Queer Masculinity and Global Palestine Solidarity: The Art of Yusef Audeh

Introduction

While the rise of the contemporary global queer Palestinian solidarity movement can be traced first to Palestine in 2002, and then transnationally in 2009, historical traces of global queer solidarity with Palestinians run deeper. Two French gay intellectuals—Jean Genet and Guy Hocquenghem—were among the most prominent shapers of global queer solidarity with Palestine. The legacies of Genet and Hocquenghem reveal that activism in this global movement has a longer history than many members of the movement today realize. The advocacy of these French intellectuals serves as an example of gendered, sexualized history and explains its resonance with queer masculinities today. I highlight the tension surrounding allyship and solidarity within the movement by providing a critical theoretical and methodological landscape to address concerns about the racialization and exoticization of Palestinians. This allows us to challenge the historiographies that are already understood through particular colonial and racial frames that limit the mapping of intimacies across continents and nations and regions (see Lowe 2015). I also discuss the present work of queer Palestinian artist Yusef Audeh—which is informed by his appreciation of Genet and Hocquenghem’s queer and pro-Palestinian solidarity—to demonstrate that their transhistorical legacies continue to powerfully inform current activism and artistic production.

Theoretical Foundation

This article couples Audeh’s artistic appreciation for these French solidarity activists with Kadji Amin’s (2017, 9) analytical model of the need for “deidealization” of such historical figures. ¹ Within academic and activist spaces around the world, there often is a reified representation of the Palestinian subject, privileging the precarities of Palestinian life, containing it within bounded territories even though most Palestinians are stateless subjects, and refusing the global pathways from, through, and to Palestine. Such reifications silence the creativity, art, and world-making of Palestinians, including artists. Certainly, Palestinians face the precarity of Israeli settler colonialism in historic Palestine, exile across the diaspora, and the realities of discrimination, racism, classism, and ableism in the face of structural and physical violence. This context makes it challenging for Palestinian artists to produce their work and to circulate it to audiences in Palestine and abroad, as well as to navigate the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. Yet the case of Yusef Audeh’s artistic work challenges reifications and binaries. As a queer Palestinian artist, he understands precarity viscerally, but his tracing of geographies of desire complicates understandings of Palestinian precarity. He does not come from poverty, but he does not come from wealth either. He has lived and studied and worked in the United States and Europe, but he maintains deep roots in Palestine. His work is not invisible in the Palestinian art scene, but it is not widely legible either. Attention to Audeh’s biography, quotidian life, everyday artistic practices, and the inspiration he derives from gay French intellectuals who are no longer alive disrupt the assumptions of Palestinian precarity. His work compels an understanding of how artistic expression—and human desire more broadly—shapes queer Palestinian masculinities.

I advance an explication of queer masculinities that ties French historical figures and contemporary Palestinian artists; this connection captures the global negotiations of queer masculinities. These connections unbind, exceed, and spill over into how we understand Palestine, queerness, and masculinities more generally. Much scholarship on queerness, nationalism, and regionalism points to Europe for an “affirmative vision,” such as anthropologist Matti Bunzl’s (2017) work on the lesbian/gay movement in Austria. This article, on the other hand, examines the dialectic between the European gaze onto the Arab world, and the Arab gaze onto Europe, particularly as mediated by queer masculinities in both regions. In connecting key categories of analysis, including art, Palestinianness, power, precarity, global solidarity, and activism, I draw upon the scholarship of Ronak Kapadia. Kapadia’s notion of “insurgent aesthetics” is in relation to the cultural work of Arab and South Asian diasporic artists. These artists respond to the “forever war” of imperialism and the global war on terror (Kapadia 2019, 1). Kapadia’s research connects the local and the global and how art is deployed in service of transnational solidarity, resulting in a “queer calculus” where racialized bodies reveal a “complex insurgency against empire’s built sensorium” (Kapadia 2019, 190). Furthermore, my analysis builds upon the burgeoning literature on Arab masculinity and the foundation laid by Farha Ghannam’s (2013) conception of “masculine trajectories” and Marcia C. Inhorn’s (2012) notion of “emergent masculinities.” These anthropologists show how Arab men such as Audeh can pursue or reject various gender-based social norms and the new forms of Arab male agency and emotional worlds that coalesce along the way.

Politicizing Queer Palestine

As activists in Palestine and around the world consider intellectual connections with Queer Palestine, and as they envision the future, we have a rich historical archive from which to derive inspiration. Here the Queer Palestine sphere refers to “the domains of queer Palestinians, the queer Palestinian social movement, the ways homophobia and Zionism reinforce one another, and the ways queer Palestinians are talked about in global contexts. The Queer Palestine sphere is therefore both local and global” (Atshan 2020, 16). The French intellectuals who have been particularly prominent in this domain—Jean Genet and Guy Hocquenghem—were one generation apart. Even while colonial struggles are connected to queer struggles in general ways, we can also historicize why and how many queer international activists have been specifically attracted to the Palestinian cause. In imagining viable future trajectories for social and political solidarity and growth, thinking about how sexual desires have been incentivized, strategized, and deployed, both intellectually and publicly, is a valuable tool for piecing together the paths we may take in the future.

