It feels unfathomable that five years have already passed. It was my 24th birthday when I woke up to the news. Sarah Hegazi, an Egyptian queer feminist, had taken her life in exile. The kind of grief that followed didn’t register in the dominant ‘language’ of mourning. There was no obituary to sign, no family structure that could explain why her death hurt the way it did. But when Sarah died, something broke open inside me, or rather, a rupture that I have since come to understand through what scholar and artist Pavithra Prasad names ‘minor’ grief: a form of queer mourning that sits in the shadow of the grand narratives of loss.
I didn’t know Sarah personally. And yet, I did. Or rather, I recognized her. In her smile, in the defiance of that rainbow flag she held up at the Mashrou’ Leila concert, in the quiet courage of her words, in the unbearable weight of the backlash. This wasn’t a typical mourning; it was a collective wound, one that queer people across geographies carried without needing to explain ourselves to one another. That particular kind of grief—the unspoken, unrecognized kind—isn’t always attached to someone we “had.” It is attached to someone we felt with, someone whose gesture cracked open something in us. As Sara Ahmed reminds us: queer loss may not count because it precedes a relation of having. The relation itself is unacknowledged, so the grief is rendered unintelligible. But still, it lingers.
Sarah was arrested in 2017 for waving a rainbow flag at a Mashrou’ Leila concert in Cairo. She smiled in that moment before the state crushed her with imprisonment, electric shocks, solitary confinement, and sexual violence. Her only real “crime” was to be visible, and in being visible, to gesture toward the possibility of queer life in Egypt, in the Arab world. But what the state punished wasn’t just a flag; it was a symbol of defiance against a wider system that survives by creating enemies within. Regimes like Egypt’s turned queer people into a threat—“vices” blamed for corrupting the youth, religion, and family. Sarah’s visibility disrupted the fragile order that states try to maintain, where queerness is treated as disposable, ungrievable, and dangerous. Her being didn’t just challenge Egyptian authoritarianism, but the global structures that police queer life—whether through prisons or anti-queer policies dressed in the language of safety and security.
Sarah’s legacy is not just in the image of the rainbow flag. It’s in the invisible threads of intimacy she wove with people like me, with people she never met, but who nonetheless mourn her today
That said, Sarah’s legacy is not just in the image of the rainbow flag. It’s in the invisible threads of intimacy she wove with people like me, with people she never met, but who nonetheless mourn her today. It lives in gestures of love: the act of waving a flag despite the threat, the decision to speak about torture when silence might have been safer, the fractured presence of joy inside unbearable pain. Her death was not an exception. It was a reminder of our queer melancholia, not a symptom of dysfunction, but a political force that arises from our abjection and animates our refusal to give in. This grief is not redemptive; it makes it bearable and survivable. What these regimes miss is that this pain that circulates through queer ‘families’ are not weaknesses to overcome but practices of healing and worldmaking on the margins. It is a grief shared by chosen families, through mundane acts of care, that connect all of us queer folk from Beirut to Cairo, Damascus, Gaza, and everywhere. We feel it in the silences, in the unfinished sentences, in the heaviness between us and that is imposed on us.
The grief I talk about today in Sarah’s memory does not align with the aesthetics of pride that dominate our timelines each June. It is political. It is a form of collective knowledge. And from that grief—quiet, minor, persistent—we learn to forge new ways of relating and caring. What we grieve is not only losing Sarah, but the fragile infrastructures that failed to hold her. The unpaid labors of care, the exhaustion of sustaining one another without institutional support, the refusal to assimilate—all of it points to a deeper question. If this grief teaches us how we survive together, might it also help us imagine how we could live differently?
To be queer is to understand and grapple with socioeconomic violence, not in isolation, but as it interlocks with colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism. It is to be grounded in class struggle, as Sarah told us and wrote to us, because queerness does not float above material life; it is shaped by it, punished through it, and sometimes survives in spite of it.
As many queer thinkers have shown, sexuality isn’t separate from the economy. It’s shaped by class, by labor, by who has what and who doesn’t. During times of crisis, the way sexuality is controlled or punished often shifts. Late scholar Christopher Chitty explained that what we now call “homosexuality” wasn’t always a fixed identity—it came out of specific changes in how wealth and land were organized, how cities grew, and how people lost traditional ways of living. Queer life, in many ways, emerged in the cracks left by these disruptions. But while the wealthy could often protect themselves, working class queer people were made targets, seen as immoral, deviant, or dangerous. In that sense, sexuality became another way to decide who gets excluded, who gets punished, and who gets to belong. Sarah’s death exposes this contradiction. She was made disposable and ungrievable. Her refusal to apologize, her refusal to assimilate—all of these made her incompatible with the category of acceptable queerness.
Sarah reminds us that the violence she faced, and queer people face at large, was not just institutional; it was familial, social, and classed
One of Sarah Hegazi’s final writings before leaving us cuts through the cultural myths of class in Egypt and beyond. Sarah reminds us that the violence she faced, and queer people face at large, was not just institutional; it was familial, social, and classed.
In Egypt, and across the region, queer lives are not only culturally repressed or criminalized by the state; they are often first punished within the very institutions meant to provide care: families, neighborhoods, and even schools. As Sarah wrote, the middle class in particular plays a central role in reproducing patriarchy and enabling authoritarianism, clinging to social status, discipline, and conformity. But these same middle-class structures—built on salaried jobs, home ownership, respectability—are increasingly collapsing under economic duress. Debt, unemployment, and war do not only destabilize economies; they unravel families, sever kin ties, and push queer people into precarity or exile. For many, such a crisis is not only financial. It is also intimate and structural. It means losing shelter, being forced to migrate, or turning to chosen kin for survival. And so when we talk about “the economy,” we must talk about queerness—not as an add-on, but as central to how crisis is lived and governed. Especially now, when the language of freedom and rights is often co-opted by regimes that bomb, displace, and disappear. Perhaps the fall of the middle class dream can open space for new forms of care and resistance that do not depend on patriarchal families, the salaried job, or states’ conditional protection.
Five years ago, Sarah Hegazi was stolen from us. Not by death alone, but by a system that renders queer life unlivable unless we bend and mute. But Sarah didn’t
As I turn 29, I’m marking time, measuring it against all we’ve lost, and all we continue to build in the ruins. Five years ago, Sarah Hegazi was stolen from us. Not by death alone, but by a system that renders queer life unlivable unless we bend and mute. But Sarah didn’t. And so today, I grieve. I grieve for the world that couldn’t hold her, the economies that exile us, the families that betray us, and the movements that still don’t know what to do with our grief unless it’s performable.
But I also hold that grief as a kind of inheritance, one of clarity. A queer, materialist clarity that tells me: our lives are not marginal. They are central to this world’s dysfunction, and to its possible reimagining. Sarah’s smile, her writing, her resistance were not exceptions. Rather, they were blueprints. For a life where care is not extracted, where ‘family’ is not contingent on normativity, where love is not punished by poverty, and where refusal is not only mourned, but remembered as a form of labor. If I carry anything with me into this next year, it is this: I will not ask this world for permission to grieve, to rage, or to dream. I will join the long, unfinished work of building the world that could have saved Sarah and might still save us.
Hossein Cheaito is a former Nonresident Fellow at TIMEP focusing on governance and economic development in Lebanon. He is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute, where his research focuses on the intersections of debt, gender, and sexuality in Lebanon.