[BRIEF NOTE] Iranian homosexualities

[rfmcdonald]

Last month, the Toronto Star published an article on the smuggling of GLB people out of Iran.

Not quite three years ago, Arsham Parsi was an Iranian refugee in Turkey. Today, he is executive director of the Iranian Queer Railroad, trying to help 200 people down the same road he took to Toronto.

"Every day, people escape, people come here," he said yesterday in his downtown apartment. "It's constant, like a railroad, always moving."

On a recent trip to Turkey, he secured refugee status from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for 45 Iranian gays, but they are awaiting interviews at the Canadian and U.S. embassies. Parsi, 28, is lobbying on to get them out of Turkey where temporary residents must pay a $200 fee every six months.

"People in Turkey say they're not homophobic and I say, `You've living in Istanbul. When you leave Istanbul, it's different.' Gays have been beaten on the streets in Turkey and the police do nothing."

Canada, the U.S. and Australia are the likely destinations for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people on his "railroad," because those countries recognize the kind of persecution they face in Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said there are no gays.

Iran is one of 86 countries around the world that still declare homosexuality a crime and punish it with prison or death.

Parsi was still in Iran when he became an activist in 2001, first starting a clandestine online chat group for fellow gays, then an organization. He left when he heard government officials were hunting him.

Iran has a lot of structural homophobia, clearly. At the same time, there are some surprising exceptions contradicting this. Take Iran's official attitude towards transsexuals.

One early campaigner for transsexual rights is Maryam Hatoon Molkara, who was formerly a man known as Fereydoon. Before the revolution, she had longed to become a woman but could not afford surgery. Furthermore, she wanted religious authorization. Since 1975, she had been writing letters to Ayatollah Khomeini, who was to become the leader of the revolution and was in exile. After the revolution, she was fired, forcedly injected with male hormone, and institutionalized. She was later released with help from her connection, and she kept lobbying many other leaders. Later she went to see Khomeini, who had returned to Iran. At first she was stopped and beaten by his guards, but eventually Khomeini gave her a letter to authorize her gender reassignment operation. The letter is later known as the fatwa that authorizes such operations in Iran.

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Hojatoleslam Kariminia, a mid-level cleric who is in favor of transgender rights, has stated that he wishes "to suggest that the right of transsexuals to change their gender is a human right" and that he is attempting to "introduce transsexuals to the people through my work and in fact remove the stigma or the insults that sometimes attach to these people."

UNHCR's 2001 report says that sex reassignment surgery is performed frequently and openly in Iran, and that homosexual and crossdressing people would be safe as long as they keep a low profile. However, the Safra Project's 2004 report considers UNHCR's report over-optimistic. The Safra Project's report suggests that UNHCR underestimated legal pressure over LGBT.

The report further states that currently, it is not possible for transgender individuals to choose not to undergo surgery - if they are approved for gender reassignment, they are expected to undergo treatment immediately. Those who wish to remain "non-operative" (as well as those who crossdress and/or identify as genderqueer) are considered their biological gender, and as such they are likely to face harassment as being homosexuals and subject to the same laws barring homosexual acts.

Perhaps more to the point, there's a huge difference between what the Iranian state says about homosexuality and what actually goes on.

A sociologist at an Iranian university has presented a new study that shows high levels of homosexual experiences among the country's population.

Iran has strict laws against sex outside marriage and other sexual acts such as masturbation. Adultery and same-sex acts are punishable by death.

Startling new research from sociologist Parvaneh Abdul Maleki found that 24% of Iranian women and 16% of Iranian men have had at least one homosexual experience.

[. . .]

In an interview with US current affairs TV programme Democracy Now, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also rejected criticism of the execution of children in Iran.

During a visit to the US in 2007 he said in reply to a question posed about homosexuality during his speech at New York's Columbia University:

"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country… In Iran we do not have this phenomenon, I don't know who has told you that we have it."

What's going on? Sexuality in Iran is, to put it mildly, made very problematic. Keep in mind that this is the country where a man who murdered prostitutes was praised as a hero by conservatives until it came out that he had sex with them first. It doesn't seem inaccurate to say that it's easy to carry on a normal heterosexual dating life in Iran under the Islamic Republic, and that many men are forced faute de mieux to share in the sexual economy of Oz. This may be tolerated for so long as it remains quiet; if people try to organize, well, that's when the hangings come into play.