Since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the Republic of Armenia has faced a number of political and economic challenges that have produced national anxieties regarding the nation’s past, its fissured presents, and its potential futures. Since 2012, many of these national anxieties – especially those regarding present and future – have most cogently been expressed through the formation of what I call the figure of the homosexual. This figure has been especially prominent within the discourses and actions of right-wing nationalists, for whom he – as this figure is often masculinized – represents the ultimate signifier of national decline and futures made impossible. In this paper, I draw on ongoing ethnographic research I have been conducting in Armenia since August 2012 on the ways in which homosexuality is taken up by Armenian right-wing nationalists, journalists, politicians, and others who borrow from these discourses that have become mainstream. This paper takes up queerness not in its conceptualization of sexual and gender non-normative subject position, but rather as a means of understanding national anxiety. I borrow from queer theory’s interest in temporality (Edelman 2004, Munoz 2009, Grosz 2004) and bad feelings (Popa 2017, Ahmed 2006) to think about how queerness might be understood as an affective (anxious) orientation to the nation and its time. I argue that the figure of the homosexual, often deemed as a sexually perverse subject/object (aylaserutyun), emerged in Armenia as a way of expressing a sense of national moral perversion (aylandakutyun) – in other words, to make sense of the improper paths of the present that have strayed from the heroic past and are producing dangerous, improper futures in an era of authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and constrained geopolitical formations. While we might desire a reading that condemns these discourses as homophobic, I suggest that reading them as performatively queering Armenia instead allows us to see larger political and economic processes as they cross paths with experiences of gender and sexuality. Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely Durham: Duke University Press. Munoz, Jose Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Popa, Bogdan. 2017. Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the 19th Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.