BEIRUT - Do not think of Beirut, Lebanon, as an austere, Middle Eastern backwater calcified by tradition. Don’t think that it’s a city tearing itself to pieces with psychotic homegrown militias. It is no steel and glass petro-metropolis that decided only yesterday to graft skyscrapers and shopping malls on top of a Bedouin culture. Nor is it a shambling ancient metropolis with covered souks and snaking footpaths. As a city it is younger than most. As an Arab city it is more modern, more cosmopolitan, and more progressive than any other. Beirut has been called the Paris of the Middle East. But that isn’t right. Beirut is the Amsterdam of the Middle East.

Here is where the taboos in the region—against alcohol, sex, scandalous clothing, dating, homosexuality, body modification, free speech, and religion—break down. Its culture is liberal and tolerant, even anarchic and libertarian. The state barely exists. Its pleasures are physical and decadent. It is where Saudis and other Gulf Arabs like to vacation because they can do, think, wear, and say whatever they want while they’re there.

It has been this way for some time. Beirut is where Americans used to go to loosen up, gamble, drink booze, and pick up hookers—and that was in the 1950s. Lebanon has had a rough thirty years, though, and its old reputation has been mostly forgotten. Civil war followed by occupation and de facto annexation by Syria’s military dictatorship haven’t done this place any favors.

Not that it mattered much as far as the nightlife was concerned. Beirut partied hard even during the black years of the war. “We would have war right over there,” one Lebanese person told me as he pointed across the street. “Right here,” he said, meaning our side of the street, “we would have a party.” Thomas Friedman captured the wild contradiction best in From Beirut to Jerusalem when he quoted a dinner party host in West Beirut who asked her guests a serious question: “Would you like to eat now or wait for the ceasefire?”

Nightclubs, like the hundreds of remaining war-shattered buildings, are strewn from one end of Beirut to another. But most are clustered on or around Monot Street, the former Green Line that separated East Beirut from West Beirut during the war.

The Green Line was the frontline. Lebanese Christians were corralled into their own religious canton on one side of the line while Muslims were shoved onto the other. Nothing lived on the Green Line but rats and wild grass pushing up through the rubble. Choosing that street in particular to party hardest during the peace years fits Lebanon’s personality perfectly. It’s a way to forget the dark past, to defy it, to transform Hell into Heaven.

Monot Street is a deliberate will to amnesia. One nightclub near the Port of Beirut attracts those who relish drinking and dancing in a morbid environment. B018 was built entirely underground. From the street it looks like nothing more than a parking lot—get out of the car and look closer. When you descend the black-painted stairwell and step through the ominous metal gate at the bottom you enter a subterranean club scene that looks like it was fashioned out of a derelict bunker.

Chairs at the bar are shaped like coffins. Pictures of dead people alight every table. Eerily lit blood-red velvet curtains hang from the walls. The ceiling is low— almost too low—on purpose. When the club is packed to capacity it can induce acute and cloying claustrophobia. At some point in the night, though, the mechanical roof opens up to the stars. If Lestat were Lebanese, he would hang out here.

Beirut’s alternative set certainly does. Here is where you’ll find bull-dyke lesbians and men with long hair and pierced eyebrows. It is as far removed from the right-wing culture of the mullahs, the Bedouins, and the Gulf Arabs as you can get in the Middle East without going to Tel Aviv. Beirutis don’t build places like this one for tourists. They build places like this for themselves.

And they’re incredibly popular. Don’t even think of getting in the door on a Friday or Saturday night unless you make reservations. It’s not that there aren’t enough tables—there isn’t enough space.

The Middle East is perhaps the most homophobic place in the world. But that doesn’t stop Beirut from opening gay nightclubs. At the gay-friendly establishment UV just off Monot Street you’ll find straight couples as well as gay men are on dates or looking to score. At Orange Mecanique (French for Clockwork Orange), if you’re a straight man you might feel a little less comfortable and have a lot less luck with Beirut’s lavish ladies. Don’t even think of going to Acid if you aren’t gay and looking to pick someone up.

The club scene is not just for kids. Plenty of forty- and fifty-year-olds hang out with the youngest and hippest. And they don’t all look out of place. But because some of them do feel out of place, they went and built their own club—Music Hall in the Starco Building—where the middle-aged set can get down and boogie without feeling self-consciously stuck in arrested adolescence.