Genet was born in 1910, Hocquenghem in 1946. Over those decades, French society was marred with homophobia and anti-Arab racism. The latter was exacerbated by French colonization of North Africa and the violent resistance France faced in Algeria in particular. Like Frantz Fanon, Genet and Hocquenghem were sympathetic to the Algerian resistance against French colonialism. They also challenged anti-Arab racism and homophobia effectively—and extended their intellectual work and activism to ally with the Palestine movement. As some of the earliest queer international figures who identified with the Palestinian struggle, they demonstrated how understanding Palestine necessitates conjoining conceptions of politics and sexuality.

While Genet’s novels, plays, poetry, essays on politics, and activism began in the 1940s, Hocquenghem’s political activism, popular writing, novels, and teaching of philosophy were not catalyzed until the 1970s. Genet and Hocquenghem died within only 2 years of each another, in 1986 and 1988, respectively, the former from throat cancer and the latter from AIDS-related causes. Both of their legacies reverberate around the world, and they—each in his own way—have left behind queer intellectual thought that directly connects Palestine and sexuality.

This article zeroes in on Genet’s final book, Prisoner of Love (1986) and Hocquenghem’s classic underground text, The Screwball Asses (1973), and his famous essay, “Towards an Irrecuperable Pederasty” (1972). Prisoner of Love is a memoir published posthumously after Genet’s death and reflects on his experience alongside Palestinian male militants, also known as the fedayeen, in the 1970s. The Screwball Asses was a revolutionary manifesto in which Hocquenghem insisted on sexual desire as an antidote to the machinations of dominating powers in society. The revolutionary nature of Hocquenghem’s writing was also evident in “Towards an Irrecuperable Pederasty,” where he called for the liberation of the male anus as a conduit for emancipation more broadly. Although neither Genet nor Hocqeunghem were visual artists, Audeh explicitly referenced these three texts as tremendously inspirational to his cultural production as a gay Palestinian painter.

Yusef Audeh’s Artistic Profile

In my interviews with queer Palestinian-American artist Yusef Audeh, whose most recent work is informed by the solidarity of Genet and Hocquenghem, he first described some of the most salient aspects of his personal biography. He is cognizant of the relatively privileged diaspora community that he comes from, his access to elite academic institutions and artistic spaces, and that he does not share the same precarity that most Palestinians face in the Occupied Territories, especially now in Gaza. He described a relatively calm and blissful childhood, in Florida, far away from the problems of Palestine, though his family would travel there most summers, when his mother would deposit the children with his paternal grandmother in Al-Bireh or with her family in Silwad, at the time a rural village outside of Ramallah. Audeh remembers his grandfather’s white house, rabbits, the glowing colors of Rukab ice cream, and his aunt decapitating a chicken. “The abruptness!” he describes, adding, “we were sterilized under the American system.” Audeh has fond memories of the olive groves, the red soil, the total clash between Floridian artifice and the real, which for him was represented by the Arab world, the Israeli military occupation of Palestine, and his family’s “return home” to their ancestral lands.

Thus, in essence, with the exception of experiencing communal summers and sleeping on shared futons in his uncle’s unfinished villa, Audeh enjoyed long periods of uninterrupted time, which he used to browse Calvin Klein ads of semi-nude men and other images of escape from his drab surroundings. He swam often, sometimes naked, as a teenager, in the empty houses of his busy and divorced parents, who both still work and value labor, his father as a doctor and his mother as a psychology student, sometimes-teacher at an Islamic school, librarian, and later a nurse. It was uninterrupted time, something he still craves and needs as a painter, stating, “the opportunity to develop my subjectivity, without pressure to respond to the banalities of daily life.”

When I asked about what his Palestinian and queer identities meant to him, Audeh articulated that he, like Genet who critiqued the institutionalization of Palestinian identity, is less concerned with nationality and more with a specific vantage point. He grew up as an observer of political discussions and a witness to two opposing cultures: American culture, which is “between-the-lines, rigid, and quite insular,” and Palestinian culture, which is “romantic and ideological, insular in other ways, but also beautiful, and in some moments resistant to the type of modernity favored by Western hegemonic powers.”

Queerness, to Audeh, is more of a philosophy of life, and for him that has meant seeking and following pleasure and desire, his intuitive self, which opposes the need to commit to a particular ideology or dogma, to categorize or segment people into particular geometries, or to exhibit any real interest in fixed definitions (see Munoz 1999). Queerness here is a form of engendering pleasure while deconstructing and destabilizing gender and its taxonomic instincts. Audeh has an utmost intolerance for extreme enactments of masculinity and gender, though he states, “I am a hypocrite, and act in different ways, admiring men in uniforms, service workers, the working class, and all types of manual labor.” He queers the very figures of normative masculinity where his gaze is not of memesis but of sexual desire. Audeh’s pleasure and gaze offers a means by which to counter the audience for these professions. So often such men in uniforms see their admirers as women and members of the upper/middle class but would not recognize admirers such as Audeh. He is aware of these dynamics and how one is implicated in them. For instance, his remarks about service workers and the working class reveal a form of fetishization and Othering of Palestinians and non-Palestinians from less privileged backgrounds. Being queer has led Audeh to distance himself from institutions which he finds pushing traditional structures of the family, masculinity, and sociality, forcing him to take refuge in the esoteric and symbolic language of painting: “Rather than a universal language, I am interested in fine-tuning a queer subjectivity, vivid and variegated, even at the risk of inhabiting a utopic or fantasy world.”

