Around midnight, upstairs in a small club in Manhattan, the pitchblack dance floor resounded with the rapid stomps and warbling, high-energy cries of the dabke, an Arab folk dance .

When the strobe lights flashed, they revealed a sea of raised hands. “I can understand so many conversations going on right now,” a Fashion Institute of Technology student shouted over the music, shaking his hips to the belly-dance beat. “But you wouldn’t want me to translate. It’s all dirty. Dirty Arabic.”

This was a recent Saturday night at Habibi, a floating monthly dance party of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Arabs in New York.

In a city that seems to offer activities for every conceivable gay subculture, Habibi is perhaps the only opportunity in New York for gay people of Middle Eastern descent to interact openly in an organized setting.

“In New York there’s nowhere I can come to and cry, so to speak,” said Amir, 27, a nurse from Saudi Arabia who lives in Brooklyn. “Habibi is a welcoming community.”

Lately, Habibi, now in its nomadic ninth year, has made its home at Club Rush in the Chelsea neighborhood. Its founder, Abraham, spins the tunes as the mob dances to Middle Eastern pop.

Habibi, the Arabic word for my beloved, is a sort of stepchild of a more serious-minded group called the Gay and Lesbian Arab Society. Abraham, a former accountant in his 40s with a shaved head and smoky accent, was one of the society’s cofounders.

“It got big, which is not always a good thing, because you have all nationalities of the Middle East,” said Abraham, who is of Syrian and Palestinian descent, grew up in Kuwait and now lives in the Queens neighborhood. Like others interviewed for this article, he spoke on the condition that his last name not be used.

“The Egyptians want to hang out with the Egyptians, the Moroccans want to hang out with the Moroccans, et cetera. This is always a problem you have with Arabs,” he said.

“Habibi blends everybody. It breaks down as many walls as possible. You have everyone in the same room dancing.”

The society’s ranks, meanwhile, continued to thin. “I think around 2004, it was the Internet that really did it,” said Nadeem, an Iraqi Christian who served as the society’s president from 2000 to 2004, when it stopped meeting (its Web site remains active). “Habibi is so successful, one, because it’s a business and Abraham really treats it like one, and two, the idea of a party entices people more.”

Gay Muslims, at least as much as adherents of other faiths, face hurdles reconciling their religion with their sexuality. At the city’s biggest mosque and one of its most progressive, the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, the imam, Mohammad Shamsi Ali, laid out what amounted to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

He said gays and lesbians were welcome at his mosque . “But we don’t need to know about their sex lives,” he said.

Habibi, which has attracted as many as 300 guests, brings together Arabs of all social levels - at once a blessing and a source of its own discrimination.

“In Dubai, everyone is bisexual,” a 22-year-old Columbia University accounting student said at a recent party. Calling Habibi “kind of trashy compared to what most Arabs, at least in Dubai, are used to,” he said: “I mean, there are street vendors here.”

In the D.J.’s booth, Abraham kept the hits coming - mainly from Egypt and Lebanon, but also some South Asian and Indian pop. “Anything with a belly-dance beat,” he said. The dancers included plenty of non-Arab men.

“Hummus queens,” a 24-year-old grocery clerk from Queens named Hilal joked at one of the parties. “That’s what you call white guys who go for Arabs.”

Some of the guests yearned for something more than just a good time. “There’s a lot of post-9/11 baggage that people want to deal with,” Hilal said . “But the only option they have is to go out to a club and dance?”

Still, Hilal took his place on the dance floor, too.

And around 1 a.m., three female belly dancers took to the stage, dressed in pink sequined burqas. The crowd cheered as the women, piece by piece, stripped their burqas.


By CHADWICK MOORE