Imagine yourself as a man in Lebanon today. You may be a civilian. You may be a combatant. In either case, you'd have little room to struggle for the right of sexual autonomy, for you are too busy dodging bombs, bullets, and what have you. It seems to me that, in many parts of the world, the struggle for bare survival takes precedence, for without that you can't live to struggle for anything else.
It's another story, of course, here in the West, where we have relative peace and prosperity that allow us to fight for many things beyond survival, especially since our political forebears already achieved many things that the rest of the world have not. That is our privilege, but we can't assume that everyone in the world has the same privilege.
> Also, since queers are found across the political spectrum, it is
> often difficult to forge agreement among ourselves on things other
> than queer issues. We just do not agree.
The more rights and freedoms queers win in a given country, the less agreement among them there will be in it. There is nothing like success that dissolves the foundation for identity politics.
Across the economic border that divides the global North and the global South, there are even less grounds for queer solidarity. Gay men and lesbians who adopt the Western sense of sexual identities in the global South tend to come from the elite strata, whereas queers in the global North tend to come from a wider range of economic classes and strata. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>