Bekhsoos is tagged as pornographic content and blocked in Tunisia using McAfee’s SmartFilter web filtering software.. To help your friends in Arab countries that censor… more »
Lead Story
Meem EroTICs at the Internet Governance Forum
Last week, I went to Vilnius, Lithuania to represent the Lebanon team of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC)’s Exploratory Research Project into… more »
Bits
Queers and their Online Spaces: a Research Project
For the past year, a team of researchers have been looking at the relationship between the internet and the queer rights movement in… more »
Lead Story
On Censorship
Hello again friends. Missed us last week? We weren’t able to publish on time. But we’re making up for it with a packed issue that actually has more Arabic than English pieces – which is a first for us. The reason is that we have a top-notch new Arabic editor, aphrodite, who is working hard to assign, edit, and write articles in Arabic. She puts me to shame with her on-the-spot working skills versus my procrastinating expertise. As soon as news of Bekhsoos’s re-launch came out a couple of weeks ago, tweeters and bloggers from different Arab cities reported that the website, along with many gay-themed websites, was blocked.
Editorial
The Evolution of Us
This is the new Bekhsoos. We’re back after almost a whole year of no publishing. So what’s different? For one thing, we’ve decided to publish weekly. Yes, that’s a huge commitment, which is why we’ve added the little “beta” yellow icon next to our logo. We’re testing this new idea. We’re putting ourselves to the challenge of publishing at least 5-6 articles weekly because we want to be on top of information technology today. The idea of Bekhsoos.com started out (exactly 2 years ago) as a replacement for a “real” print magazine. Today, and with the way information sharing has evolved, it is clear to me that Bekhsoos actually belongs online. That’s where young LGBTs in Lebanon are looking…