Recent debates about homosexuality in Arabic literature and culture have focused on the West’s role in shaping our perception of Arabic models of desire. Some critics have argued that Western sexuality marginalized and supplanted traditional Arabo-Islamic sexualities by casting them as uncivilized or anti-modern. This reading of the “hegemonic” West has produced in some instances a wholesale rejection of the effects and importance of Western discursive practices and theoretical models, from Westphal’s “homosexual” coined in 1870 to Eve Sedgwick’s “closet” and Judith Butler’s “gay rights as human rights.” In Joseph Massad’s work, for instance, this rejection takes the shape of a binary opposition pitting an authentic Arab desire against a hegemonic Western gay and lesbian model of sexual identity. In this theoretical paper, I summarize the various debates about the representations of homosexuality in Arabic literature and culture. I argue that it is crucial to rigorously engage Western theoretical practices in order to produce new knowledge about the transformations and mutations of Arab sexual identities and models of desire as they take shape in literature and film. I argue that there is a need for scholars working on Arab homosexuality to engage with the Arabic tradition but also with Queer Theory as an intellectual tradition that paved the way for thinking through gender and sexuality across cultural and historical settings, from Geoffrey Goldberg’s queering of the Renaissance to Johnathan Dollimore’s reading of André Gide, Oscar Wilde, and others. Furthermore, I argue that the readings of both past and present representations of Arab homosexuality are grounded not only in the theoretical frameworks from which those readings arise, i.e., American Academia, Queer Theory, and Postcolonial Theory, but also from contemporary Arab social settings and literary and artistic genres. The critical move to claim authentic Arab sexual practices and desires, and which overlooks current models of sexual identities visible in Arab societies and represented in literature and film, could only be characterized as ahistorical and nostalgic. In conclusion, I suggest that the resistance to Western theoretical frameworks and sexual models and the upholding of romanticized Arab sexual practices that lie outside of discourse produce a reductive binary opposition of East vs. West, thereby simplifying our understanding of an otherwise complex and multifaceted representation.