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Amid Lebanon’s fractured political climate, identity politics have resurfaced in uncomfortable ways. A recent piece by Daraj Media, The Queer Left Lost Between Gender Politics and the Resistance Axis (The queer left lost between sexuality and the axis of resistance)has raised a question that deserves serious engagement: can queer people align with forces that do not recognize their identity, in the name of opposing occupation? It is a fair question, but it carries a hidden assumption: that being queer and opposing occupation are in conflict, and that you cannot fully be both.
To be queer is first to survive.
Occupation does not pause for identity. It strips people of the right to exist, regardless of who they are. Anti-occupation spaces are not always safe for queer people, but queer liberation has never been possible under occupation either.
Occupation is not a neutral backdrop against which extremism simply appears. It helps produce the conditions in which it can take root and persist: poverty, trauma, institutional collapse, and the erosion of civil society. Recognizing this does not excuse homophobia or exclusion, nor does it erase the threat of homophobia from extremists that exist outside these realms and across continents. The truth of the matter is, not a single political party in Lebanon, whether it actively opposes the occupation or not, has ever fought for queer rights.
The pinkwashing we should be more alert to is one that has been consistently deployed against this region (what we saw in Gaza and now in Lebanon): the framing of LGBTQ+ rights as a metric of civilization, used to justify mass killings, military intervention, economic suffocation, and the erasure of civilian life. That instrumentalization does real damage and works to make genuine solidarity harder, all while handing bad-faith actors an easy argument.
Queer people in Lebanon, as elsewhere under occupation, are not a constituency to be managed or a variable in someone else’s political equation. That deserves more than a framework that pits their identity against their political reality.
The contradiction is not theirs and never was.
