Nine Books That Showcase Queer Life in the Arab World

When the genocide in Gaza began in 2023, I remember seeing a repeated commentary on social media: every time a queer-presenting person posted about Israeli war crimes, a troll would pop up to tell them to go to Gaza themselves, and “do you know what they do to people like you there?” (As a Southerner, my favorite response online was something along the lines of, “They don’t like ‘people like me’ in Texas, either, but I don’t want to see Texas bombed off the map.”) Logical fallacies and bad actors aside, though, while there is a relative wealth of literature written in English (and French) by Arabs abroad, there is significantly less queer literature published in Arabic, within the Arab world.

Being anything other than cisgender and heterosexual falls outside the norm in what are often very traditional societies, and while laws across the SWANA region vary, some more lenient, some quite repressive, some enforced, others not, there is a great deal of censorship, much of it self-imposed. A queer writer is less likely to tell queer stories because of a fear of backlash, the difficulty of finding a publisher, or the worries about how it might affect their relationships with others in society. A straight writer is still, sadly, not always likely to treat their gay characters with understanding and empathy.

All the upheaval of 2026 aside, I choose to believe this state of things is, slowly, changing. In 2021, Areej Gamal’s novel Mariam, It’s Arwa (recently published in my translation by AUC Press), a novel about two women falling in love, was awarded the Sawiris Cultural Prize for Emerging Writers in Egypt, a country that has made headlines for human rights abuses against the queer community for years. It actually wasn’t the first time a queer narrative won that prize. In 2017, the same year LGBT activist Sarah Hegazy was arrested and tortured in Cairo after waving the rainbow flag at a Mashrou’ Leila concert, Muhammad Abdelnabi’s In the Spider’s Room, which recounts another flash point in the history of queer rights in Egypt, was a joint recipient of the Sawiris Prize; that same year, it was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. There are writers telling these stories in Arabic, and at least two prize-granting bodies have taken note.

This list includes several translated gems in addition to a handful of original English-language texts and anthologies of queer stories by Arabs. I have faith that in the coming years, the list will only continue growing.

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This Arab Is Queer, ed. Elias Jahshan (Saqi, 2022)

A finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Awards in the US and shortlisted for the 2023 Bread & Roses Award in the UK, this anthology was followed last year by This Queer Arab Family (Saqi). In the first, writers from eleven Arab countries share stories about the intersectionality of their Arabness and their queerness, covering everything from first love and sexual liberation to racism, transitioning, and coming out as queer in a fiercely heteronormative society; the second redefines family, telling the stories of queer Arabs the world over who have built their communities on their own terms. One of my favorite pieces in This Arab Is Queer, Amina’s “An August, A September and My Mother,” is a touching homage to Sarah Hegazy, who never recovered from the trauma of her experience and tragically took her own life three years later, and Randa Jarrar’s “Learning from Other Mothers at a Time of Genocide” (in This Queer Arab Family) is one of the most heart-wrenching essays on the genocide in Gaza I’ve read. The stories in these books, both memoir and fiction, overflow with the strength that comes from solidarity and joy wrested from the hands of a world that doesn’t always willingly grant it.

The Queer Arab Glossary, edited Marwan Kaabour (Saqi, 2024)

I admit it: I’m married to a sommelier, but I’m still the girl who picks her bottles of wine based on pretty labels. That said, I tend to have good luck picking things that are both beautiful and delicious, and this book hit all the same pleasure centers as a perfect bottle of wine: sheer delight in its physical beauty followed by a sense of being utterly justified in my choice. The first published collection of Arabic LGBTQ+ slang, this book is a work of art. Clever illustrations by Haitham Haddad accompany more than 300 terms in both Arabic and English that run the gamut from the offensive to the reclaimed to the endearing, words created by marginalized communities in Arabophone countries to express their identities and realities. Queer Arab activists and artists including Hamed Sinno of Mashrou’ Leila fame (also included in This Arab Is Queer) and the Moroccan author Abdellah Taïa have contributed essays to the collection, as well, placing these words and their histories in a modern context. In my 20+ years of language learning, this is the only glossary I’ve read for fun, and I would (will!) one hundred percent do it again.

