This paper analyses and critically discusses experiences and narratives of sexuality disclosure and concealment of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background living in Brussels. It does so by presenting data collected over a year of ethnographic research in the city. The "closet/coming out" metaphor is central in western discourses around LGBTQ identities and sexualities, and its wide circulation resulted in its conflations with a number of different meanings. Rather than simply being a descriptive metaphor, it comes to represent a linear, tautological, and normative path of LGBTQ liberation, leading the LGBTQ subject from an "in" of darkness and secrecy to an "out" of transparency and authenticity. Queer of colour scholars have noted how the metaphor, and the prescriptive path it traces, often fails to capture and understand the experiences of racialised LGBTQ people. Elaborating on queer of colour critiques to the normativity charted by coming out discourses, this paper argues for the unpacking and deconstruction of the binary and linear trajectory from "in" to "out" of the closet to understand the experiences of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background. In particular, it argues for a focus on silence as a productive site, on non-disclosure of sexuality as a functional strategy, and on the ways in which knowledge about sexualities can often circulate in tacit ways. As a result, the rigidity of the closet is disrupted, and its borders emerge as porous and flexible in the experiences of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background.

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This article examines the experiences of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background in their navigations of different areas of Brussels, and their narratives on such experiences. It builds on literature on the territorialization of homo/bi/transphobia to neighborhoods framed as “Muslim” in continental Western Europe, and the imagination of rigid borders separating these areas from other parts of the city. The article presents analysis of semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ people from a Muslim background on their experiences of these demarcations. The analysis of data calls for a deconstruction of rigid discourses of difference and division at work in the city. This allows for an understanding of the complex ways in which LGBTQ people from a Muslim background relate to different areas of the city, and how their multiple crossings into/from racialized-as-Muslim neighborhoods escape the rigidity of essentialized imaginations of the city along civilizational lines.

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