This is an excerpt from the introduction of Bareed Mista3jil. The full text will be available online in PDF format after the launch event.

Introduction

There is much mystery and fantasy surrounding the concept of female sexuality in Lebanon. Even more taboo is the topic of homosexuality, and a lot more has been said about male homosexuality than female homosexuality. This comes as no surprise in a patriarchal society where women’s issues are often dismissed. And sexuality, because it touches upon reclaiming our bodies and demanding the right to desire and pleasure, is the ultimate taboo of women’s issues. We have published this book in order to introduce Lebanese society to the real stories of real people whose voices have gone unheard for hundreds of years. They live among us, although invisible to us, in our families, our schools, our workplaces, and our neighborhoods. Their sexualities have been mocked, dismissed, denied, oppressed, distorted, and forced into hiding. We hope that the stories found here would touch the hearts and convince the minds of the readers, so that we can come together as Lebanese from all regions, beliefs, and backgrounds to respect and embrace all differences, especially those of gender identity and sexual orientation.

Who Is This Book About?

This book brings together the stories of women who are not heterosexual. It seeks to question and challenge the common misunderstanding that the only alternative to heterosexuality is homosexuality. We tend to label people as either straight (heterosexual) or gay (homosexual). During the research process for this book, however, we came across such a wide array of sexualities that it was impossible to lump them all into the one “homosexual” category. That’s why we call it a book about lesbian, bisexual, queer, and questioning women, and transgender persons. It’s quite a mouthful, yes, but it is important to start acknowledging and recognizing this range of sexualities. For the purposes of this introduction, we have used the term “queer” to represent all non-heterosexual identities. “Queer” was once a derogatory term used to define homosexuals as deviant, strange, or abnormal. It is very similar to the current Arabic derogatory term, “shazz,” which literally means “deviant” and is the most common Arabic term for “homosexual.” While queer theory is a social school of thought that aims to deconstruct understandings of gender altogether, the word is also commonly used as an umbrella term for non-conforming sexualities, and that is how we are using it in this introduction. One must keep in mind, however, that when used in the personal stories, “queer” is a significant sexual and political identity, different from “lesbian,” as the stories themselves demonstrate.

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How Was This Book Written?

The stories in this book are entirely based on conversations with over 150 women and transgender people we interviewed in Beirut. We wanted the stories to come through as authentically as possible with a consistency in the narratives, so every single story went through a journey of its own. At first we thought it was most important to find the stories from the people who wanted to tell them. But as the work on the book progressed, we found it necessary not only to include stories ready to come out, but also to search for those that weren’t. It became more important to truly represent the wide range of experiences around a certain topic, so as to increase our chance of covering a very diverse community without leaving radically different voices, opinions, or life experiences out. We realized, for example, after talking to a number of women about their relationships with their parents, that attitudes towards the issue differed immensely. So we didn’t want to have stories that were only about disapproving parents, although that was the most common perspective. We set out to find the entirely opposite experience of a lesbian coming out to supportive and loving parents.

We did not sign the stories with any names, nicknames or initials because we wanted to guard the safety and confidentiality of the brave people who told their stories. And because each story is a representation of an experience common to hundreds of individuals in Lebanon – although the details may change, the depth of the human experience is quite common – we opted not to use any single name or person for each story. The definite answer to the question: “what is the life of a typical Lebanese lesbian like?” is that there is no “typical Lebanese lesbian” and no single life story common to all. One may, however, state with a high degree of certainty that the stories in this book represent many common fragments from the lives of many queer women in this country. We cannot claim, however, that we could ever gather or represent the entire range of experiences in one small book. As we’ve already mentioned, Lebanon’s extremely fragmented society, along with the huge array of sexual diversity, make for an uncountable number of experiences all different, yet all strikingly similar in their common struggle for acceptance.