Audeh connects Palestinianness and queerness with the thread of being an outsider, which itself is a way of loosening ethno-nationalist conceptions of identity. His position is a refusal, a practice of dis-identification. Even as a gay Palestinian, he identifies it as “hard to claim the subaltern perspective,” because these categories are so often conditioned by class, gender, economic status, and position on the queer spectrum. Though he feels queer Palestinians possess something of the subaltern, he asserts that “it is more our incredulity, the unwillingness to be fed untruths, the knowledge that every position is constructed, written by someone with a bias, agenda, who has accepted a cheque in some form or another. Maybe it equips us with a doubly-critical eye, like the triple oppression of capital, patriarchy and racism of Audre Lorde, but of one less degree.” This mention of Audre Lorde disrupts colonial and nationalist representations of Palestinianness that do not engage with feminist theory and queer theorists. Audeh recognizes that, in his case, it is a double-oppression only, because he is a cis-gender man and benefits from it, especially in the Arab world. Saying that people are “all rungs on a shifting ladder,” Audeh’s integration of Black feminist/lesbian thought helps explain these shifts. Specifically, Lorde’s (2007) mention of the “mythical norm” and the Black feminist project of difference and against equivalence is critical.

The artistic and interdisciplinary training that Audeh has undergone includes time in New York, Cairo, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He always admired painting but never thought it was something he could do. He was pressured into studying architecture, because that was a more “pragmatic” option and much more symbolic of a legible, desirable, and respected masculinity than that associated with being an artist. Audeh was uncomfortable with the form of education favored by art history and architecture. He finally moved back to the Arab world to pursue his “real love” of painting, mainly in Jordan and Palestine. In his typical poetic fashion, Audeh reflects, “Allegories from fiction and life have helped me to clarify my compulsions, which often incorporate architectural interiors, mise en scéne, male desire, and other motifs related to the history of painting.” He loves living in Palestine and exploring and contributing to the art scene, even as he faces the challenges of life under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and the conservative norms and homophobia within Palestinian society.

The trajectory of Audeh’s artistic work is evident as a practice of queer masculinity. His training and socialization present ways to reimagine masculinities in Palestine and across the broader Middle East. He is principally concerned with his painting language and how it can communicate his personal gendered experience. He returns to the question of realism, saying, “My hand is utterly incapable of reproducing a photograph, which I learned first in a competition to draw Albecht Dürer’s Young Hare at age eight.” He gives himself tests, impulsive exercises versus slow, protracted, more intellectual ones as part of his struggle to decipher how his experience can manifest in a painted situation, scene, arrangement, or imagined place. His queer tendencies and proclivities are gradually becoming incorporated into his work, as curators encourage him to extract his deepest inner desires, though he is “suspicious of [his] own fantasies, as they can be quite extreme.” Audeh sees his work nodding to more textual or cinematic references, as in recent paintings, Entre Chien et Loup and The Speed of Fingers, which were commissioned in response to Jean Genet’s novel Prisoner of Love. When I asked what being an artist meant to him, Audeh responded, playfully, “This is a horrible question! I wouldn’t know how to respond, only that it is the only thing that feels natural to me, and that it involves protecting my utopic tendency within the context of the harsh, visceral, and sometimes grotesque reality of the artist.” Audeh therefore queers how we think about art, artists, subjectivity, and desire. He foregrounds his own reflexivity and authenticity as a gay Palestinian cosmopolitan artist to challenge expectations surrounding heteronormativity, compulsory Zionism, and respectability politics in mainstream art worlds. Audeh remains true to his political and sexual principles and aspirations.

Audeh on Genet and Hocquenghem

Audeh is compelled by his understanding of Genet’s queer legacy, saying, “Genet was a radical fag…. I use it in a positive way, to reclaim the term.” Audeh often thinks Genet does not receive “the credit he deserves, as a queer person, despite being French, of living with the fedayeen, or Black September, in the 1970s in Jordan, for 2 years.” He shared that he knows “one hardcore dyke, originally from Haifa, who would drop what she’s doing in a second to join the revolution, so to speak, if she could. But otherwise we are all seeking individualistic ends.” He acknowledges that there are Palestinian radical writers out there: “Sure there is Ghassan Kanafani and Ahdaf Soueif—who wrote the introduction to my copy of Prisoner of Love—and many other talented Arab writers and poets, though I think we are always searching for influences which are outside of ourselves.” This was a subtle way of addressing the desires of Palestinians and their mobile, global conversations and influences.

Audeh appreciates Genet’s symbolic language, his anecdotes, his questioning of the reliable narrator, and his explication of what he noticed. Audeh asks, “At the beginning of Prisoner of Love, [Genet] describes a Pagan procession in Lebanon, preceded by a blue-and-white banner of a saint, the flamboyance of sailors marching in their gumboots, an Islamic crescent. Who were these lively, strapping young men? And how did these histories get lost in the narrow representation we have of the Arab world today?” Audeh creates an archive of Palestinian queer masculinities and desire by engaging with the work and activism of non-Palestinian gay men.

Audeh’s understanding of Hocquenghem’s queer legacy is equally lucid. “Hocquenghem says some outlandish things. They make me laugh, because they often have elements of truth. I discovered The Screwball Asses (Hocquenghem 2009) in one of my favorite gay bookstores in Paris, Les Mots à la Bouche, in Le Marais. He talks about meeting a younger boy, after a meeting of the Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action [FHAR] at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.” Audeh describes that Hocquenghem and the younger boy “meet in a toilet” and cites Hocquenghem’s reference to a “dark, humid hovel where we wade in puddles of water and urine” among “half a dozen bodies.” Audeh reflects that Hocquenghem “laments the fact that homosexual desire is performed where repression has exiled it—alleyways, toilets, basements, backseats of taxis, forests, anywhere which is not public. For all the visibility we demand, there is an equal desire to be unseen, to explore dark fetishes, outside of public view.”

