In 2007, the Iranian President Ahmadinejad declared that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Public figures in other countries in the region, including Egypt and Turkey, made similar comments. In contrast to this rhetoric of denial, numerous Internet sites bear witness to the existence of queer people in the Middle East. In this presentation, I address this contradiction by focusing on the politics of visibility and queer uses of digital media. I argue that queer uses of digital media shed light on local queer practices of strategic visibility and thus contextualize the advantages, as well as drawbacks, of digital media for queer agency and subjectivity in the region. The internationalization of LGBT rights and lesbian and gay identities contest our monolithic conception of visibility, and its manifestations globally require us to consider it in the plural as "practices of visibility." Current scholarly debates have already engaged queer visibility: Massad (2007) describes the insistence in international gay rights discourse on visibility as "incitement to discourse" and criticizes it for threatening the existence of same-sex sexual practices outside the discourse, while Binnie (2004) and Habib (2009) argue that researchers render the emerging agency of local queer populations visible. The Internet adds another layer of complexity to these discussions: since its inception, the Internet has been a tool of empowerment for many queer groups in the Middle East; however, the anonymity and invisibility that renders the Internet an effective organizing tool can also further bolster invisibility and silencing, which seem to be part and parcel of queer experience in a region that has historically overlooked same-sex contact in privacy, while privileging heterosexuality through family and kinship ties in the public domain. Regarding visibility as potentially, but not always, agency-laden, this presentation will identify two contrasting instances of queer visibility, one entrenched, the other emergent: the "travesti" (Turkish transliteration of "transvestite") as an embattled mainstream queer subject in Turkey versus the Internet-mediated negotiation of visibility by Legato, an intercollegiate Lesbian and Gay Association, which uses the Internet to recruit and train student activists on college campuses. Drawing on my interviews, as well as analysis of Legato website and mailing list, I will demonstrate that the Internet's role in queer agency and subjectivity is twofold: it has been instrumental in coming out, but it has also become a "digital closet."