The Bride of Amman by Fadi Zaghmout, trans. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (Signal 8, 2015)

The interlaced stories of four women and one gay man in Amman, an ensemble cast à la Love Actually, provide a somewhat damning vision of Jordanian society’s views on marriage. I read the book in conjunction with an Arabic-language autoethnography of Jordanian women, which I reviewed in The Markaz Review, and the two complemented each other to a T. The fabric of society in many Arab countries is woven from tradition, a list of dos and don’ts that must be followed to keep one’s place within it. The characters in this book, as in most of these books, generally…don’t. Of three best friends at the University of Jordan, Rana, a Christian, falls for a Muslim boy (leading to one of my favorite sentences: “The closer I got, the more I felt his warmth, and the more I felt that warmth, the more I craved heat, like a piece of ice longing to evaporate”); Hayat immerses herself in extramarital affairs to avoid the memories of an abusive father; and Leila rushes into marriage with a man she barely knows to avoid becoming like her older sister Salma, who falls into despair after reaching age thirty and being discarded to the junk heap of society as a spinster. Leila’s new husband, Ali, has his own secret: he’s gay, no interest in women at all, but succumbed to the pressure to marry because he wanted to please his family and start one of his own. The characters tell their stories with all the simplicity of frustration and fury.

In the Spider’s Room by Muhammad Abdelnabi, trans. Jonathan Wright (AUC Press, 2018)

In 2001 Cairo, fifty-two men were arrested and put on trial for “perversion” during what became known as the Queen Boat case, following a raid on the eponymous gay nightclub. Hani, the narrator of In the Spider’s Room, is one of them. Left traumatized and speechless after his time in prison, he writes alternately about his arrest and imprisonment and his life before it: his childhood and sexual awakening, his marriage to a woman, and his first real love. The book portrays a wide array of characters within Egypt’s larger gay community, men from different social strata with a plurality of takes on sex and love. It also fleshes out some the themes touched on in The Bride of Amman, describing Hani’s complicated relationship with his mother, who pushes him into marriage, and the wife he calls a “rare human being,” as well as the validation he feels in first discovering himself sexually (writing that it was “as if a fracture had healed, like a broken doll lucky enough to have found someone to put the pieces together again and bring it back to life”). Hani also struggles with guilt and self-loathing, something illustrated to perfection by the fact that he simultaneously fears spiders and describes his seduction of his first love as weaving a web to catch him. The beauty of that analogy, and one that leaves a lot of room for hope, is that despite the horrors of Hani’s time in prison, he leaves its walls completely cured of his fear of spiders.

Cinnamon by Samar Yazbek, trans. Emily Danby (Haus, 2013)

Author Samar Yazbek’s first novel, Cinnamon begins when Hanan, a wealthy, childless, pale-skinned woman from Damascus, surprises Aliyah, her dark-skinned maid from the slums, in bed with her husband. Hanan feels betrayed, but not by her husband, whom she despises, instead by Aliyah, with whom she’s been carrying on a long-term affair. The book is basically a study in dysfunctional and self-destructive relationships. There were so many points of discomfort for me: the initial power imbalance between mistress and servant, Aliyah’s age, and Hanan’s, actually, when they are introduced to the pleasures of the flesh, the vicious joy Aliyah takes in exerting her sexual power over both master and mistress, Hanan’s quiet obedience to her mother and her forced marriage, and the horrific circumstances Aliyah was pulled out of to work at Hanan’s villa. But that discomfort seems to be the point. In rich, lyrical prose, the book blurs the lines between victim and antagonist and problematizes the lack of class mobility within Syrian society. Aliyah, who both owns her sexuality and discovers a love of reading by smuggling books from the villa’s library into her room, gets a good glimpse of her potential, but Hanan’s love for her does not extend so far as to allow her to step out of her role, at least not during the daylight hours.

