‘The L in HELEM is for Lebanese’: Queering Nationality and Ethnicizing Queerness

This paper contributes to the debate on the appearance of LGBTQ+ organizations in the Middle East in the beginning of the twenty-first century, through the analysis of the diasporization of HELEM, the MENA region’s first LGBTQ+ organization, founded in 2001 in Beirut. By looking at the effort to internationalize HELEM to Canada, France, Australia and the USA, it addresses the under-researched intersection of queer migrations and LGBTQ+ activism, bridging queer and area studies. Acting as a diasporic mediator between Canada and the Middle East, HELEM Montreal started with the formal goals of fundraising and attracting visibility to its Beirut counterpart. More recently, it has been shifting to benefit from Canada’s federal scheme of refugees’ resettlement private sponsorship, seeking to fund the resettlement of queer refugees from the Middle East. This paper also reflects on the challenge posed to LGBTQ+ Arab activists in guaranteeing that queer asylum claims are credible as authentic without reproducing Orientalist tropes that dehumanise heterosexual Arab men. Asylum systems operate as regimes of truth that require certain narratives and performances on the basis of gender identity and sexuality.