Berlin's Arab Queer Community Builds Space Through Drag, Music and Shared Belonging

On October 30, in Berlin, the drag performer Hassandra took the stage as Elissa, the Lebanese pop star, at the third ADIRA Drag Festival. The theme this year was "Who's Your Diva?!" Performers paid tribute to figures from across the Eastern Mediterranean who have become queer icons, among them the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, the Turkish star Bülent Ersoy and the Lebanese pop singer Haifa Wehbe.

The festival belongs to ADIRA, a Berlin collective that organizes events and club nights celebrating queer Arab* culture. The asterisk is deliberate: it includes ethnic minorities who are not Arab, and people with varied identities and roots in Southwest Asia and North Africa. The name comes from Levantine queer slang. An adira is someone with a strong presence, powerful and accomplished.

Hassandra, who uses the pronoun "they" and works as a performance artist, drag performer, DJ and organizer, founded ADIRA in 2023 with Zuher Jazmati, a Syrian-German DJ and cultural producer who performs as xanax_attax. The collective runs panel discussions, performances and music events, all built around collective participation and community-building.

The choice of Elissa was not an obvious tribute. Speaking to DW before the show, Hassandra described her discography as romantic, raw and soft, "very Adele vibes." Her personality, they said, is the opposite: feisty, blunt, unfiltered. Elissa has spoken out on Lebanese politics and has publicly backed LGBTQ+ communities in the Middle East. She has also repeatedly caused controversy across the Arab world with her positions on other political questions. Hassandra's performance takes on that contradiction, tapping into what they called her controversial political opinions.

That is the point of the theme. "As queer people, we tend to idealize a lot of pop divas," Hassandra said, "but these pop divas are very imperfect in their nature." The show revisits their legacies through a more critical lens, and Hassandra wants that habit to travel beyond the stage: no one should blindly follow any politician, political party, pop diva or activist.

Hassandra was born in Beirut in 1994 and studied theater and stage acting at the Lebanese University. They moved to Berlin in 2017, at 22. They call it an impulsive decision, but add that Lebanon's economic situation was bad and getting worse. In Berlin they became involved in the independent art scene and queer nightlife, and drag became another way to express themself. Their performances mix theatrical intensity, political humor, grotesque aesthetics and moments of tenderness, and they question conventional ideas of gender and identity. Recurring subjects are home, nostalgia, displacement and queer Arab culture.

The context for this year's festival is heavy. Islamophobia and homophobia are rising alongside the far right, and spaces like ADIRA offer Arab queer people belonging and support. In July, an Islamist terrorist attack struck Berlin's Christopher Street Day pride parade, and the attack was deadly. Afterward Hassandra felt caught between identities. As an Arab queer person, they said, "you fall in this position where then you start receiving a lot of racism."

Their response is double. Queer Arabs, Hassandra said, should say they are sad about what happened and also reject the racism that followed. They described the Arab community as being used as a punching bag for many things happening in the country. Rather than let the attack feed hatred, they said, "we should make Germany a safer place for everyone to live in. There's place for everyone. It's a huge country." The interview was conducted by Gönna Ketels.