ABSTRACT

Sex supported social life as a complex circulation of emotions and connection that created the conditions of possibility for queer male social worlds in Beirut. The author's fieldwork was about more than arriving and then finding a place to dwell within Beirut’s queer male socio-sexual world in order to observe its practices. In ethnography, the intimacies and connections that grant access and insight into everyday life develop slowly as ethnographers get to know people, which largely happens in small moments that make up the ordinary aspects of life. Sex enabled the author to think about the field and home not as distinct places, but as joint sites of negotiated feeling and sensation among others that formed over time. In Beirut, queerness was largely banned from the heteronormative space of the family home. Participating within the socio-sexual worlds men created outside the domestic sphere led the author to learn much about the limits and potentialities of queer male life in Beirut.