Beirut, The new Gay Mecca?

[Guest shebavon]

From the NY Times travel section.

 

 

Beirut, the Provincetown of the Middle East

 

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Dancing goes on until dawn at Acid, one of the city’s best-known gay clubs.

 

By PATRICK HEALY

Published: August 2, 2009

THE pre-party began at 9 p.m. in Bertho Makso’s room at the Bella Riva Suite Hotel, and by 9:05 p.m. the air was awash in cologne, hair spray, cigarette smoke and gossip about the night ahead. Would a certain 20-something from West Beirut be at the beach party? Had the two men from Cairo arrived yet? Was the cute D.J. from Bardo, a gay bar here, going to be spinning? And did anyone need condoms?

 

 

The last question came from Bertho, a 28-year-old Lebanese tour operator who was the host of the main event that Thursday night in June: the Bear Arabia Mega Party, at the Oceana resort about 30 minutes south of Beirut. Scores of gay men — most of them “bears,” a term used the world over for heavyset, hairy guys usually older than 30 — were coming from across Lebanon and the Arab world, as well as Argentina, Italy, Mexico, the United States and elsewhere. Bertho had been picking them up at the Beirut airport since morning, and he looked exhausted as he handed out fistfuls of condoms to the dozen men in the room.

 

“So many questions today about what ‘gay Beirut’ is like,” he told me. “I’m just like, ‘Wait and see, you’ll like it, you’ll like it!’ ”

 

Tipping back a Red Bull on the sofa was Roberto Boccia, who was in from Rome for the event. In his 40s, wearing a white T-shirt and khaki shorts, Roberto said he was surprised by the brio of Beirut compared with gay life in Rome, and said he was going to spread the word back home. “Some of my friends are still scared to come here, because of the wars, and because it’s harder to be gay here than in Europe,” he said. “But I say, we have to win this. We’re gay, we overcome things.”

 

At that moment Bertho’s boyfriend, Rob, a very young Justin Timberlake look-alike, stumbled in from a side bedroom. He lifted his T-shirt, which read “Maniac 65,” to show off a sliver of his toned, tanned torso, and flashed a dazzling smile.

 

The room went quiet.

 

“O.K.,” Bertho said to no one in particular, “we should probably leave soon.”

 

While homosexual activity (technically, sexual relations that officials deem “unnatural”) is illegal in Lebanon, as in most of the Arab world, Beirut’s vitality as a Mediterranean capital of night life has fueled a flourishing gay scene — albeit one where men can be nervous about public displays of affection and where security guards at clubs can intercede if the good times turn too frisky on the dance floor. But even more than the partying, Beirut represents a different Middle East for some gay and lesbian Arabs: the only place in the region where they can openly enjoy a social life denied them at home.

 

Asu, a 35-year-old gay man visiting from Damascus — who, like many men interviewed in Beirut, asked that his surname not be published — said that only two close friends in Syria knew that he was gay and that there were no bars, clubs or cafes in Damascus where gay Syrians felt at ease.

 

“I thought I would meet other gay men at university in Syria, but it didn’t happen, and then I thought as an adult man living in Damascus that it would happen, but it hasn’t,” said Asu, who was nursing a club soda at Wolf, a gay-friendly bar near the American University in Beirut. “I’m 35 years old. I feel very lonely at home. There’s only the Internet for me, to e-mail with other gay men. The Internet, and Beirut. I try to come here every year now, because it is a relief.”

 

While homophobia is not a rampant problem in Jordan, according to Abdul-Azeem, a gay man from Amman, he has not found enough openness to start a relationship with a man. Instead, he said, he has been dating a Beirut man long-distance for the last nine months.

 

“We met on my last trip here,” said Abdul-Azeem, who is 25, and spoke during a visit to the new Beirut Arts Center on a 90-degree afternoon in June. “I hope we will be in love in the future. But I had to travel here to find a man who maybe I will love. I wish we were together every day.”

 

Gay life in this city is still inching out of the shadows, to be sure, but it seems to have developed a steady forward momentum since the end of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war in 1990 — and especially in the calm that has followed the brief 2006 war between Hezbollah forces and Israel.

