Queer Arab Martyr - Jaber Jad

Queerness has always been the Arab world’s secret pleasure growing in privacy and secrecy as institutionalized heterosexism has marginalized it and made it forbidden to exist.

Yet it still grows forcing a wave of consciousness-raising within Arab culture.

Queer Arab Martyr explores the violence, secrets and fetishes unique to the Arab world unveiling the intersectionality of identity and body politics, religion and ethnicity. The book collects short emotional ethnographies to describe the sexualities, body politics, and of course, the sex of queer sexual minorities in the Arab world. The book also accompanies these short stories with beautiful illustrations by the author himself.

Access to queer representation and language through global online networks and dating apps has created a new wave of urbanized Arab queers that are negotiating their visibility and sexual orientation with the older, more conventional Arab generation, exasperating an already abysmal generational gap.