Monot Street is considered the hottest nightclub strip in the Middle East. It has been repaired and reconstructed as has much of downtown. But the city is still laced with bullet-pocked and mortar-shattered towers, constant warnings that any of this, or even all of it, could be lost at any time. And it is not all ancient history. The destruction wrought in the past resonates powerfully in the present.

In late November Hezbollah guerillas in South Lebanon launched attacks inside Israel. The Israeli Defense Forces responded with a furious barrage of air strikes all along the border, the most vigorous counterassault inside Lebanon since they withdrew their occupation forces five years ago.

The St. George Hotel in downtown Beirut, along with many buildings around it, is still a twisted wreck from the 650-pound truck bomb exploded by Syria that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February. The area remains a crime scene wrapped in yellow police tape and guarded by soldiers with machine guns. Since Hariri was killed and the democratic (and subsequently victorious) Cedar Revolution broke out, a terrifying wave of car bombs and follow-up assassinations brought every repressed yet vivid bad memory of trauma and pain back to surface.

Peacetime in Lebanon is not what most countries think of as peacetime.
Leave it to the Lebanese to literally fight bloody mayhem and chaos by having a wonderful time. On Independence Eve, November 21, the XOM nightclub threw a “Dance Mine Action” party to raise money to help rid Lebanon of its 500,000 remaining land mines. “Do it for Humanity,” said the advertisement.

Beirut is nothing if it isn’t fun. But an aura of doom hangs over this place like the mythical Sword of Damocles. Even the Buddha Bar, one of Beirut’s most glamorous nightclubs, is a place where a mob hit or assassination would hardly seem out of place. Men barging in with machine guns wouldn’t turn heads unless they actually started shooting at people.

Fatalism pervades every aspect of culture in Lebanon—even when it comes to mundane things like driving a car.

Go ahead and drive drunk if you want. Everyone else does. It is punished neither by law nor by stigma. Seatbelts are openly scoffed at. Some taxi drivers remove them from their cars altogether. Some who haven’t will gruffly say, “Take that off” the instant they hear the click of the latch from the back seat. One of my drunk-driving Lebanese friends gave me no end of grief for fastening mine as he weaved his way at top speed down the road toward my apartment after the bars closed just before dawn.

If you enjoy a shot of adrenaline with your whiskey or arak, Beirut is your place.

The clubs on the Christian side of the city are hipper and more fashionable than those on the Muslim side, but the Muslim side is starting to catch up. The just-opened and self-described “leftist bar” De Prague has the ambience of a quiet, intellectual café by day, but turns into a pulse-pounding, hard-boozing club scene at night.

Muslims enjoy the pleasures of venues such as Fusion, Basement, Casino, and Crystal just as much the Christians do. Members of Hezbollah, Lebanon’s “Party of God,” wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those places even if the destruction of Israel depended on it. But high-ranking members of Amal, the other main Shia political party and gun-toting militia, not only visit the clubs; they own some of them.

They play music too loud in this city. It drowns out all thought and makes conversation with others impossible. But at times that’s just the right touch. Thinking too much in Beirut can be disconcerting. Sometimes getting drunk and going blotto in decadence is just what people need.

And the clubs are certainly decadent, especially by the standards of the Middle East. You can’t imagine how physical and erotic they are unless you first scrub every image of bearded mullahs and veiled women out of your head. Some of the most beautiful and attractive people you will ever see in your life order tray after tray of shots while dancing, flirting, hugging, kissing, toasting, gyrating, and drowning in Eastern/Western fusion techno music. The sheer ecstasy and joy of these places is made all the more poignant by the very real and sometimes unbearable forces of history bearing down on the people who live here.

Beirutis, more than any other people I know, live in the Now. And they have something to teach us: life not only should be, but can be, fun to the bitter end. They dance on the rim of a volcano. What else can they do? They live in one hell of a rough neighborhood, and it’s just who they are. If fifteen years of war followed by another fifteen of foreign military dictatorship could not crush Beirut’s spirit, it’s unlikely that anything short of the end of their civilization ever will.


Michael J. Totten is based in Beirut, Lebanon. His work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the LA Weekly, Tech Central Station, and Beirut’s Daily Star. Visit his daily Web log at http://MichaelTotten.com .