The Nightlife

Gemayze street, Downtown area, Marina Dbayyeh area, Monot street, Batroun area... These are the places of the famous Lebanese nightlife. It is where the Lebanese people forget about their disastrous life and enjoy the time with loud music and a drink from here and another from there ending up forgetting their reality for sometime but not for so long because the sun always shines the next day.

Most of these places are considered to be straight clubs, straight pubs, straight hangout places, but where do gay people go if they wanted to hang out and meet other gay people? Where can they go and be themselves just as straight people being themselves?

Since it is still unacceptable for two men to kiss or hold hands in any pub, or on the street, gay people now have their own hangout places, nightclubs, pubs, and restaurants. It is a stage of "Not to Mingle", just because homosexuals are being abused (verbally and sometimes physically) and just because homosexuals are not accepted yet in the community they had to have their own places, because at the end of the day they are human beings and they need to go out, forget their disastrous life and have fun meet other gay people and live normally.

Pubs such as Life-Bar, nightclubs such as Acid & Milk, and Restaurants such as Bardo, are not gay friendly places but gay places, other gay friendly places can be such as: Teh Marbouta, Torino...

Now days homosexuals are able to go out enjoy their time, and actually kiss in the middle of their restaurant/pub/nightclub and they would not be abused nor kicked out, because they became living in tribes.

To Mingle or Not to Mingle

Human beings cannot live without interacting with one another; they are very social and dependent on each other in several things. And so in order to interact with the other person you need to build some sort of a relationship or a connection which keep you and this person connected to your needs and her/his needs. But all this connection should be mutual from the two sides; otherwise it will not give any fruits in the end of the day.

The question is: How can gay people in Lebanon mingle in side of the community, and how can they become a part from this community just like anyone else? How can they interact with the straight people and have this mutual will to connect and help each other in order to survive? Or should the gay people only mingle with gay people and exclude themselves from the whole community? And wouldn't that be a very wrong step towards increasing the misunderstanding and the gaps between the straight people and the gay concept?

To mingle inside the community is to be "one" with the community while maintaining your own views and personality, but being accepted as an entity no matter what your views, color, sexuality, and religion are... To mingle inside the community is to wear the "clothes of that community"...But not exactly. You only wear these clothes, if they fit your body, if they don't then you either edit them, or change them, because at the end of the day, if you do not like the green color, you won't ever feel comfortable wearing the green color, so you change it to the red color.

To mingle... Is to become accepted. But the fundamentally judgmental Lebanese community will not allow any homosexual to mingle among it. Why? Because we go back to the first article I've written, religion, parental and environmental social background, and I must add one more thing: Because the Lebanese community is afraid of change, and of losing the religious, sectarian political system they have if we ever progress. So it is all connected and it is all in the hands of the rulers of the country.

To mingle is to forgo your sexuality in front of the straight people. Because nobody wants to be mocked, or made fun of, or even beaten by straight guys. To mingle is to have tow lives, a life that you fake, and a secret life that you are not proud of it just because people made you feel ashamed of it. To mingle in Lebanon is to wear the green color that you hate in order to just be loved and accepted by the people who curse your secret life.

Not to mingle...Not to mingle... Gays will separate themselves from the straight community, they will not care if they are accepted or not, loved or not, respected or not, but they will stick together as one herd and will fight for their rights as one hand so that they force the community to accept them and respect them.
They will organize demonstrations against the government in order to ask for legal acceptance (Article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code where everyone should sign to abolish: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/abolish-article-534-of-the-lebanese-penal-code), they will walk in the streets of the country to show the people that they are humans and deserve to live, they will be on talk shows and television programs to enlighten the people of this country that all what religions have said, and parents have created is just a lie and a fallacy.

Not to mingle is to stand and sacrifice for a cause of existence. Not to mingle is to stand high and be proud of who you are, who you have been and who you will always be: Lebanese & Gay.
I know that all this is just hard for us to do, and I know that if we move towards this step lots of us are going to lose their jobs and be humiliated in their neighborhoods, but what if we didn't do such a step and they found out about you? You will always be humiliated and maybe abused...
Is it not worth it to suffer for a year or two or maybe five years and then have a government that protects you and society that understands you?

Yes, I do also understand that the gay lifestyle in Lebanon is beautiful, we have our pubs, our nightclubs, our restaurants and even our hangout places, but all this is still not enough for us to mingle with the rest of the community.


In the end of the day the choice is always ours, we either fight the unfairness and the disgrace we live in, or we let it go and live under the 534 Article of the Lebanese Penal Code, which can be applied anytime and we all be taken to prison just because we are homosexuals.

The Coming Out

The Big deal in our life is to graduate and receive our masters or/and PHD and show our parents, and the society that we live in what we have become. The big deal is to shine just like a star in the sky in front of the people who either underestimated you or didn't think you could make it through.
But you work so that these specific people start look up to you, you come out to be a very successful person with lots of people around you who are either jealous of you or happy for you (I doubt that though).

