Hadd Crimes
“Islamo-fascists” are executing gay men, so why is Iran tolerating gay sex parties?
by Scott Dagostino

The news photo sent a shockwave of horror around the world in July 2005: two teenage boys, neither one older than 18, standing blindfolded while two older men slip nooses around their necks. Iranian teenagers Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni were executed by hanging because they were boyfriends.

Iran was immediately condemned by gay people of every political stripe. From the left, Peter Tatchell, leader of the British gay activist group OutRage!, stated, “this is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists…the entire country is a gigantic prison, with Islamic rule sustained by detention without trial, torture and state-sanctioned murder.” From the right, a US gay conservative group announced, “in the wake of…the hanging of two gay Iranian teenagers, Log Cabin Republicans re-affirm their commitment to the global war on terror.” There was widespread agreement that the West must act immediately to defend gay Iranians from their “axis of evil” government – widespread agreement, that is, except among gay Iranians.

“I don’t believe that there is an active campaign of execution, punishment, going after gays, in Iran,” says Bhaman Kalbasi, 27, who fled to Canada five years ago after spending two months jailed and tortured for his pro-democracy activism. Now working in production at the CBC, he decided to risk going back to Iran earlier this year, in the wake of more gay executions, to see for himself what was happening. “This society is changing – rapidly changing,” Kalbasi says. “I was very surprised.” Before leaving the country, “I didn’t meet that many people who said they were gay. They’d have sex with men and then go back to their girlfriends.”

Now, despite Iran’s official death penalty for sodomy, Kalbasi says gay sex is thriving in its cities and the powers-that-be generally look the other way. “It’s as easy as drinking a glass of water for the intelligence services of the Iranian regime to round people up. They know all the gay gatherings in the city, where people go. I’ve been to one party that I’m sure they knew about. Over 60 kids were having orgies there.”

Kalbasi was surprised at the lack of discretion. “You’d enter any room and it’s like a bathhouse.” The isolation for gay people, he says, makes them “just explode. They go way overboard…people are more proper [in Canada] than in Iran!”

Gay orgies held in a country with a death penalty against homosexuality? “This is not quite as paradoxical as it might seem,” writes British journalist Brian Whitaker in his detailed new book, Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East. He explains that, “contrary to popular opinion in the west, it cannot be said that any universally-agreed ‘Islamic punishment’ for homosexual acts exists. Sodomy is not among the hadd [capital] crimes specified in the Qur’an…To say that ‘Islam’ prescribes ‘death for homosexuals’ is simplistic and misleading, even though religious conservatives and Western gay rights campaigners (each for their own reasons) like to claim that it does.”

Whitaker describes a culture built on conformity and appearances – if Iran is not Peter Tatchell’s “gigantic prison,” it’s definitely a giant closet and the Iranian government operates on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ scheme.

The authorities hold back, Kalbasi explains, because “they don’t want the whole world to find out that there are gays in Iran…In the propaganda, they say, ‘Look at the west. Look what it has become – heaven for homosexuals.’ But to say that and then say, ‘and here’s all the homosexuals we have to round up’ – it doesn’t look good.”

It helps that there’s a sort of camouflage – in a culture where the sexes are segregated, it’s common to see Middle Eastern men developing closer friendships with each other than those in the west. Men kiss and hold hands in the streets and no one considers it sexual, nor do they want to pry.

“The line,” Kalbasi concludes, “is that you can party within your private sphere…as long as you don’t make it political, as long as you don’t start coming together and saying, ‘we, as a community, have a right.’ As soon as you do that, they won’t like that anymore.”

Arsham Parsi, 25, crossed that line and became a fugitive. Before being granted permanent resident status in Canada this past May, (he holds up a copy of fab and beams – “this is my first gay magazine!”) Parsi had been a tireless secret agent for gays in Iran. His often-told history is a mix of coming-out and Casablanca. “When I was a teen,” he says, “I believed that I was ill. My friends loved the girls but I didn’t. I tried to change. I didn’t know about ‘homosexuality.’ In Iran, sexual words are not used; they are ashamed of sexuality.”

At 15, Parsi discovered the Internet, exclaiming, “Google helped me find myself! I finally found the word ‘gay.’ Many people in the world were gay. I was not alone! I was so excited but I couldn’t tell anyone.”

Parsi used his Internet access to start building a community, compiling an e-mail list and starting a website under a false name. “I received e-mails from close friends but they didn’t know who I was,” he laughs. Parsi fielded “questions about leaving the faith, about family, lots about HIV. I didn’t always have the answers. I was young, I wasn’t a doctor.”

He cautiously approached a few physicians for advice but “they just tried to cure me.” Finally, he found “a gift from God!” A female doctor studying HIV agreed to help in secret, admitting, “if I help you, I lose my chair.” With her help, Parsi arranged HIV testing for 50 people and handed out condoms at parties.

“Many people in Iran are ashamed to buy condoms,” he says and Kalbasi agrees that there were few condoms in sight at the parties he described. Eventually, Parsi formed the Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization (PGLO) but the government soon caught on. They too had been using the Internet and began an entrapment.

“There were secret police in the chat-rooms,” he says. “After a few months, the government censored our website. We’d had 200 visitors in two months.” Despite not using his real name, Parsi had become known so he decided to flee to Turkey, where he started up an Internet magazine and radio station.

“It takes about twelve hours [to download] fifteen minutes,” he says, but the results were worth it. “I sent out the first radio show on a Thursday, by Saturday I received over a hundred emails. One said, ‘When I heard your voice, I was crying…he’s gay and he’s speaking for us!’ They’re crying when they write and I’m crying when I read.”

