Hello world, (notice how the word Gay in the title starts with a capital letter. I did it again.)

It has been great reading your comments and receiving your emails. I welcome you all to my humble blog one more time.

As I wrote in the very first post, I live in North Lebanon. I’m going to talk about what it’s like to be Gay here. I wanted it to be what it feels like to be homosexual in Lebanon overall, but since many blogs targeted this topic before, I narrowed it to North Lebanon only.

After you go through all these stages regarding your identity and sexuality, you come to realize that it is not going to be easy accepting it. First of all, where I live is considered to be a very religious place. Going to churches and mosques is very vital. Not only that, but attending weddings and ceremonies is extremely important too. From a very young age, the idea of getting married and starting your own family sticks in your head. As so, you start to think that this is the ultimate way to live your life. You know, you graduate, you find a work, you meet a girl and then you marry her. For girls, they graduate, they find a work and wait for the right person to ask them out and eventually pursue their life together. I’m sure that this is the way in many parts of the country. True. But in North Lebanon, it is a bit different than that. We tend to attend weddings a lot. After each wedding, we listen to every single person telling us “3a2belak” or “3a2belik”. You eventually learn to smile, nod and politely say thank you.

As you know, there are some “gay friendly” bars in Beirut or other places. We don’t have that here. We don’t even have bars in the first place. But really, do you understand how hard it is? I mean, where should you meet people? Where can you have a pleasant conversation with a person of the same gender without the need to whisper every time someone passes, in fear of being caught? But caught in what exactly? What are we doing wrong? This reminds me of HOMOPHOBIA contagiously spreading around here. Lebanon is homophobic, a huge number of people is homophobic. We deal with them every single day. Since we don’t have places to comfortably meet, and since some people are still confused about who they are or what they want, we tend to rely on applications. Yes, I mean Grindr. You download the application, you hope for the best and the next thing you know you delete it. Meeting gay people in North Lebanon, or at least where I live, is not easy. We are still afraid of going out or even sharing pictures. You talk to an interesting guy with an obvious high IQ. After a while, you send a picture. Suddenly, you are blocked. So, you assume that the person knows who you are. Two guys or two girls are still hesitant to sit in a normal restaurant and chat, in fear of seeing people they know. I had that fear. (Notice the word had). Why should we be afraid of that? We are only eating and chatting. It’s not like we are making out, or chatting naked in front of people. For many cases, meeting gay people here is easy, if what they are looking for is sex. For people like myself, looking for an actual meeting with an actual person with an acceptable IQ, it’s different. Don’t get me wrong, I love it here. The people are nice, extremely homophobic, but really nice. But since everyone knows everyone, it is hard to feel comfortable sitting in a public place with someone else. Let me make it simple. While having dinner, if someone sees the second cousin’s cousin of his/her friend, that someone will fear that his/her parents will know about it. You may laugh, but this is the case. Everybody knowing everybody is a double edged sword, especially for gay people in the North. It sucks.

So yes. This is what it feels like living here. But really, the people are nice.