The Screwball Asses resonated with Audeh when he read it because, at the time, he was dating a French artist, so “these stereotypes came up in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.” He argues that the dynamics between queer Arab and white French men are particular and conditioned by histories of colonization, more so in the case of North Africans, but he always identifies that the political is present in sexual dynamics. “In the end, at least in gay male-male relationships, you always have the position of penetrator, power, the top, and the position of receiver, submission, the bottom. These have their degrees of activity and passivity, but I am speaking in general terms.” ²

Audeh reports that he still encounters the unwillingness of Arab men to submit, or to be sodomized, in the Arab world. “Does it make it true? No. But one could invert this relationship if a French man were to take a more active role, rather than being the stereotypical bottom seeking an Arab phallus as Hocquenghem puts it. I once dated a Ukrainian Jewish guy, and you would have no idea how these political micro-dynamics play out in bed, in unexpected ways.” At this point in the interview, Audeh proceeded to quote two excerpts from Guy Hocquenghem’s (2009, 11) work: “I get fucked in the ass as by the people my father and grandfather have fucked in the colonial wars, before doing so in their factories,” and “I lend my ass for 15 minutes to someone that the bourgeoisie has mythically sodomized its entire life, to the point of perfecting in him the male pride that was already instilled in Islam.” When I asked Audeh about how this reading of Hocquenghem was linked to his interpretation of Genet’s solidarity with Palestine, he described it as “unjudgmental and generous. Maybe he was a lost soul searching for a cause, and I can’t underestimate the lengths at which we might travel for desire, curiosity, even sexual fetish, though I feel Genet’s solidarity was genuine.” Audeh ties desire and solidarity in a manner that allows for these transnational, transhistorical connections. On Hocquenghem’s solidarity with Palestine, Audeh reflected, “It makes sense, as I place the revolutionary homosexual movement of France in the 1960s and 1970s within the internationalization of other radical political movements. Was it business or pleasure?” This rhetorical question was also underlying Hocquenghem’s motivations in solidarity, revealing Audeh’s nuanced perspective.

Audeh’s current artistic projects are directly related to both of these French figures. He shares, “Genet’s tiny black characters on a white page: do they add up to reality? This is something of a departure point for me. Rather than explicit sexuality, paintings of nude men and cocks, which is au courant in ‘gay painting’ but becoming more and more a pastiche, I want to accentuate his queer vision of reality, which extends to uncanny ways of seeing everyday situations, some less, some more erotic than others.” Audeh resignifies, rearticulates, and reimagines these themes in ways that still center this Western space but also show the expansiveness of Queer Palestine. His paintings not only embody queer masculinity but are also fundamentally Palestinian in their resistance to the marginalization of Palestinian subjects, including Palestinians in the diaspora.

Audeh adds, “In a way I think Hocquenghem’s audience is the queer community itself—a plea to liberate from within—whereas Genet’s personal struggle is told vis-à-vis international political struggles and his acts of solidarity in different contexts among the Palestinians, the Black Panthers.” Halfway through this reflection, Audeh included a side note about Genet: “he absurdly avoided any questions about himself.” Both of these French intellectuals have pushed Audeh to think about his own position and to develop a richer vocabulary to describe his lived reality, which “oscillates between highly controlled political situations, and elaborate pursuits of ecstasy, pleasure, and escapism.”

Audeh’s Paintings

During our time together, Audeh showed me two of his paintings: The Speed of Fingers and Entre Chien et Loup (Between Wolf and Dog). According to Audeh:

The Speed of Fingers depicts a card game, a ceremonial act between two fedayeen, each with suspicious looks, bony faces, clenched jaws. Except I chose to paint only one full figure; the second is represented by only his hands. It is almost a complete reproduction of a painting by Renato Guttoso, Portrait of Mario Alicata, whose sinister, dark and luscious expression is the embodiment of the way Genet depicts the two card-players in Prisoner of Love. The complicated aspect of this painting was how to paint a card game without cards? It was almost impossible. In the end I included cards. The expression had to be clever, agitated, as if they had just hurled the Arabic word sharmouta [slut] at one another. Cards and gambling were banned among the bases of the fedayeen, as it was seen as “a middle-class pastime for middle-class people.”

It was powerful for me to view this painting with this context in mind. (Figure 1)OPEN IN VIEWER

It is noteworthy that in Genet’s Prisoner of Love, the Palestinian commander forbids the men under him from playing poker, referring to it as a “bourgeois game for bourgeois people.” Nonetheless, the fighters played poker, yet without any cards. The cards would have included all those symbolizing power (kings, queens, and jacks). As a result, Audeh’s decision to restore the cards in his painting also restored power to the fighters in a setting where the commander had disavowed that power. Audeh’s emphasis here is on defiance—in line with his queer ethos. His invocation of a derogatory word for a prostitute (sharmouta) in this context leans into a particular form of masculinity, artistically, intellectually, and politically. The choice of the feminine rather than masculine form of the Arabic word for prostitute here resonates with a toxic masculinity, revealing that queer masculinity can include elements of chauvinism.