And so we recorded interviews with every storyteller, listened to the interviews a number of times, transcribed them, and then wrote them out into a narrative piece. The story was then sent again to the storyteller for approval and editing. Often, months passed between these two phases and big changes were made by the storytellers to their own stories, as they grew and changed and learned more about their own selves. After that came the editing process with a number of editors and readers, who also suggested emphasizing some parts, expanding or shortening the stories, and focusing on the most important segments. The lucky stories made it through this process untouched and were published exactly as they were told the first time. The less fortunate pieces were bounced back between the writers and the storytellers, cooked, mixed, broken to pieces, redrawn, and rewritten many times until we were able to say exactly what was meant to be said.

A few of the stories were written and submitted by the storytellers themselves. The reason we didn’t compile the stories in this book by solely asking for submissions was because we knew we were going to get submissions from a very small group of women, who are privileged enough to be able to write and articulate their stories. We knew, too, that because, as women, we are sometimes made to believe that our stories are not important, that many would hold back. We could imagine the voices in some women’s heads, convincing them that their stories, their lives, are not important to share with the world, that they are alone, or that their feelings and experiences are mundane. What we hope they will come to see, as you will see too in these pages, is that they are truly what they jokingly call themselves: women warriors.

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Our purpose was to present the stories of this marginalized, invisible community straight from the hearts of the people who lived them. We didn’t want to provide mere sociological observations or pretend to summarize the life experiences in generalized studies. It isn’t easy for anyone to reveal themselves to the public with such honesty and vulnerability, especially those who have spent lifetimes hiding their true selves from even those closest to them. The women and transgender persons who have shared their stories with you are brave and heroic and deserve our gratitude for the mere fact of them speaking up. And it is important for the people who have so generously shared their stories to know that they have not gone to waste, that they will not be buried.

The original idea of publishing a book like this came on a spring night in 2006, while driving down Hamra Street in Beirut. We were having over a conversation about the lack of publications by and about queer people in Lebanon. At that time, we wanted to write a book called “Gay Lebanon” and to include in it submissions from Lebanese queers. I remember us wondering where we were going to get any lesbian stories because we knew very few lesbians at the time. Over the three years that passed, we witnessed the rise of a remarkable lesbian community that brought a powerful new meaning to queer solidarity, understanding, and grassroots activism, and it became clearer to us that these were the people whose stories needed to be heard. It took a little over a year to get this project together and while the initial proposed titles were picked from lesbian terms or experiences, we decided on the more ambiguous “Bareed Mista3jil” as a name for our book. “Bareed Mista3jil” has a very close meaning to “Express Mail” but a better translation would be “Mail in a Hurry.” It reflects both the urgency of getting these stories across and also the private nature of the stories – like letters written, sealed, and sent out to the world.

In a way, the journey of these stories is similar to the stories themselves. They have come out of the closet.

The Themes Presented in this Book

Originally meant to be split into chapters, every chapter on a particular theme, the stories refused to be tied down to any one single chapter. Instead we tagged every story with the theme it addressed fully or partially. While we do not profess to have done any sociological or psychological research, we have come up with some analysis on the different broad themes presented in these stories: Coming Out, Homophobia, Family, Self-Image, Relationships, Sexual Diversity, Religion, Self-Discovery, Emigration, Activism, and Community.

A Vision for the Future

We stand at a historical crossroads in the journey for queer recognition in Lebanon. Queer women are finding each other in greater numbers every day and uniting in solidarity. Our battle for full citizenship rights and public visibility is long, but is already powerfully underway. We are organizing and resisting discrimination whether through personal coming out to friends, blogging about our everyday experiences, creating online media, supporting the women’s rights movement, or discussing our ideas and thoughts constantly. We’ve also written this book.

We are the non-conforming sexual community of Lebanon: the lesbians, the bisexuals, the queers, the questioning women, the transgender and transsexual men and women, the Muslims, the Christians, the Druze, the atheists and agnostics, from the North, the South, the Bekaa valley, Mount Lebanon, Beirut, your daughters, your sisters, your mothers, your aunts, your teachers, your students, your employees, your managers, the people you love, and the people who love you dearly. And we shall no longer be afraid.