 

Bars have opened, and old ones are into their fifth or sixth year of sponsoring annual parties and music festivals. Some yacht clubs and hotel pools have gained a reputation as popular spots for gay men to hang out and flirt. Internet chat sites like Manjam (www.manjam.com), self-described as “a gay social network for dating, work and travel,” have taken off; several gay men here had no inhibitions telling me their Manjam profile screen names. And, by anecdotal accounts, gay men and women from other Arab countries and the West are increasingly vacationing here — a choice that is all the more sexy and thrilling for some because they feel they are living on the edge and discovering a gay culture that is freshly evolving.

 

During the mid-1990s, a few small cafes in Beirut became popular gathering places for gay men — not only for groups of friends, but also for men who had chatted on the Internet and wanted to arrange a safe place to meet. One such spot, Café Sheikh Mankoush in the Hamra district, also installed computers that gay men used to chat online with others in Beirut, Bertho said.

 

In the years since, Lebanon has become one of the most liberal Arab counties when it comes to sexuality and sexual behavior, according to Michael T. Luongo, the editor of the 2007 book “Gay Travels in the Muslim World,” which was translated and printed in Arabic this summer by a Beirut publishing house, Arab Diffusion. (Travel guides to Beirut are not plentiful, particularly ones that might be helpful for gay and lesbian travelers, but one useful publication is “A Hedonist’s Guide to Beirut,” published by Hg2 Guides. It can be bought on Amazon for $14.78.)

 

“What’s interesting is that the Arab areas that were once controlled by the French, like Lebanon, are the ones with laws against homosexuality, because the French felt comfortable talking about sex,” Mr. Luongo said, “while the areas controlled by the British didn’t have those laws because they didn’t talk about sex. As a result, flowing from that French history is a relative familiarity with homosexuality in places like Lebanon. You have more gay life where the laws exist against it.”

 

 

“Gays who live in the Arab world or regularly visit have a good idea about the good places and the bad for gays,” Ricardo said. “Cairo — bad, some police harassment. Istanbul and Amman are better. Damascus — bad, with lots of police harassment too.”

 

In Iraq, for instance, conservative Muslim clerics have called for the “depravity” of homosexuality to be eliminated. Amnesty International said this year that up to 25 boys and men had been killed in Baghdad because they were gay or were believed to be gay. In Saudi Arabia, Yemen and several other countries, homosexual acts are punishable by death. In March, a 44-year-old gay man in the Yemeni city of al-Hisn was shot to death, one of several gay men reported killed since mid-2008.

 

Even in Beirut, a widely publicized beating of two gay men by police officers spurred the Lebanese organization Helem — the most visible gay rights group of any Arab nation — to hold the first major gay rights rally in the region in memory. The rally, in February, drew several dozen gay men and lesbians, and straight friends and supporters, to a downtown Beirut square, where they waved rainbow flags and banners calling for gay rights.

 

That rally — as well as Lebanon’s elections in June, won by moderate political parties — has buoyed the spirits of gay men and lesbians in Beirut, yet still they have hardly turned cavalier about their public behavior. Police officers sometimes seem to be on every block, and the military is omnipresent. Raed, a young gay man who works in Beirut, pointed out that a police booth is located close to Bardo, one of the most popular gay gathering spots on most nights of the week.

 

“They know that Bardo is a gay place, but they have never really blinked an eye about that,” Raed said. “When I go out from Bardo I always feel at ease hugging my friends — of course in a decent way — in front of the police. This is the kind of change I am talking about. Although the laws still incriminate homosexual acts, we as gays here don’t feel that much threatened by it anymore.”

 

Bardo doubles as a restaurant and bar and, like most gay nightspots in Beirut, it attracts a mixed crowd of men and women, gay and straight. As midnight approached at Bardo one weekend early this summer, I had to bob and weave among the 100 people squeezed in its two main rooms. One had cocktail tables and stools and a small bar rail, while the other was packed with tables on one end and a raised platform on the other, where men relaxed on plump pillows and talked with one another. Euro club music by David Guetta and electronica by Paul Van Dyk thumped from the speakers, and gorgeous waiters wearing T-shirts that read “Bardo of Love” served and laughed with the patrons.

 

As Chris Asy spun music (he being the “cute” D.J. being talked about at Bertho’s apartment), Bassil Zahr, a 23-year-old American of Lebanese descent who visits every year and his friend Lara Kays, who works at a radio station, shared mixed drinks as they filled me in on the Beirut scene. Occasionally Bassil would lean over to flirt with Chris, an Australian with curly golden locks, leaving Lara and me to talk.

