Photo Book Revives Beirut’s Forgotten Transgender History
Studio shoots, interviews and archive photos: A new book documents the untold stories of 11 trans women living in Beirut and rewrites the queer history of the Lebanese capital.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya reports over at Huck:
As the founder of Cold Cuts, a magazine documenting queer histories from across South-West Asia and North Africa, [Muhamand] Abdouni, a photographer, filmmaker and visual artist, has spent half a decade capturing the lives of LGBTQ+ people in areas where discrimination is high and records of queerness, non-existent.
His latest project, Treat Me Like Your Mother, builds on this already extensive body of work by documenting the previously untold stories of 11 trans women living in Beirut.
We need to be aware of our own history. I grew up without any access to queer records, which means I essentially grew up without any sort of representation of what I am, who I am, or who my community is.
Abdouni’s photos of Lebanese transgender women are inspired by the glamour of old Lebanese photo studios.
Archive photos from the 1980s og 90s reveal Lebanese drag balls. Abdouni explains:
“We had no idea that balls existed throughout the ’80s and ’90s in Lebanon. Obviously we knew they were happening in Harlem, but we were always under the impression that it was something that we’d appropriated later on. But the fact that we have our own history of ball culture, different to the one in the States, is mind-blowing.”
Read the whole article here!
In an interview with The Strange Fire Collective Abdouni talks about Cold Cuts:
Cold Cuts is the photo journal exploring queer culture and the Middle East. It began as a passion project, a visual collaboration between friends and photographers, which then developed into a queer Arab and Middle Eastern publication out of a combination of growth and necessity. Representation of queer Middle Eastern cultures was lacking in accuracy, substance and dignity, so Cold Cuts became an organically home-grown platform for queer histories and narratives.
The Cold Cuts site has more photos from the book.
See also: Mohamad Abdouni’s web site.
Photos by and from Mohamad Abdouni.
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