The title of the painting Entre Chien et Loup (Figure 2) refers to the French expression for twilight, “between dusk and dawn.” This transition is also depicted in Genet’s Prisoner of Love, which depicts the possibility of men becoming more militant or violent, metaphorically transforming from dog to wolf. Audeh referenced a passage from Hocquenghem’s The Screwball Asses, which invokes this metaphor from the animal kingdom. He adds that men are constantly compared to animals in terms of virility, and Hocquenghem’s sexual objects are described in binary terms: “either weaker or stronger, older or younger, more in love with him or he more in love with them.” Audeh expands, “For me Entre Chien et Loup also speaks to the unequivocal mask that we wear as homosexuals, performing fluidity of gender and identity, yet regressing to fixed categories in our sexual lives: sub- or alpha-male, feminine and masculine, trade, and other questionable acronyms.” Hocquenghem’s metaphor, with Audeh’s visual representation, captures a dimension of the queer experience that resonates across geographic boundaries and works against the binaries that are the foundational language for these conversations and representations and identifications.OPEN IN VIEWER

Audeh recenters themes of power in this painting, as well. Moving away from binaries, the anthropological concept of liminality is striking here, particularly from the margins and between binaries. Audeh’s invocation of the virility of animals and the violence required for the transformation from dog to wolf reclaims power for the Palestinian male subject. The transcendence of binaries in nature is also profoundly queer. Viewing power from the margins runs through the works of Genet, Hocquenghem, and Audeh.

Genet and Hocquenghem’s legacies of queer and Palestinian solidarity shaped Audeh’s artistic approach in transformative ways. Audeh reflects: “The scenes within Genet’s writing are rich with nuance, dress, mannerisms, gestures, foreplay, all of which have Hocquenghem and Genet both helped to decode. They exist in full force in Palestine and across the Arab world, homosensuality as I like to call it, which is the object of many of my painting endeavors. If not explicitly, I would like there to be homosensuality in everything I represent, even if in a security booth, a flower, a handshake.”

Audeh theorized this notion of homosensuality after Genet and Hocquenghem’s work had been imprinted in Audeh’s consciousness. Their queer solidarity with Palestine helped shape Audeh’s relationship to his own artistic production as a gay Palestinian man. Audeh recognizes homosexuality and the erotic, homosociality and the relational, but the notion of homosensuality better accounts for the affects of the world of art that connect men in queer ways. The homosensuality of queer masculinities, intimacies, and geographies is seen through the artistic gaze of Audeh and in the cultural production of his paintings. His work shows the many ways that desire and pleasure move across intricate and expansive queer circuits. This expression of homosensuality is captured in both paintings—with an emphasis on masculine desires for power.

“Towards an Irrecuperable Pederasty”

Audeh reads widely and explicitly connects his theoretical explorations to his paintings. For instance, Audeh devoured Hocquenghem’s 1972 essay, “Towards an Irrecuperable Pederasty.” This powerful piece reflected on why the Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action (FHAR) in France, which Hocquenghem had helped found, had not lived up to its radical potential. In that piece, which is influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze as well as Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Hocquenghem links the queer French struggle to the Palestinian struggle. Audeh also closely read Genet’s last book, Prisoner of Love, which was published posthumously in 1986 and is a memoir of Genet’s time immersed with the Palestine Liberation Organization in Jordan and Lebanon and the Black Panthers in the United States. While finding the Palestinian movement “very just,” Genet (2003b) acknowledged that his “sympathy” was “driven by the erotic charge” that he felt toward Palestinians and what that represented for himself and his own sexuality. This was joined with his “will to be against all established power, to be on the side of the weakest” (Genet 2003b, 133). This explicit reference to the erotic charge signifies the racialization and exoticization at play here, which was vital to performing gay French masculinity. It was a way of queering geographies of desire while affirming their colonial remnants.

Queer Palestinians such as Audeh identify resonances with some of the debates that animated the FHAR, one of the world’s most formidable queer movements. The historical legacies of global struggles to combine political and sexual liberation have reverberations in the present moment. While we must advance robust accounts of agency primarily belonging to queer Palestinians on the ground in Palestine who established and continue to sustain their movement, accounting for the subsequent networks of queer solidarity with Palestine is also critical. These networks—while currently coalescing and under contestation in the Middle East, Europe, North America, and Latin America—also have intellectual forefathers in figures such as Genet and Hocquenghem. Genet and Hocquenghem’s connections to Queer Palestine are also accompanied by a surveillance, desire, and iteration of queer Palestinian masculinities, ultimately leading to a form of solidarity.