“He’s taking on a lot of important issues,” says Kalbasi, “giving these people the self-confidence to say, ‘we have certain rights.’” He disagrees, however, with Parsi’s decision this year to organize an international protest and vigil on July 19th – the anniversary of the hangings of teenagers Asgari and Marhoni. Turning them into international Matthew Shepards made many uncomfortable, as there had been controversy over this specific case from the start.

The Iranian government claimed that the teenagers were not executed for being gay but because they had sexually-assaulted a 13-year-old boy at knifepoint. Kalbasi believes this is probably true, while Parsi argues that all the secrets and lies surrounding the case make finding the truth difficult.

Their disagreement was mirrored by western gay activists. Scott Long, LGBT Rights Project director of Human Rights Watch, stated, “there is no evidence that [sex with the 13-year-old] was a consensual act…A whole tissue of speculation has been woven around mistranslations and omissions and this has been solidified into a narrative that this is a gay rights case.”

Peter Tatchell of OutRage! was horrified by Long’s hesitation, insisting that his group was “not prepared to give the benefit of doubt to the murderous regime in Tehran.” Parsi felt the same, despite any doubts, and said in a press release, "we feel great pain when we see human rights advocates ignoring the evidence and failing to speak out against the torture and execution of gay people in our country."

This stance annoyed Kalbasi, who explains, “from a journalist’s point of view, I have a moral responsibility to check my facts.” Parsi “can’t go on saying ‘we’re not sure about it but hey, we’re going to campaign on that day.’”

Even while being beaten and tortured in a prison for 63 days, Kalbasi says, “there were doubts. I knew for a fact that there was no active campaign against gays.”

Kalbasi’s comments are “not helpful” in this case, says his CBC colleague, Farid Haerinejad, a 41-year-old heterosexual man who returned to Iran after 23 years and produced a CBC News: Sunday documentary on gay Iranians. If Parsi overstates the danger to gay men in Iran, he says, Kalbasi is definitely understating it. Even without an official execution campaign, says Haerinejad, there’s an ever-present threat of harassment, blackmail, and beatings.

One gay man he interviewed was raped by five policemen, who told him, “you guys are spreading all this immorality…this is your fault.”

Haerinejad believes that the executed teenage lovers were forced to confess to phony rape charges. As Afdhere Jama, editor of the queer Muslim magazine Huriyah, wrote, “the father of the 13-yearold boy claimed his son was raped because in the conservative society of Iran it is much better to have a heterosexual raped son than a homosexual willing participant.” OutRage!’s Peter Tatchell insists that “smears and torture against gay people are routine in Iran. Whenever the regime wants to deflect criticism, it trumps up charges of alcoholism, adultery, rape and drug abuse against the victims of its brutality.”

If Kalbasi seems to gloss over all this, Haerinejad says it’s because “he believes in the government. He’s not speaking as a gay activist.” Kalbasi concedes that, while he considers the new Iranian president “an outright idiot,” he’s reluctant to see any major shift in the status quo. “Iran is suffering enormous economic issues, political issues, identity issues,” he says, admitting that he’d rather “let the bad guys rule until the population comes to its senses” than risk any further destabilization. One only has to look at the civil-war nightmare of Iraq, where gay men are shot in the street, to see his point.

Particulary alarming, the US critiques of Iran sounded all too similar to the rhetoric preceding its invasion of Iraq. In a speech to the United Nations in September, George Bush told Iranians, “your rulers have chosen to deny you liberty.”

The Belgium-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission had already backed out of the July 19th protest against the Iranian hangings, asking, “how do we avoid reinforcing stereotypes and playing into hostilities prompted by our own government?”

Activists were leery of being overzealous in their condemnation of Iran, for fear of supporting a US agenda they rightly didn’t trust. After all, when the International Lesbian and Gay Association sought formal consultative status with the UN last January, Iran predictably proposed to deny them such status. The United States faced its “axis of evil” enemy – and agreed.

“It is astonishing,” said Scott Long, “that the Bush administration would align itself with Sudan, China, Iran and Zimbabwe in a coalition of the homophobic.”

Farid Haerinejad, having filmed his documentary in Iran, is not astonished. But he insists that such focus on international political maneuvering obscures the need to help individual Iranians. Last month, activists cheered as American voters elected Democrats to both the House and Senate – severely limiting Bush’s ability to start a war with Iran – but, a week later, an Iranian man, Shahab Darvishi was executed for “moral corruption, battering and sodomy.”

Darvishi was hanged to death in a public square, in front of hundreds of cheering people. That crowd is the true issue, says Haerinejad. Even when speaking with other “liberal, openminded” straight people in Iran, they would ask him why he was wasting his time reporting on gay rights when there are “so many more important issues.” “To a gay person,” he replied, “his life is important.”

Haerinejad insists that the gay rights struggle “is not a political movement. You can change the government and the problem is the same.” The government, says Kalbasi, “isn’t really the issue when the family structure in Iran, the society surrounding it, is repressive enough…your family’s biases against anything remotely outside the traditional family and marriage.”

Most gay Iranians, he insists, are not oppressed so much as “depressed…People are not confident. They’re always struggling with the issue, with their identity, with their family expectations, so that when they do get into a relationship, they have no idea what they want out of it.”

“I think the divide is only one of timing, of catching up,” says Kalbasi, “Iran will be where [Canadians] are…50 years from now, 20 years from now, with the new communication, a lot faster.” Iran is a remarkably young society – 70 percent of the population is under the age of 30.

“They’re connected to the world,” says Kalbasi, “they all have satellite dishes on their roofs and they see everything [Canadians] see.” And as Parsi points out, “in Iran, we have 75 million people. Of course, they can change the law – if they want.” After all, he says, it’s happened before.

“Iranian marriage law used to be gender-neutral until the Shah took power,” he says. “We’re fighting for traditional values!”