Egypt is plagued by periodic and unrelenting sex panics–moments of crisis that magnify the practices of queer sexual communities while subjecting those communities to the naked power of state repression and social demonization. My paper explores the deep historical antecedents to these “intimate crises” that are anchored in nineteenth and twentieth-century social transformations which re-wrote the relationship between sexuality, the family, and the state. While, at face value, these forms of violence may appear to be unprecedented, as Egypt has no laws which explicitly criminalize homosexuality, this paper examines a socially productive categorical ambiguity between homosexuality and sex work in particular; an ambiguity anchored in Egypt’s legal apparatus for criminalizing “prostitution.” In doing so, it aims to address and move beyond the nominalism that has suffused the history of sexuality in the Middle East and beyond. The antecedents this paper is concerned with emerge firmly in the interwar period. As nationalist figures, including Islamists and feminists, rallied to achieve national independence, they found common cause in the demonization of “sexual deviants.” For these figures, their image of an independent nation necessitated a bourgeois form of sexual subjectivation. As such, one of the hallmarks of these decades was a struggle against licensed sex work, a practice that the British occupation and later capitulatory powers regulated for purposes of sexual “hygiene.” In this way, the nationalist bourgeoisie cultivated a moralizing form of anti-colonialism, one which viewed sexual subalterns as forces colluding with a putative moral decline that enabled the intrusions of colonialism. Thus, this paper considers the tensions and ambiguities surrounding the sexual politics of anti-colonialism, revealing the constitutive status of “sexual deviance” in the making of the postcolonial Egyptian state. Charting a queer history that digs beyond the silences and lacunae written into the hegemonic discourses of this period, this paper will also aim to reconstruct worlds occluded and obfuscated by the language of power and its historiographical instantiations.