Sido Lansari’s visual essay can be read as a postscript to his short film Les derniers paradis. The film is about Sami, his protagonist from Casablanca. In the course of the film, Sami moves to Paris to live with his French boyfriend, Daniel, but he feels alienated and out of place in queer circles there. In his contribution, Lansari explores multiple fictional temporalities. His essay begins with analog photographs of the ruins of bars and abandoned pools in Casablanca, evoking Sami and his revisiting of the remnants of his youth in Morocco. Additionally, Lansari uses silhouettes taken from 1980s photos published in the French gay press as forms representing Arab bodies in the French gay imagination, reflecting what Sami might have continued to experience after his separation from Daniel. A quotation, possibly from Sami, is highlighted in oversized font. The images are punctuated by statements from the LAHZEM group taken from the journal Gai Pied from 1982-83, denouncing the discrimination faced by Arabs in French gay circles. Finally, his collage references the first nonfetishizing media representation of Arab gay men in 1989—an article on mixed couples (Arab and French men), in which Arab gay men openly shared their love lives for the first time.

Despite a historically rich tradition of thinking about the relation between sexuality, desire and revolution, there is little engagement with desire’s radicality today. This volume attends to the radicality of desire as a starting point for overcoming heteropatriarchal capitalism by turning to the specific radical homosexual critique as it was first formulated in France in the 1970s in the writings of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes and the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire, as well as in the conceptions of their most important protagonists, Monique Wittig and Guy Hocquenghem. Radical Desires seeks to emphasize the anti-identitarian character of the French gay liberation movement, as well as its implicit and explicit critique of gender and sexual binaries.

At the same time, the volume is also interested in intersectionally expanding this critique by confronting it with anticolonial and queer of color perspectives. As French gay liberation activists’ relations to North African men were often problematic, several contributions engage with the latent orientalist and racist tropes that appear in the movement’s writings. By aiming to go beyond a mere historicization of these ambivalences and exploring which contemporary problems appear in a different light as a result, Radical Desires highlights the (dis-)continuous relationship between current debates and those in 1970s France.

To explore the multiplicity of forms with or in which these critiques were expressed, the volume places theoretical perspectives in conversation with artistic perspectives on Queer liberation in a transnational context.

With contributions by Friederike Beier, Antoine Idier, Émilie Notéris, Lukas Betzler, Mohammad Shawky Hassan, Sido Lansari, Todd Shepard and Julian Volz.