A map of queer experiences in Occupied Palestinian territories

At the beginning of Israel’s siege of Gaza, following Hamas the attacks on the 7th of October 2023, “Queering the map”, a collaborative community-based counter-mapping website, became suddenly so popular it was hard to access it because the server was crowded. The website is an interactive map where anyone can write about their queer experience, pinning to a place. Some queer Gazans have used it to share stories of lovers that died in the bombings in early October (images 1 and 2) while somebody imagines talking to their emigrated lover: “Israeli occupation may take everyone and everything you ever loved away” (image 3). The personal lives of the writers had been impacted by the war in ways I could have not thought of otherwise: somebody spoke of how they would have confessed their love if they knew the person they loved was going to die so soon. These accounts of the war differed from anything else that was in the news in those days, they showed the normality of the lives that had been destroyed by the then-just-starting war. Soon, internet connection became way less accessible in Gaza and now no new messages have been added in the strip since October. Old messages from other Palestinian territories and from Palestinians living in Israeli territories were still available and show insight into queer Palestinian experiences. In this text, the word queer will be used to refer to all individuals and experiences that sit outside of straight and cis identities.

I have to admit I was naively surprised, exploring the use of Queering the map in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, to see how many people simply wrote “Free Palestine” (example, image 4). This use of the platform, like many of the comments on the website challenged my perception of what it can mean to be queer. One person wrote, “Being out does not mean anything to me, I wish to see Haifa”. How can coming out mean nothing? My surprise came from the fact that I was applying the standards of my experience of queerness (rooted in a European-Western context) to a completely different situation. There are two feelings that show on Queering the map and that I think made me understand why Palestinian queers tend to live these two identities in such an interconnected way. The first one is the fact that the occupation hurts their experience of love, in the same way in which it disrupts other instances of daily life. “Free Palestine. My love was taken from me because of the occupation and borders. I will always love you joj”(image 5). Here, the political will of a free Palestine is connected to the personal loss of a loved one. The possibility of living a happy queer life can not be understood in isolation from the possibility of living a free life in Palestine. The second one is the will to challenge pinkwashing, Israel’s use of queer identities to present itself as a civilized state in opposition to a somewhat savage Palestinian sexuality. The most recent and outstanding use of this narrative are the pictures reposted by the IDF showing a queer flag in front of buildings in rubbles in Gaza. Some of the comments do so openly, like the one in image 7, others do so by showing how the effects of occupations do not spare queer Palestinians, despite Israel’s efforts to show itself as close to LGBTQ+ individuals.

Queering the Map does a great job in changing the narrative around Palestinian queer experiences and sexuality in general. It provides Palestinian queers with a virtual space where they can share what being queer has been like. The virtual arena creates agency around the telling of these stories. Some comments show the hardship of living in a mostly conservative society (image 10 and image 11), even if sometimes they do so in a hopeful tone and in an effort to encourage someone who might be experiencing those same issues (“BE STRONG EVERYONE DON’T GIVE UP” from image 11). At the same time others share moments of joy, somebody tags “a place where I kissed my first crush”(image 12), and somebody talks of how being gay in Gaza was “somehow fun”(image 14). For queer Palestinians to take agency in talking about their experiences with queer love, dating or sex is to reshape our perception actively and to change the narrative about Palestinian sexuality.In the face of media depicting Israel as a progressive country opposed to conservative Palestinian society and of the weaponizing of this binary through pinkwashing, these stories are a reminder of the fact that queer Palestinians can live joyful lives despite existing in the intersection between the oppression from Palestinian authorities and the oppression linked to Israeli occupation.

The stories that we can read in the Palestinian Occupied Territories on Queering the map are also an exercise of hope. Queer and Palestinian identities do not only intersect in the kind of oppression the people that inhabit them withstand. They also intersect in the kind of future they envision. “Our Queer Palestinian voice is higher than the brutality of the occupation and higher of the oppression that our society puts on us, the voices of freedom will win and Palestine will be free and so we will be” (image 15), says one comment. This message is the exercise of imagining a somewhat revolutionary future, in the face of an occupation that has lasted for decades and of the objective problems that queers face in Palestine, talking of a free Palestine with free queer Palestinians can seem utopian. Utopian thinking might not be a bad thing though. Queer theorist Jose Munoz talks of the utopia as a way to critique the present, by imagining “what can and perhaps will be”. He attaches the concept of utopia to queer critique by creating the term “Queer futurity”, queerness to Munoz means “imagining the future beyond the negative present”. Queer imagination and hope become then the instruments to imagine worlds completely different from the ones we inhabit now. Sa’ed Atshan has applied these concepts to the Palestinian context imagining a combined struggle for sexual and national liberation that brings “straight and queers, Israeli and Palestinians” to live together as equals. I think many of these messages are intimate exercises of queer futurity, hope becomes the instrument to imagine a different world, instead of imagining oneself somehow fitting in the structures that exist at the moment. Somebody in Gaza wishes the end of the occupation and to see the sunset with their lover. (image 13) Somebody in Ramallah talks of how a past relationship was so amazing that it gave them hope for how queer Palestine could look like. (image 16)

Hope and political will mix in these messages: they ask us to imagine realities so far from the current situation that they might seem unachievable. Hope can become an exercise of resistance: for Queer Palestinians to make themselves visible and to voice their desires is also to say that they will not settle for survival: it is not enough to be out but to be forced out of one’s community and it is not enough to be part of one’s community while not being able to live their identity freely, it is not enough to live freely as a queer person while living under occupation nor to live freely as a Palestinian but oppressed as queer. These utopias are a reminder of what is possible and of what to strive for. Thinking of queer Palestinian experiences is a reminder to fight against a narrative that sees Israel as a civilizing force as opposed to a vision of Palestinian culture around sexuality as savage, leaving these messages is a also an effort against the pinkwashing narrative. Queering the Map in the context of Palestine and Palestinians also directs our gaze towards experiences of queerness that are not rooted in Western standards, by doing so it expands our perception of what queerness looks like and helps us work for queer activism and discourse that are truly inclusive. The last chapter of Sa’ed Atshan’s “Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique” is titled “We were never meant to survive”, from Audre Lorde’s poem “Litany for survival”. The poem ends like this:

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent

we are still afraid

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive.

The poem is a beautiful ode to lives that happen somewhat against the odds, there is a triumph in this existence that one has to invent. When I read the phrase alone as the title, I thought it referred to the fact that nobody is meant to only survive, I saw it as a reclamation of a life that is more than survival. In the context of the narratives around Palestine, the messages on Queering the Map are a reminder that Palestinians rightfully wish for full lives and not for mere survival.

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