History didn’t forget Palestine’s queerness—it erased it. Beneath centuries of empire and colonization lies a land once alive with gods in eyeliner, lovers defying gender, and dancers turning worship into art. Long before borders and scripture, this place told stories where thunder desired and love remade the world.

By the Bronze Age, in what became ancient Canaan—whose Indigenous culture is most remembered in the early history of Palestine and the Levant—queerness was divine. Melqart, the storm god of the sea, embodied beauty and power. His beloved Eshmun, a mortal healer, became immortal when he died and was reborn through Melqart’s grief. Each spring’s return marked their reunion. 

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From the Phoenician coast to the valleys of ancient Palestine, people honored them with festivals of music and offerings. Their story celebrated devotion strong enough to overcome death.

Those festivals were theatre and theology at once. Priests and temple attendants lined their eyes with kohl, draped themselves in fine clothes, and reenacted the lovers’ return. Among them were gallim—eunuch-priests of Astarte and Atargatis—whose voices rose in song as they danced through states of divine possession. 

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Midway through the rites, they shed one set of garments for another: linen robes revealing jeweled belts, veils turning into crowns, their bodies shifting between feminine and masculine adornment. Transformation itself was the ritual act—their fluidity a channel for the goddess’s own changing form, a sacred performance rather than transgression.

In the coastal towns, traveling musicians known as hazzanim – precursors to later cantors – composed songs for weddings and harvest feasts where men sang verses to one another as ritualized praise. Bronze-Age reliefs from Megiddo and Lachish show paired dancers with braided hair and mirrored adornments, moving in postures of courtship rather than battle. In the incense-lit shrines of Asherah, lovers—regardless of gender—offered honey and wine together as vows of mutual protection. 

Desire was not a boundary but a bridge; to touch was to participate in creation itself.

Successive empires imposed their own hierarchies on the region, but none erased its older ways of embodying the sacred. From Assyrian and Babylonian rule through Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic eras, local traditions adapted rather than disappeared. Each culture held its own relationship to gender and desire—some celebratory, others repressive—but traces of fluid devotion endured beneath them all. 

As anthropologist Dionigi Albera notes, “the history of this region has been characterized by a long-term proliferation of traffic, contacts, and borrowings,” showing how ritual and belief persisted through change. 

By the time the British arrived, Palestine had endured millennia of transformation, yet echoes of these embodied and poetic expressions of queerness still shaped how people understood holiness, the body, and love.

The gender-fluid rites once performed by temple attendants found echoes in the ecstatic spirituality of Sufi dhikr circles and village festivals, where movement, song, and trance blurred distinctions between body and spirit. Though not explicitly queer in doctrine, Sufi practice often created space for fluid expression and same-gender intimacy within devotion. 

Mystics such as Ibn Arabi and Rumi wrote of divine love in terms that transcended gender—where the soul could be both lover and beloved, feminine in surrender and masculine in passion. Palestinian folk poetry and song carried the same undercurrent of longing, expressing affection between friends and companions in tender, gender-ambiguous verse. The forms of devotion changed, but the emotional register endured: queer desire remained a path to the sacred. 

Modern queer Palestinians continue that lineage. Rauda Morcos, a poet from Akka and the first openly lesbian Palestinian public figure, founded Aswat – Palestinian Feminist Center for Gender and Sexual Freedoms in 2003. Based in Haifa, Aswat (“Voices”) became the first organization for queer Palestinian women, creating publications, workshops, and spaces for community and expression. Morcos’ poetry turns love into endurance, writing of language, body, and desire as acts of freedom. Her work appears in Poets for Palestine (2008) and other anthologies that link intimacy to resistance.

Scholar Sa’ed Atshan, in Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, describes how queer Palestinians use care as resistance. He writes that they “embody both critique and care as intertwined projects of liberation.” For them, affection is survival under occupation.

Western headlines often label Palestine “a land of homophobes.” That narrative ignores both history and present reality. Queer Palestinians have always created networks of art and kinship despite repression. In Haifa drag shows, Ramallah studios, and diaspora collectives, they continue the creative defiance once seen in Melqart’s temples—beauty as protest, intimacy as freedom.

Recovering these stories is not invention but restoration. Queerness in Palestine is native to the land, older than empire or dogma. When someone claims queerness is “un-Palestinian,” remember the storm god who wept his lover back to life, the dancers who changed form to honor the divine, and the poets who turned survival into song.

Queerness did not begin with modern activism. It began here—with desire strong enough to shape the seasons, with ritual that made transformation holy, with love that refused to disappear. History tried to erase it. The land never did.

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