 

“You come to a place like Bardo’s and you think there’s a lot of out gay men here, but that’s not quite right,” she said. “I have one other gay friend besides Bassil. Men don’t wear being gay on their sleeve, and I doubt any of them are out to their families. In America you have lots of places where gay guys hang out , and you have gay sports leagues in New York, don’t you? Here it’s only the bars where you see gay men.”

 

But Bassil described Beirut as fairly relaxed about sexuality and said that his friends who came from overseas were routinely surprised to find “a shockingly big and open gay culture” there.

 

“Most Americans I speak to are usually afraid to visit Lebanon because they still have an image of a war-torn Beirut,” he said. “They also may listen to the biased media that only reports on which bomb went off where or who died when. The truth is that you probably have a greater chance dying from a car accident then getting injured or killed in Lebanon.”

 

Near the exit at Bardo I met Steven Larkin, the co-founder of OUT Adventures, a Canadian-based travel company, who happened to be visiting the bar that night. He said he had come to assess Beirut as a possible destination for his clients. OUT Adventures now books tours in Egypt and Morocco, he said, and has been eyeing Beirut for some time to determine if the city is reasonably safe and sufficiently appealing for gay visitors.

 

“I really like the feel of this city, from what I’ve seen so far,” he said, before heading out to Wolf. “Guys are fun, smart, attractive. I can see a future for us here.”

 

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There is no gay neighborhood in Beirut per se, and bar-hopping here is not for the unadventurous. A Bardo waiter told me about another gay spot, Life Bar, in the Ashrafieh section of Beirut a couple of miles away; the directions he gave me were, “Tell the cab driver to go just past the S.N.A. building — just pronounce it ‘Sna’ — to the street on a hill, turn right and go a half a block up.” While most bars and restaurants have addresses, Beirut is a maze of twisting side streets, many of them unmarked. My cab driver dropped me off at a spot where he thought Life Bar should be; it took another 10 minutes, and asking three different people for directions (two of whom wanted a “tip” for the service), to find it.

 

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By 1 a.m. Life Bar was mostly empty; a few older men sat on the leather banquettes in the long, narrow space. One of the bartenders, who declined to give his name, said that the Life Bar did not publicize itself as a gay bar because doing so might attract extra scrutiny from the authorities.

 

One hotspot that the authorities — and gay Beirutis — know plenty about is Acid, the city’s best-known gay club, about 15 minutes west of Ashrafieh in the Sin El Fil neighborhood. Acid opened in 1998 and quickly emerged as the final stop of the night, as the dancing rages past dawn. As everyone told me, the club was wall-to-wall men, some of whom made out with one another without any evident inhibition. No one used to kiss inside clubs, Raed told me later, but now he regularly kisses his boyfriend when they are dancing.

 

“Of course every now and then I am told by the security guy there to stop, but they nevertheless don’t repress it violently,” Raed said.

 

Fifteen minutes on the dance floor left me sweaty and with a ringing in my ears, so I stepped outside where two dozen men were smoking and chatting.

 

I struck up a conversation with one of them, Anton, who was alone, leaning against the wall of the club. A university student from Paris, he had arrived in Beirut a few days earlier with friends, but that night he had left them at Centrale — a sleek, popular French restaurant in Gemyazeh, designed by the architect Bernard Khoury — to meet up at Acid with a Lebanese man with whom he had chatted on Manjam.

 

The man had never shown up, and this amounted to strike two for Anton in his experience with Internet hook-ups in Beirut. His first experience was not only bad, he told me, but scary.

 

Any new user to Manjam is initially inundated with solicitations offering sex for money, Anton said, but after a while he began chatting with a man who called himself Marwan. The two discussed meeting but never made a plan; Marwan had asked for Anton’s cellphone number, but instead, for some reason, Anton gave him the name of his hotel. Around 4 the next morning, Anton said he was awoken by Marwan in his room, standing beside his bed; half-asleep, Anton rebuffed his request to spend the night, but soon was sufficiently awake to demand that he say how he gained access to his room and then screamed at him to leave. The man finally did.

 

“I still can’t believe I gave him the name of my hotel — stupid,” Anton said. “The front desk said they had no idea how he got in.” Anton and his friends changed hotels the next day.

