Raed Rafei Read Bio Collapse
Raed Rafei is a Lebanese filmmaker, writer, and scholar. He is currently based in San Francisco, where he is finishing a PhD in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Mainstream historical accounts have long held that the sexual revolution and subsequent gay rights movements started in the 1960s in the US and Europe. What if we imagined Beirut as the heart of a queer revolution where anti-imperialist ideals and sexual freedoms are tightly interlinked? What would happen if we imagined, further, that this was an all-encompassing revolution for “the wretched of the earth”—one that sought a definitive break with Western, capitalist, heteropatriarchal ideologies and drew inspiration from premodern spiritual wisdoms? Pasolini, a colossal figure at the nexus of queer sexuality and radical leftist politics, could help us reconfigure the past along these lines and envision alternate futures.
A Museum of Immortality
