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.

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.