This paper examines lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) networks across the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Specifically, it examines the creation of and role regional networks and meetings play in LGBTQI organizing with a focus on the diffusion of ideas and strategies within and across the region. Despite a growing number of LGBTQI organizations and groups, there are only a limited number of studies on LGBTQI activism in the MENA (Whitaker 2006; Nagle and Fakhoury 2018). Much of this literature focuses on the influence of international LGBTQI advocacy organizations with Massad (2002, 2007, 2009) arguing that these organizations are a form of cultural imperialism. Critics argue that Massad assumes that Western actors shape and control the debate on homosexuality and ignores or denies MENA-activists’ agency (Fortier 2015; Ritchie 2010; Makarem 2009; Drucker 2008). Overlooked in this debate and in the literature on LGBTQI activism in the MENA are the growing number of interactions between LGBTQI organizations across the MENA, the creation and role these regional networks play and their significance for the diffusion of ideas and strategies within the region. This paper puts activists’ agency at the centre of analysis and, by examining regional LGBTQI networks and meetings, examines how activists shape and control the debate on homosexuality and the struggle for political and social change. Why and how are these networks created? How are ideas and strategies shaped and diffused across the region? What is the significance of these networks and meetings for LGBTQI activism? The paper makes two arguments. First, it highlights the affective role that regional networks and meetings play in combating alienation. Regional networks play an important role in teaching gender and sexuality, in empowering individuals and helping to transform them into activists, and in movement-building by bridging isolated efforts into one cause. Second, it argues that activists examine priorities and discuss how to adapt strategies to local conditions at regional meetings. Activists reject, adapt and adopt both Western strategies and those of MENA activists from other countries to suit the specificities of their individual countries. The paper is based on extensive fieldwork conducted in 2017-2019. It includes data gathered from over 100 interviews with activists from Lebanon, Tunisia, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria and Morocco. The paper’s findings have significance for the literatures on diffusion, the NGO-ization of social movements, queer families and the literature on MENA LGBTQI activism.

Much has been written about the NGOization of civil society in the Middle East and its consequences, with scholars writing about NGOs as instruments in the bureaucratization of and, therefore, limiting of activism, and as tools of cultural co-optation by the West (Ali 2018; Abdo, 2010; Qassoum, 2003; Jad, 2003; Hammami 1995). In what would come to be an influential argument, Massad drew a link between cultural imperialism and the NGOization of LGBT activism. Massad’s framework, however, leaves something to be desired. While it is important to examine the consequences of NGOization, less attention has been paid to the causes behind its contemporary appeal in the Middle East, especially as it relates to advocacy around gender and sexual rights. This paper argues for the need to pay attention to forms of grassroots political organizing that predate the proliferation of NGOs in the region, and to the role that their failure to endure played in enabling the popularity of the NGO model. Taking Lebanon as its focus, it examines the role the inability to build a lasting, inclusive leftist alternative played in the NGOization of gender and sexual rights in the country. In particular, the paper looks at Helem – the first LGBT rights group in the Middle East – and its evolution from a node in a wider leftwing network to an NGO with a more circumscribed remit. The paper examines routine collaborations between Helem and the Leftist Assembly for Change, established in 2005 by queer and feminist leftists and their allies, with which Helem shared members and a meeting space. The Assembly was created by activists who sought a holistic approach to leftist politics; one that paid equal attention to the fight for gender and sexual rights, the liberation of workers, and the protection of the environment, amongst other principles. Paying close attention to the role that Helem played in shaping the Assembly’s political orientation, the paper traces what drew feminist and queer activists in the early 2000s to leftist political organizing, and what later encouraged many of them to abandon an approach to gender and sexual rights grounded in a broader leftist framework in favor of NGO work. The paper draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2016 and 2018 among radical leftists in Beirut, as well as in depth life history interviews carried out in the summer of 2019.

As a consequence of the dichotomous discourse of looking at LGBTIQ movements in Lebanon as either “victims” of state oppression and laws or “agents” of the western “Gay International”, very little literature has focused on the role of queer feminists in organizing for protests and penetrating discourses of uprisings. In this paper, I try to break out of this binary view of “victim of state” or the “gay agenda” and delve into the types of networks that are formed during revolutionary moments in Lebanon between the queer feminists and other groups. I use the organizing networks that evolved between the queer feminists and other sub-groups of the You Stink movement as a case study. The You Stink movement began as a protest against garbage issues in 2015 that soon evolved into a significant secular uprising -- with no affiliation to any sectarian political leader -- against the current political system. It was formed from various sub-groups that came together to organize (Geha 2018). Yet despite the fact that a large number of queer women were involved in those sub groups, little attention has been paid to queer women’s participation and their organizing strength and their input in rupturing the Liberal hetero-masculine discourse of the You Stink movement. In order to make sense out of those networks and connections, how they come together, organize, debate and even fight, I use the concept of people as infrastructure developed by Simone (2004) to look at spaces, persons, practices at the conjunction of politics and organizing during an uprising. Drawing on field notes from participant objectification, participant observation and interviews with queer feminist activists involved as organizing in the You Stink movement between summer 2015, and summer 2018, I try to capture the formation of infrastructures of organizing that allow certain networks to emerge between sub groups during uprisings, especially between queer feminists and other subgroups.