imperial context . On the other hand, Marxist work on state violence places social organization along lines of racial and sexual as intrinsic to the processes of accumulation and expansion of capitalism as we see it today . In my presentation, I will critically engage with Massad’s account of gay imperialism by proposing a Marxist framework for both imperialism and sexuality . These frameworks will allow me to account not only for racial violence and sexual imperialism, but that also for the larger globalized capitalist project of which they are a necessary condition of possibility. I will do so by first, apprehending imperialism as an advanced stage of capitalism , and globalized neoliberalism as the context in which the gay international emerges , and second, by accounting not only for discourse on sexuality, but also state repression of certain sexualities through cohesive force as a bourgeois management of sexuality in contexts of violent restructuring of post-colonial economies . My aim is to foreground an anti-imperialist critique of western sexual hegemony which accounts for its role in restructuring global-south economies and the changes in social relations and subjectivities they engender without reproducing the orientalist conflation between western civilization and gender and sexual rights.