© Jessie Deeter

Through the machine-pumped smoke the figure reveals itself to the crowd, hips writhing in circles, hands "voguing" as the ringing Arabic music picks up the pace. Cheers go up as Mousbah turns to face the audience, a long silver chain whipping around his neck as he dances.

There is no mistaking the man in the tight white polyester pants and long filmy white-with-silver-patches v-necked shirt beneath the haze. A patch of dark chest hair is visible from the third row. This is what they came for.

Everyone knows Mousbah Baalbaki, Lebanon's only male belly dancer.

His parents thought that he should play football. They told young Mousbah that belly dancing was not for men. Traditionally, belly dancing was reserved for whores and harem girls, not women from respectable families, and certainly not men. Although Lebanon is a modern country of several faiths, it is still grounded in tradition, and Mousbah came from a traditional Sunni Muslim family in the South of Lebanon, the most traditional part of the country. Nonetheless, from pre-adolescence the Lebanese boy always felt the rhythm. Ever since he followed his mother and sisters to parties full of Arabic music and dancing, all he wanted to do was dance.

It wasn't a popular decision. "Here we grow up thinking men shouldn't dance Arabic," says 27-year-old Mousbah Baalbaki. Wearing a striped tee-shirt, long shorts and sunglasses on his head, gripping a cell phone in one hand, Mousbah looks more like a handsome Lebanese businessman than what he is, a dancer causing a small revolution. He stands with one foot in Europe and one in the traditions of his homeland.

Like Lebanon, he is on the brink of a new and exciting relationship with the rest of the world but like Lebanon, he has difficulties breaking with the traditions of his ancestors. After 15 years of a devastating civil war, the Lebanese are trying to leave their dark age behind by making Beirut once more the hippest place to be in the Middle East, a sister city to Paris.

Beiruti nightlife, which runs seven nights a week, is comprised of underground grave-like nightclubs and bars whose lifespan is measured in months. It's a world full of smoldering young girls smoking and trying to maintain looks of casual disinterest as they talk to their equally young suitors.

They may look and act like their Parisian counterparts, but the Lebanese still inhabit a world in which everyone is identified by religion-and no self-respecting Lebanese religion makes room for gays. Even today, if you ask most Lebanese on the streets what they think of homosexuality, they will tell you that it does not exist in their country.

Growing up, Mousbah was torn between his need to dance and respect for a conservative mother who could never approve of such a thing. In a country where both concubinage and homosexuality are still illegal on paper, Mousbah wanted to be sure that his mother would not find out. Not only about his job but also about his sexuality. He still hasn't told his mother that he's gay.

"When I was little I thought I was the only one in the whole country being gay-you think people will hate you," says Mousbah, whose father died without knowing that his son was gay. Raised in the conservative town of Sidon, the dancer was brought up in a Muslim household in which the possibility of being gay, no less a gay dancer, was never discussed.

In Middle Eastern culture, where the men are still meant to be manly and women submissive, being a man who dances and lip-syncs to lyrics bemoaning his broken heart requires a lot of courage. Baalbaki says that although he has been out in Beirut since his student days at the Lebanese American University, he hasn't told his mother yet that he is gay because he doesn't want to hurt her. "She heard a rumor that I was doing a strip show and I told her I was working in a bar as a cashier--my mom would not accept that her son dances in a club," he says. Although he is comfortable with his gay identity Baalbaki stressed that his message isn't about being gay. "I'm trying to prove that a man can do it, can dance in this society," he said. "I don't like to be referred to as a gay dancer, a lot of people say because I'm gay I dance Arabic, but it has nothing to do with my sexuality." He points to his chest and says, "As you see me physically I'm a man-when I'm performing on stage you see a male dancer." He continues, "I don't like to dress like a woman when I dance because I don't want to give the wrong idea-I am a man." Male or no, Baalbaki has mastered the provocative nature of his art. "Arabic dancing is seduction," he says.

And it is a seduction every week on stage at Amor Y Libertad, the Cuban-style nightclub in a Beirut suburb where he performs. He wiggles his hips seductively at the men and women in the front row, blue eye shadow and glittered cheeks sparkling. The men laugh self-consciously and look around the room as if to say that they are not too enchanted by the dervish on the stage. Most of the crowd, a mixture of men and women ranging from their early 20's to their late 40's, is dancing along with Mousbah, clapping to the beat as he mouths the lyrics of the woman singing about the man who broke her heart.

If you get up close to the stage, you can even smell Mousbah's potent perfume. In 20 minutes, the show is over. Although it's not a drag show, it's the closest thing to a good drag act you'll find in Lebanon. "If he dances that well he has to be gay," said one spectator. It was exactly the kind of comment that makes Mousbah angry. "As a belly dancer, you can criticize my performance, my dancing, but not who I am," he said.

Twenty-two year old student Wael Natour, an admirer and acquaintance, admits being torn by two contradictory feelings: "I think he is a great dancer but I don't want to hang out with him too much. Lebanon is such a small country," he said. "People will start gossiping and think that I am gay."

"In Europe I'll be more a hit than here-even now men are very sarcastic, they can't accept it," said Mousbah of his Lebanese fans. He hopes one day to have international success, and expects that countries with more "Western" points of view will appreciate his art more than Lebanon, where he has yet to reach national icon status. With a video coming out soon, Mousbah expects that he will soon have to face the music at home too. Although an English-language Lebanese newspaper did a story on him, his mother never read it. He doesn't think that he can keep her away from her television, though.