In “Towards an Irrecuperable Pederasty,” Hocquenghem recognizes the relationship between political repression and sexual repression. He outlines a vision for radical queer thought and action. The role of desire is fundamental to Hocquenghem’s radical politics. In recognizing how “repressive institutions of bourgeois society” repress homosexual desire, he calls for a “homosexual revolt” (Hocquenghem [1972] 1993, 235). This then becomes a geographic practice that also asks us to rethink the practice and spatialization of masculinities. The national and colonizing body traverses spaces that are vital to the articulation of desire and revolt. “Our homosexual relationships are, by definition, the negation of certain social relationships which are constitutive of patriarchy and capitalism,” writes Hocquenghem [1972] 1993, 240), who aspires to “a world where freedom of desire can be realized” (Hocquenghem, 244). He describes desire as the “best weapon” of homosexuals to be used—not to “convert heterosexuals and create a world purely of homosexuals”—but where the desire for “what is different from us” and “what we can no longer be or no longer wish to be” has revolutionary potential (Hocquenghem, 244). This desire continuously calls for “new sustenance” and “sexual instability” (Hocquenghem, 245). Desire here is structured through a difference that incorporates Palestine but in ways that consolidate colonial epistemologies and the unacknowledged queer and racialized desires (Johnson 2003). Desire is not meant to be “canalized” but to go “in many directions,” breaking down “object-choice” (Hocquenghem [1972] 1993 1993, 238) social limitations on what constitutes the masculine and feminine and who is to desire whom. Hocquenghem recognizes the “multiplicity of our desires” and that “anyone could desire anyone else” and “desire finds sustenance everywhere”; homosexual desire is meant to be “scandalous” and therefore, most importantly, “subversive” (Hocquenghem, 244). Hocquenghem’s conceptualization of desire is broad and he wants the homosexual movement to also be about love and humanism that are “joined to a hope for collective liberation” (Hocquenghem, 244).

As a result, Hocquenghem theorizes the realm of the libidinal. The libidinal is true love connected to political emancipation or “an egalitarian form which barred the horrible penetrative relationship, a form which was libidinal and not sexual in the bourgeois sense of the word” (Hocquenghem, 241–42). He reiterates the message of a prior FHAR publication that the libidinal “is everywhere in the political, and the political is everywhere in the ‘libidinal.’ This is not through sublimation, but by a direct connection” (Hocquenghem, 246). In extending this understanding of the libidinal to the distinction between public and private spheres, he writes: “The practical discovery of revolutionary homosexuals is that the private is only a closet and that the political is only one libidinal expression among many” (Hocquenghem, 247). As a result, what had previously been internalized as private, shameful, and intimate can be used for public, political, and revolutionary aims in a context where social norms reject such use by homosexuals. This is the potential that Hocquenghem envisions in desire.

In The Screwball Asses, Hocquenghem writes: “The ruling classes are the ones who have split and mutilated desire. The bourgeoisie invented the notion of homosexuality and made it into a ghetto. We must not forget this. There are two sexes on earth, but this is only to hide the fact that there are three, four, ten, thousands, once you throw that old hag of the idea of nature overboard. There are two sexes on earth but only one sexual desire” (Hocquenghem 2009, 47). Previously, in “Towards an Irrecuperable Pederasty,” he critiques the FHAR’s “withdrawal into ourselves” asserting that “the whole world is not too wide for us” and that the homosexual movement must encompass, through desire, subversion, and/or solidarity, everyone including women, heterosexuals, Blacks, and Arabs (Hocquenghem [1972] 1993, 245).

Hocquenghem’s explicit concerns with Arabs also included his citation of an FHAR manifesto that drew upon the following statement: “We’ve been buggered by Arabs. We’re proud of it and we’ll do it again” (Drucker 2015, 201). This statement was made in recognition of anti-Arab racism in French society, the parallel marginality that homosexuals and Arabs have experienced in France, and the transgressive gesture of overtly declaring one’s homosexual promiscuous experience with an Arab in that context. While some Arabs within or outside of France perceived that sexually penetrated French citizens helped reverse the colonial dynamic of power between France and North Africa (where most Arab immigrants in France originate) according to Hocquenghem, he also refers to an additional Arab population: the Palestinians. In his discussion of the relationship between the libidinal and the political being by direct connection and not sublimation, he writes: “The struggle of the Palestinians, for example, would be linked “libidinally” to our homosexual struggle” (Hocquenghem [1972] 1993, 246). This reflects a sublimated desire and impulse for Palestinians alongside the expressions of support for the morality of their cause.

Prisoner of Love

We can contextualize Hocquenghem’s solidarity with Arabs within a tradition that includes other radical queer French thinkers and activists including Daniel Guerin and Jean Genet. Hocquenghem and Guerin were both active figures in the FHAR. Queer studies scholar Peter Drucker draws such a connection, referencing Guerin, who was also active with FHAR, and declared: “All my life I have practiced a solidarity with Arabs based on shared oppression” (Drucker 2015, 201). Drucker cites the anti-imperialist agenda of the FHAR, which aligned itself with the Algerian movement for independence from France. He also discusses an interview with Jean Genet in which he describes how he overcame anti-Algerian prejudice: “speculating that perhaps going ‘to bed with Algerians’ had helped him realize that ‘Algerians are no different from other men’ and reinforced his sympathy for the Algerian struggle” (Drucker 2015, 201). This reveals how often gay masculinities are connected to normative colonial masculinities of sexual conquest where it is the site of entry and release that is key to possibilities for freedom.

