What We Built

In 2018, we partnered with BBC Arabia on a documentary bringing the Lebanese kink scene into public view for the first time, a real risk in a region where this kind of visibility rarely goes well. It's since been watched over 1.7 million times. The comment section, predictably, tells you more about the conservative landscape it was released into than it does about us: over 2,600 comments, most of them hostile. We're still proud we made it.

Watch the documentary →

Understanding exactly where the law stood mattered as much as any workshop we ran. In 2018, our members researched and presented a full breakdown of the Lebanese Penal Code as it applies to BDSM and kink, how the "morality" articles are structured, which ones carry real risk versus which are rarely enforced, and what rights someone actually has if they're ever questioned or arrested. It traced the code back to its 1940s French-occupation origins, mapped out the specific articles that could touch our community, and turned all of it into plain, practical guidance: know your rights, know what not to say, know who to call. That knowledge stayed in the community long after the workshop ended.

One of the more overlooked ways CedarGardens contributed to the conversation was research. In partnership with the community, students of the Lebanese American University conducted a study on attachment, personality, and reflective functioning within the Lebanese BDSM community, comparing 107 BDSM-identified participants against a control group of 108. The findings pushed back against a persistent stereotype: there was no significant difference in attachment style or capacity for mentalization between the BDSM group and the control group, and it was the control group, not the BDSM group, that scored higher on markers of borderline personality traits. It was a small study, but a meaningful one: real data, gathered in Lebanon, treating the question of who practices BDSM and why with the seriousness it deserved.

Partnering with the Lebanese Medical Association for Sexual Health (LebMASH), we built a vetted list of over 60 healthcare practitioners across Lebanon who were kink-aware or kink-friendly, so members didn't have to choose between honesty with a doctor and their own privacy. The list was always private to protect the practitioners on it, and with most of our community having since left the country, it's no longer maintained. It stands as a record of what we tried to do.