 

While meeting men on the Internet is widely popular here, the Saint-Georges Yacht Club and the rooftop pool at the Palm Beach Hotel — only about 150 feet from each other, near the Corniche seaside promenade — have gained reputations as popular daytime cruising places for gay men, especially on Saturday afternoons. Saint-Georges charges $20 for a day pass, while the Palm Beach pool can be easily visited free.

 

One Saturday afternoon, the enormous square pool at Saint-Georges was full of a mix of groups of men and parents with children. Many more men lay out on lounge chairs and ordered bar service; one of them multitasked by applying pomade to his hair and suntan oil to his chest while answering his cellphone, which had the “Sex and the City” theme music as its ring tone.

 

 

Few men told me that they were traveling alone, and most expressed discomfort at the idea. Bertho Makso said that the bulk of his travel business (www.lebtour.com) involves couples and groups of friends who want to explore Beirut in a pack, and Bertho and others are increasingly designing tours and events to cater to them. While Beirut has some superb architecture and a handful of spots that are well visited — like the Corniche and the Roman bath ruins — the cultural life here is still in a stage of postwar development, with few museums or typical tourist destinations. It’s the clubs and the parties that Bertho has built his business around.

 

 

The Bear Arabia Mega Party proved to be a success, for instance. About 80 people had arrived by 11:30 p.m., dancing on an open-air patio under a Hawaiian-style thatched roof. The highlight was the contest to elect Mr. Bear Arabia. Six shirtless men entered the competition, and as they lined up shortly before 1 a.m. to answer questions from a table of judges, the partygoers were each given a paper ballot.

 

At 1:30 a.m. Bertho declared a winner: a husky 40-something named Clement. He was given a sash emblazoned with “Mr. Bear Arabia,” and draped it over his bare chest as other men offered congratulations.

 

As the night neared a close, I met a young man named Mohammad who had come from Basra, in Iraq. He was standing by the edge of the patio, looking at the white moon in the cloudless sky. He said he was worn out from dancing — worn out, but “happy, so happy, to be here.”

 

“It’s terrible at home, they are killing us,” Mohammad said. “It’s only worse for gays after the war. Under Saddam, there wasn’t chaos, there wasn’t random killings. A friend of mine is a decorator in Basra, and his shop was burnt down — because he was effeminate, we think.

 

“Beirut is freedom,” Mohammad continued. “I can be every part of Mohammad here.”

 

IN A BAR, ON THE DANCE FLOOR OR BY THE POOL

 

GETTING THERE

 

Flying from New York to Beirut generally involves connecting in cities like Paris, Rome, London or Istanbul, and there are plenty of options on Delta, American, Air France, United and other carriers. The total flight time via Paris is roughly 12 hours, not including a layover.

 

In early June, a round trip on Air France to Beirut was $1,383. An indirect route — say, connecting in Dubai with a layover of several hours — would have lowered the fare by about $200. Fares for travel this month start at $1,248 according to a recent online search; summertime in Beirut is the high season, when airfares and hotel are usually at their most expensive.

 

The Beirut airport is about 20 minutes from downtown; taxi drivers will attempt to charge upward of $40 and argue that this is an “official” airport rate. Decline, and offer to pay $20 (American dollars are widely accepted throughout Beirut); if that price is not accepted, move on to the next driver until you find one who will accept that rate. (Depending on your patience, a driver eventually will.) Most hotels will also arrange pick-ups and drop-offs, starting at about $25.

 

WHERE TO STAY

 

The Palm Beach Hotel (Ain el Mreisseh, downtown; 961-1-372-000; www.palmbeachbeirut.com) is a well-decorated and cozy 88-room hotel at the foot of the Corniche, on the Mediterranean. The rooms are reasonably sized, with cable television, wireless and private terraces. It has an excellent breakfast buffet, free to guests, and quite a good Indian restaurant. Best of all is the exquisite rooftop pool and bar area, which is busy through the day and past 2 a.m. most nights. A high season standard double starts at $170.

 

One of Beirut’s best-known marble-laden luxury hotels is the InterContinental Phoenicia (Ain el Mreisseh, downtown; 961-1-369-100; www.phoenicia-ic.com), a couple of blocks from the Palm Beach (many of the seaside hotels are clustered together). The rooms are quite spacious, and the hotel has a full-service spa, fitness center, indoor and outdoor pools, and restaurants. A double room starts at $420 in August.