Genet also shined light on the Palestinian movement. In Prisoner of Love, which he wrote between the years 1983 and 1986, Genet chronicled his experiences with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), proclaiming, “It’s not the justice of their cause that moves me—it’s the rightness” (Genet 2003a, 409). In his analysis of Prisoner of Love, sociologist Jonathan Dollimore describes the text as a “poetic meditation on desire, politics, loving, and dying” as well as love in relation to masculinity, war, and revolution (Dollimore 1991, 352). The book also queers the masculinity of war by situating it outside the framework of the heterosexual nation. Dollimore (1991, 354) marshals the example that Genet discusses of a young soldier “washing the clothes of his friend who is shortly to go and fight, declaring that he loves the revolution and all the [f]edayeen, but his friend especially.” Genet quotes the young Palestinian man describing the “gulf” that would be by his side were his friend to die. Genet writes that the two fedayeen are lovers of sorts. Dollimore (1997, 41) reflects on this: “These are Genet’s reconstructions, and perhaps the gulf, the void, are his as well as the soldiers’.” Drucker (2015, 201) takes up the concern leveled by “many radical intellectuals and even FHAR members” about queer French solidarity with Arabs, including from Guerin and Genet. They “criticized the essentialist and even racist way it reduced Arab men to a means of expression for white French gay men. A similar one-sided erotic charge permeated Genet’s solidarity with the Palestinian [fedayeen] and Black Panthers” (Drucker 2015, 201). Activism, and its desires, has the potential to continue to racialize and imperialize understandings of Queer Palestine; queer masculinities can lead to erasure and homogeneity.

In one translation of Prisoner of Love, the book opens with an introduction by the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif. She states that “Palestinians found in Genet a passionate friend and thoughtful interpreter” (Soueif 2003, xv). She also describes Genet as “one of the first foreigners to enter the Palestinian refugee camp of Chatila [Shatila] after the Christian Lebanese Phalange, with the compliance of the Israeli command, tortured and murdered hundreds of its inhabitants” and explains that Genet visited “at the request of his Palestinian friend Leila Shahid” (Soueif 2003, x).

Shahid worked for the Institute for Palestine Studies’ French language quarterly, and she spoke in Vienna alongside Genet in 1983 after the massacre. In their joint interview, Genet (1987, 77) stated: “The day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like other nations, I will no longer be there.” Journalist Rudiger Wischenbart then asked, “The intellectual as a lone gun, as a sniper?” and Genet replied, “Exactly.” Wischenbart followed up: “And do your Palestinian friends know this and accept it?” Genet then said, “Ask them. Ask Layla Shahid.” Wischenbart responded, “No. I am asking you.” Genet paused and replied, “I think that it’s there that I will betray them. They don’t know” (Genet 1987, 77). From the transcript, we know that Shahid, a prominent Palestinian figure, was sitting next to him subsequently expresses respect, admiration, and curiosity for Genet’s experiences and thoughts. Genet’s pull toward the question of Palestine strikes me as being mired in a nihilism of sorts that does not fully align with solidarity and movement building. Here I am ambivalent: while I appreciate Genet’s solidarity with the Palestinian cause, I have reservations about some of the fetishism that undergirds that solidarity.

When asked if he could articulate what his political revolution would look like, Genet (2003a, 132) stated, “My point of view is very egotistic. I would like for the world—now pay close attention to how I say this—I would like for the world not to change so that I can be against the world.” Genet then connected this to the Palestinian cause and to his abandonment of Palestinians if they achieve enfranchisement. Here Genet exhibits a kind of frontier and cowboy masculinity. Literary scholar Stathis Gourgouris (2003, 283) adds, “Genet’s evident anarchism reveals the epistemic co-incidence of Trotsky’s famous rival phrases: revolution betrayed opens the way for permanent revolution.” Genet’s attraction to Palestinians because of their revolutionary struggle reflects the continued appeal of the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement to leftist activists in the contemporary context. The most radical elements define Palestinians by that revolution—projecting onto them a desire for permanent revolution—standing in opposition to two powerful forces in our world: Zionism and homophobia (and, in some ways, relishing the struggle itself). Additionally, there is a cost for maintaining some discourses on solidarity with Palestinians while rendering Palestinian society and its complexity invisible.

In another translation of Prisoner of Love, the back cover includes an endorsement by leading Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. Said’s initial characterization of Genet’s text includes the words “peculiarity” and “strangest” alongside “extraordinary,” revealing some ambivalence. In his subsequent article, “On Jean Genet’s Late Works,” Said, author of the seminal text Orientalism, addresses the question of Genet and Orientalism: “[Genet] entered the Arab space and lived in it not as an investigator of exoticism but as someone for whom the Arabs had actuality and a presence that he enjoyed, felt comfortable with, even though he was, and remained, different. In the context of a dominant Orientalism that commanded, codified, articulated virtually all Western knowledge and experience of the Arab/Islamic world, there is something quietly but heroically subversive about Genet’s extraordinary relationship with the Arabs” (Said 1990, 34). Said also explicitly refers to Genet’s work as a form of solidarity: “So the choice first of Algeria in the 1950s, then of Palestine in the period thereafter, is and ought to be understood as a vital act of Genet’s solidarity, his willingly enraptured identification with other identities whose existence involves a strenuously contested struggle” (Said 1990, 38). Said’s testimony serves as a powerful response to the concerns that Drucker and others have raised about the “one-sided” nature of Genet’s solidarity. If we adopt an understanding of the erotic that brings together Genet’s broader conception of love with Hocquenghem’s delineation of love and the libidinal, it is possible to envision reciprocal desire between Genet and some of his Palestinian friends. Such a multi-directional desire does exist in the contemporary moment between many queer Palestinians and queer activists around the world who are in solidarity with them. I recognize that much of the desire that undergirds this results from the male gaze and helps shapes the transnational queer masculinities at play, including those that connect Audeh to Genet and Hocquenghem.