But what if you are homosexual? You reach a phase where you have to come out to your family, your mother, father, sisters,and brothers... Some of the people I know have been there, mothers always know, fathers always reject, and sisters sometimes ignore and brothers are disgusted... But not always, in other cases the coming out goes smooth and we live happily ever after.

But what happens when the family rejects their children? Have you ever asked yourself this question? Those people who you have lived your whole childhood, teenage, and adolescence together will forgo you just because you are different, how do you feel? Another question that annoys is that: How are they able to forgo a part of the family, a part who has been there for the past twenty or twenty five years? Would they not be forgoing a part of a whole? A part that completes the puzzle? How can they do that without having second thoughts about it?

Usually the father and the brother do the "forgoing" step after the coming out, the mother softens and the sister weeps. Was not this kid a part of the father's life? And isn't this kid the fruit of his fatherhood attitudes? And again, doesn't this father have any kind of feelings towards his son that drive him to accept the fact that he is homosexual?

Lebanon my friends is the country of variety. People accept and others reject, people die because of wars and others go clubbing the night after...

But where do Homosexuals stand in the coming out process? Some of them get psychiatric help, others forget about it and hide it in front of the straight society, others go for it with whatever guts they have, and some just let it go and who ever finds out, finds out...

It is essential to realize that Lebanese families are still concerned about their social stance and economical levels, and other people's talks, religion, ethics and morals, which used to exist hundreds of years ago in Europe.

The coming out is crucial and hard but not impossible. What's needed is patience, because when you are a grown person whether a male or a female, and you are socially and economically independent you wouldn't mind being thrown out of the house, or being excluded from the family. You reach a psychological phase where you'd say: "Those who accept me, accept me, while those who don't, they just don't". No matter who these people were, you know that you can live without them if they can live without you. In order to come out, one should be emotionally and psychologically independent and is not related to anyone who might forgo her/him if they knew about their homosexuality.

Fitting In

We should always face facts. Every day, and every hour and even every moment in our lives, we should be able to face the "facts" whether we like it or not.
But in order to do that, we should be able to "see" and understand the situation we are put in.

For most of gay people in Lebanon their lives are nothing but a discrete scary situation. Most of these people try to hide their sexuality in public places, just because they know they are going to be rejected, so they "fake it".

What do they fake? They fake their attitudes, they fake their behaviors, and they even fake their body movements. But at the same time, they seek acceptance from the community.

I am not saying let's go act "bitchy" and give them the crazy attitude, and by that we would really be seeking acceptance, "no" but why don't you just act normal and natural?

But fact is, in order to fit in the Lebanese community, you must not be different. They oblige you to transform yourself into one of them otherwise you will not be accepted as one of them. They force you indirectly to change yourself at least while you're with them to be alike and then they would love you and accept you and even fight for you.

It is explicable now why most gay people tend to change their attitudes and behaviors while they are in straight places, or between straight people, but one might say:"So what if the community found out that you're gay, and rejected you?!"

Well, yes so what if they found out and rejected them? It may seem simple, but unfortunately it is not. The problem is that they will not only reject you and kick you, they will discriminate you from others, they will use violence against you, they will break you in any means possible, just because their religion told them to do so, and their parental and environmental social backgrounds told them to do so.

If you are not one of them, then you won't ever fit in, sad but true.

At a Striaght Pub

Yesterday I went to meet my friend in a pub around downtown Beirut, we were sitting and kind of chatting and something just grabbed my attention, a guy and a girl French kissing in the middle of that bar. So I thought what if two guys were kissing instead of this guy and this girl? I started drawing several scenarios:

a- They might have been kicked out of the pub and never to come back again, humiliated with hateful words.

b- They might have been abused physically by some of the customers, and the owners, and eventually kicked out of the club for good.

And the final scenario is the most common:

c- They might have been taken out of the club, by the "MEN" and got their asses kicked in front of everyone on a weekend night...

This is the truth...

The problem with our society is that it suffers from different problems that have several causes and stimuli:

a- Religion

b- Parental background

c- Environmental social background

These three problems drive our society into a very judgmental, hypocritical, and chaotic system that refuses to accept differences, and other people's social or mental deformation.

SIDE NOTE: I am not saying that being GAY is a deformation, I am only trying to explain how is the Lebanese society created, and on what bases.

So where should gay people live? Should they all leave the country? Go to Europe, Canada, or to some states in the United States?

But if all the gay community leaves from Lebanon, I think the population would decrease into half… Such a big gay community, but afraid to be exposed in front of the public, because of the (A), (B), and (C) that I mentioned previously…

The question to be asked: When will the Gay people in Lebanon stand up and ask for their rights? Because as we always say: One Hand Does Not Clap.

Introduction: What is GLL

Hi everybody,
My name is Ash living in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, the country that is situated between Israel/Palestine, Syria and the Mediterranean Sea.

I have had several different blogs, but I decided that these things were too personal, very intimate and I took them offline...

Why am I back again?
GLL!
Gay Lives in Lebanon: I am here to talk about GLL, I want to expose the suffer, the illegal laws the country has against them, the unethical behaviors people have against them, the inner community itself, and my personal experience.