 

Another luxury hotel, Le Gray (961-1-973-111; www.campbellgrayhotels.com), part of a group that includes One Aldwych in London and Carlisle Bay in Antigua, is scheduled to open in late September in the historic Solidere district in downtown Beirut. Rates for a double room will start at $390 a night.

 

For budget-minded travelers, among the comfortable options is the Bella Riva Suite Hotel (Caracas Street, Hamra; 961-1-754-343; www.bellarivahotel.com). Many of the rooms have a kitchenette and a small sitting-room area; the hotel also has a restaurant and coffee shop and privileges at a nearby beach resort and health club. A standard double during the summer starts at $85.

 

WHAT TO DO

 

Bardo, a gay bar and restaurant in Sanayeh, has emerged as a very popular gathering spot any night of the week. It is about 60 feet off Spears Road, about one block east of Sanayeh Gardens and almost directly across from the Haigazian University. As with many bars and clubs in Beirut, taxi drivers may know the spot simply by name.

 

Acid (961-3-714-678), a large gay disco in Beirut, in Sin El Fil next to the Futuroscope exhibition hall. Fridays and Saturdays are the busiest nights, especially after 1 a.m., with dancing past dawn.

 

Life Bar, a long, narrow bar in the Ashrafieh neighborhood on Liban Street behind the S.N.A. Building (pronounced “Sna”) is popular with gay and straight people. Particularly lively on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays before 11 p.m.

 

Wolf (beirut.wolfbars.com/contacts.html), a gay “bear” bar in Beirut, most lively on Friday and Saturday nights after 10 p.m. It’s on Mankhoul Street, in Hamra, very close to the American University of Beirut.

 

Saint-Georges Yacht Club (www.stgeorges-yachtclub.com), well marked near the InterContinental Phoenicia, is a popular hangout for gay men on Friday and Saturday afternoons (as is the rooftop pool of the Palm Beach Hotel). The large pool, nicely cushioned lounge chairs and well-staffed food and bar service are nice attributes as well. It costs $20 a day for entry for nonmembers.

 

The Beirut Art Center (off Emile Lahoud Avenue and across from the Beirut River, in Jisr El Wati; 961-70-262-112; www.beirutartcenter.org) is a major new year-round gallery space featuring Lebanese and international contemporary artists. Updated information on exhibitions here, as well as other cultural events in Beirut, can be found on the Arts page of The Daily Star, an English-language newspaper.

 

WHERE TO EAT

 

Centrale (Mar Maroun Street, Saifi; 961-1 -575-858; www.centralerestaurant.com) has drawn international attention for its stunning open-plan space, designed by the architect Bernard Khoury — one of many architectural delights in this postwar city. The cuisine is traditional French; the menu specializes in meats and seafood, and usually changes seasonally. Dinner for two is about $120 with wine.

 

For lovers of hummus, kebbe, kafta, grape leaves and other traditional Lebanese fare, it’s rather hard to go wrong, but one dependably strong restaurant with local flavors is Karam Beirut (Bazerkan Street, downtown; 961-1-991-222). The local olives and memorable baklava are bonuses. Lunch or dinner is about $35 for two.

 

 

PATRICK HEALY, a reporter for the Arts section of The Times, covers theater.

[Gaybutton]

Sounds good to me. You'll have a wonderful time . . . just before the kidnapping.

[Rogie]

For lovers of hummus, kebbe, kafta, grape leaves and other traditional Lebanese fare,

 

That reminds me Lebanon was famous for its Chateau Musar, a heavyweight red wine that was made even whilst the civil war was raging.

 

Not sure I'd like grape leaves, though.

 

Mind you, I used to enjoy eating grapes whole, seeds 'n all. Nowadays I cannot. 'Proper' grapes are hardly ever seen any more, in the UK at least.

 

Lebanon's been on my list of countries to visit for a while, so I enjoyed reading that article.

[Guest lvdkeyes]

Not sure I'd like grape leaves, though.

Grape leaves are stuffed with rice and/or beef/lamb and cooked in a broth and served with lemon juice over them. They are delicious.

[Rogie]

Grape leaves are stuffed with rice and/or beef/lamb and cooked in a broth and served with lemon juice over them. They are delicious.

 

Ah, that's better!