Conclusion

Genet and Hocquenghem recognized the interlinked nature of national/sexual liberation. Moreover, in their solidarity, they subordinated their own projects to that of Palestinian liberation. This points to the fact that national/international influence goes both ways: outsiders looking in carry the suggestions of politicizing sexual identity, but also, Palestinians looking out view the menu of ideas that global discourse offers. This means that there never was a purely mono-cultural, purely indigenous queer politics that is then, according to the taste of the critic, enhanced or defiled with global elements. Despite the messiness and drawbacks of intellectual support across borders, solidarity remains possible. Genet and Hocquenghem’s examples also illuminate the possibility for such solidarity to be mired simultaneously in dynamics of racialization, exoticization, and political sloganeering. Often the realities of global entanglements and polylocality and polyvocality are not afforded to Palestinians by their observers, even those in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle. Here anthropologist Anna Tsing’s (2004) notion of “friction” is productive, revealing the reductionist narrative that globalization necessitates clashes of cultures, when global interactions are often much more diverse and complex.

Audeh sees how the West imagines Palestine through colonial and postcolonial authors, but his work augments this by portraying an archive of world-making for Palestinian artists. In line with Audra Simpson’s (2007, 67–80) notion of refusals, Audeh’s refusals resist colonialism, Zionism, homophobia, and homogenizing representations of Palestinian masculinities. He reveals the possibilities of desire through queer heroes, though these heroes are not bound by space nor do they operate through nationalist politics. Audeh’s work also contributes to colonial geographic critiques (see Woods and McKittrick 2007). Nonetheless, Audeh’s class and mobility privilege through his American citizenship contributes to the exoticization of fellow men.

In his book, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History, Kadji Amin (2017, 9) argues for the “deidealization” of queer figures. As we recognize Audeh’s cultural production we can also heed Amin’s call for deidealization. Amin’s scholarship in this domain was focused on Jean Genet’s solidarity with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians, particularly with a concern for his racial-sexual fetishism, support for “pederastic inegalitarianism” (Amin, 9), and romanticization of violence. Amin calls for queer theory that is more nuanced—not lauding Genet as a queer idol but recognizing the complexity that attachment to his legacy raises for critical thought on queerness. Amin writes, “Animated by eroticized differentials of age, sexuality, and sometimes race, pederasty is among a series of problematic and outmoded queer attachments” (Amin, 12). He contends that Genet’s social pariah and criminal status in France attracted him to the Palestinian cause for its “advocating violence and hatred against the political system of sovereign states itself” (Amin, 142). Furthermore, Amin attributes Genet’s attraction to Palestinians not to “political commitment and high-minded solidarity” but to “the charge of radical oppositionality.” After all, the PLO were among “the most resistant and threatening movements through which Genet could route his oppositional wish” (Amin, 171). Amin concludes, “Genet is resolutely against the biopolitical norms that mark the Palestinians for death; however, his againstness is also a form of intimacy that freely admits its desire that norms be sustained so that his opposition to them, and the satisfactions therein, might continue unabated” (Amin, 175).

Yusef Audeh is not naïve; he recognizes the theoretical impulse of deidealization, which manifests at critical moments such as when he wonders whether Hocquenghem’s solidarity with Palestine was motivated by business or pleasure or both. Audeh also critiques Genet for not addressing his positionality in a self-reflexive manner. At the same time, Audeh does not diminish the genuine solidarity that undergirded the advocacy of these queer French activists and knowledge of that nourishes Audeh’s spirit as well as his artistic production as a young queer Palestinian man. Audeh is empowered by the legacies of these French intellectuals and inspired to center Palestinian power at the heart of his paintings. Audeh’s deep reading of both of these French intellectuals, coupled with his knowledge of praise for Genet from legendary Arab minds such as Edward Said and Ahdaf Soueif, informs his commitment. Audeh articulates the profound combination of politics and sexuality—and their liberatory potential as is resonant in Genet and Hocquenghem’s writings—for queer Palestinians, queer Arabs, and other racialized subaltern queer subjects. At the same time, one must be cautious about the impulse for Palestinian narratives and expression to necessarily pass through the Western/French gaze.

Recognizing Amin’s vigilance about exoticization while simultaneously taking seriously Audeh’s artistic appreciation for Genet and Hocquenghem, we have one avenue for excavating the historical underpinnings of transnational queer solidarity with Palestine. Audeh recognizes that a figure like Genet occupies a very peculiar identity that enables him to gesture toward transnational forms of queer masculinity and solidarity, and that Genet's engagement with Palestinians required abandoning certain of his privileges as a white European man. This resonates with anthropologist Theodoros Rakopoulos’s (2016, 143) notion of solidarity as “a bridge, which situates people in relation and inter-dependence, and ties the contingencies of the political present to existing (‘even deep’) practices of survival and sociality.” Audeh’s work and voice demonstrates that the historical traces of queer movements are not relics of an inaccessible past but rather contemporary reverberations, manifesting in the strokes of brushes, the beds of lovers, and the activism of revolutionary thinkers. Though this constellation of solidarity can never be pure or perfect, it can nevertheless help overcome the precarities of queer Palestinian life. As a diasporic young queer Palestinian man, Audeh searches for empowerment and belonging between East and West—and for safety amidst heteropatriarchy. Audeh has found in his art a synthesis and solidarity that transcends space, time, and material limitations on the body and its creative imaginaries.