Floodlines by Saleem Haddad (Europa, 2026)

If you liked Saleem Haddad’s debut novel, Guapa (Europa, 2016), you will love Floodlines. Whereas Guapa, set in an unnamed Arab country, tells the story of a young gay man making his way in an unwelcoming society, Floodlines takes as its subject a family of artists displaced from Iraq and examines the residual trauma from a past indelibly marked by colonialism and conflict. In 2014, as ISIS ravages Iraq, three sisters, the daughters of a renowned Iraqi artist father and a British painter mother, fight over the family legacy, each woman approaching the topic based on her relationship to the country she is grieving: political fury, nostalgia, or pain. The sisters, their mother, and the only grandchild, a war reporter, confront family resentments, jealousies, and secrets, recognizing gradually that coming to terms with the past is the only way forward. The characters and the relationships between them are finely drawn, and the book retraces big moments in Iraqi history since the 1920s. It is also shot through with references to Iraqi art and cultural history: beautiful old architecture, traditional boats on the Tigris, the queerness of the epic of Gilgamesh. The overall feeling is that art is the only thing with the power to save us.

The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine (Grove Press, 2021)

Winner of the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Wrong End of the Telescope is the story of Mina Simpson, a Lebanese American trans woman and doctor who goes to the Greek island of Lesbos to help an old friend treat incoming refugees. Estranged from her family and her roots, Mina has avoided traveling near her homeland for thirty years, but she develops a bond with a Syrian woman seeking asylum with her family and trying to keep her liver cancer a secret, both from them and from the authorities who might send her home. At the start of the novel, Mina is clearly concerned about how her trans identity might impact her ability to help the refugees she encounters, but the conversations she has with them (e.g., the one little girl who asks if she is a man) are both surprising and life-affirming.

Honestly, choosing one of Alameddine’s novels felt impossible, if you can, read them all, starting with his debut, Koolaids: The Art of War (2015), which tackles the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco and the Lebanese Civil War.

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2020)

When I read Thirty Names of Night, I found myself wanting to recommend it to everyone I’d ever met, and everyone I hadn’t. My initial soft spot for the novel was because I grew up trailing my birder father through marshes along the Louisiana Gulf Coast, watching sandpipers dance away from the waves and peering through binoculars at tiny birds of prey on powerlines. But Joukhadar’s incandescent writing folded me into itself immediately. A Lambda Literary and Stonewall Book Award-winning novel, The Thirty Names of Night is a masterfully braided narrative about a closeted Syrian American trans man searching for a new name as he mourns the loss of his ornithologist mother, and a Syrian artist named Laila Z in 1940s New York who painted birds. The two stories intertwine in ways that seem, somehow, nothing short of miraculous, honoring queer and trans ancestors while also evoking the immigrant experience, the quest for self-discovery, and the joy and diversity of queer communities of color. Throughout the book, birds appear as an overarching thread, an innocence and wisdom in constant motion that mirror the immigration of New York’s Syrian community and the narrator’s migration of the self as he transitions. The book is beyond moving. It might be a little on the nose to reference Emily Dickinson’s “hope is the thing with feathers” here…but I’m not sure I care.

I’m in Seattle, Where Are You?: A Memoir by Mortada Gzar, trans. William Hutchins (Amazon Crossings, 2021)

As Gzar has stated in interviews, only the famous and powerful write memoirs in Iraq, the same could be said for much of the Arab world. That’s one thing that makes this book so special, as gritty and painful to read as it is. I’m in awe of the guts it must have taken for him to write, illustrate, and publish such a personal work, which lays bare the atrocities he suffered at home and the continued indignities experienced in the US. The nonlinear narrative unfurls from Seattle, where Gzar has finally settled and is seeking his lost love, Morise, an American soldier he met during the invasion of Iraq. Speaking to a number of people (and inanimate objects), he tells the stories of his youth collecting shrapnel in Basra, where even his earliest awareness of his sexuality led to trouble; his years as a pious college student in Baghdad, where he met and fell in love with Morise; and the impact of Saddam’s downfall and the subsequent sectarian violence on Iraq’s queer community. The book covers war, torture, and PTSD; homelessness; drag (for both identity-affirming and protective reasons); young love; migration; and queer solidarity. The last paragraph is my favorite.

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Mariam, It’s Arwa by Areej Gamal, translated by Addie Leak, is available from AUC Press.