LAUSR

An ethnography of gay men in Beirut, Sofian Merabet’s Queer Beirut is an extremely well-written work that would be particularly well suited to an upper-level undergraduate or graduate course in anthropology, gender studies, Middle Eastern studies, urban studies, or LGBTQ+ studies, particularly ones that deal with field research methods. Although the book primarily references anthropological research methods and theory, it is also very much concerned with issues of urban development in talking about how “queer space” in Beirut has been shaped by the rebuilding and subsequent gentrification of downtown Beirut, and it is deeply engaged with the fields of gender and sexuality studies in its discussion of the lives and experiences of gay men in the city of Beirut. The book is interspersed with vignettes of various gay men that Merabet met over the course of his ethnography, and it begins with an illustrative vignette that discusses how Paradise Beach, a beach frequented by Lebanese gay men, formed a “queer space” that allowed two gay men of very different classes and religious backgrounds to meet and form a relationship. Using this vignette as example, he continues on with a discussion of what he means by queer space, saying that: