Homophobia Without Borders: Dismantling Homophobia’s Architecture in Cairo’s Bathhouse Raid and Berlin’s Rave Crackdown

This chapter explores the shared architecture of homophobic repression across borders, through a comparative lens on two events: the 2001 police raid of a gay bathhouse in Cairo and the 2021 crackdown on queer rave spaces in Berlin.

While the political regimes differ greatly, both cases reveal how states target queer subcultural life—spaces of desire, intimacy, and resistance—as sites of social disorder.

Drawing on personal insight and activist histories, the chapter shows how queer nightlife and cruising cultures not only bear the brunt of moral panics and state control, but also act as barometers for authoritarian tides. In tracing these parallels, the text calls for a transnational queer feminist solidarity that resists both local repression and its global echoes.

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