Facing gender and sexuality-based violence in Iran, many LGBTQ individuals leave their home country and lodge asylum claims in Turkey. Since Turkey does not provide long-term settlement for non-European refugees, Iranian asylum seekers temporarily reside in Turkish towns and await resettlement to a third country, mostly the United States and Canada. This paper focuses on a critical time period in which this “temporary transit” has turned into a condition of “indefinite waiting.” As North American countries have cut their refugee quotas and tightened their asylum policies since 2014, the prospects for LGBTQ refugee resettlement have grown increasingly dim. Even applicants who have completed necessary asylum procedures and have been formally eligible for resettlement for years are still stranded in Turkey with insecure legal status. As they face an uncertain future, Iranian LGBTQ refugees also live difficult lives in Turkey. They dwell in small towns, where they have restricted mobility: they have to “sign-in” regularly at the local immigration offices, and even a short trip to a nearby town puts them under the risk of deportation unless they secure a “travel permit” from the local immigration authorities. While waiting for resettlement, they face constant verbal and sexual harassment from local townspeople and other refugees; work insecure and heavy jobs in textile and marble factories; and are denied housing, evicted from apartments, and fired from jobs when their LGBTQ status becomes known. Based on two years of ethnographic research, this paper explores the emergent artistic practices and collaborations in this precarious and undetermined period of waiting. Through an ethnographic exploration of refugees’ collective podcast production, exhibitions, and queer film events, I illustrate how refugees use collaborative cultural production and independent art to create more meaningful lives as well as to maintain hope for an imagined future despite prolonged waiting, economic insecurity, and restricted mobility. I argue that while waiting serves to govern, demobilize, and demoralize refugees, Iranian LGBTQ refugees turn it into an “active time-space,” in which they create new spaces of artistic expression, transform their environments, and establish new alliances and solidarities with Turkish artists and activists.