 |
|
A gay Iranian in exile
'I have to talk. I have to tell the world what we are suffering'From Saturday's Globe and Mailhttp://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071005.cowent06/BNStory/Front/home
Saturday, October
6, 2007 This is what happens to homosexuals in the Islamic Republic of Iran. When Mr. Ahmadinejad declared that there are no homosexuals in Iran, people in the West laughed in derision. What a buffoon! But Mr. Parsi didn't laugh. He understood precisely what Iran's President meant: that gay men and women will continue to be imprisoned, tortured and murdered with the full blessing of the state. According to Iran's sharia-based law, they may be lashed, hanged, stoned, cut in half with a sword, or thrown from a tall building or cliff. According to current custom, they may also be raped, dragged by cars or burned alive. "For years, nobody was talking about this," says Mr. Parsi. "I have to talk. I have to tell the world what we are suffering." Mr. Parsi, who escaped from Iran two years ago, now runs the Iranian Queer Organization from Toronto. Its website (http://www.irqo.net) is a lifeline for homosexuals trapped in Iran. It publishes an Internet magazine in Farsi, and also helps asylum seekers find safe houses, acquire refugee status and get resettled. Mr. Parsi uses an assumed name, for his family's sake. He can't go back home because he'd be arrested. Strangely, the ruthless persecution of gays in Iran hasn't received much attention in the West. One reason is that Iranian society itself is homophobic. Gay men and women are regarded by their families as a deep shame to the family honour. Many Iranians in the West retain these values, and they wish Mr. Parsi would keep quiet. "They don't accept this cause and they say don't talk about it," he says. "We have people working for women's rights, including many scholars, but they don't support us." Even Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi won't talk publicly about gay rights, because she'd lose her credibility. So where are the Western human-rights activists? They, too, have been mostly silent. Many people on the intellectual left, such as my colleague Rick Salutin, would rather argue that Mr. Ahmadinejad is no more of a buffoon than George Bush. They argue that people who condemn the Iranian regime as evil, and claim that Western cultural values are superior, are guilty of a sort of moral imperialism. Mr. Parsi has a different view. "In Iran, if I saw the police, I would just hide because maybe they would arrest me. Here, the police support me. Here, I'm free." Homosexuality is hardly rare in the Muslim world. In many places, sexual relationships between men are tolerated so long as they're discreet. But the line is drawn at men who want to live together, or want legal rights, and most men who have sex with other men deny they are homosexual at all. Some Western scholars even argue that the concept of "gay rights" has no meaning in the Muslim world. Mr. Parsi disagrees. He says such people are part of the problem. As a teenager growing up in Shiraz, Mr. Parsi was lonely and filled with self-loathing. He had never met another homosexual, and he thought he was a freak. "I prayed to become a good person, a normal person." Other people fasted for one month, but he fasted for three. Then he found the Internet. And he discovered that he was not alone. "After that, I started to understand who I am." The first gay man he met in person was an Italian living in Tehran. Soon, he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, all with deeply secret lives. In 2001, Mr. Parsi started a small e-mail group he called Rainbow, which he used to distribute foreign articles and information to his friends. It was a dangerous existence. Some of his friends were entrapped by the police and thrown in jail; three committed suicide. In a remote province, two gay teenagers were hanged. In another, a father doused himself and his gay son with gasoline and set both of them on fire. The son burned to death. In 2005, Mr. Parsi heard that the government had issued a death warrant against him. He knew he had to leave, and headed for the Turkish border. He had stopped praying by then. "When I fled to Turkey, I promised my God that I would support gay, lesbian and bisexual Iranians," he says. "That would be my form of worship." In Turkey, Mr. Parsi was quickly approved as a United Nations-designated refugee. He applied to Canada for asylum, and arrived in Toronto in May of 2006. Today, his life is more than full. His group fields a couple of hundred e-mails a day from people in Iran, and he often stays up most of the night to work. He has appeared on U.S. news broadcasts as a passionate advocate for gay rights in Iran. He has a day job, with a retail chain, to pay the rent, and he's also taking a college course in web design. At the midtown coffee bar where we met, Mr. Parsi seemed utterly at home - a vibrant, fashionably dressed young man in a tolerant, multicultural city. And yet, he still feels like an exile. His greatest dream is to go home, to a country where minorities like him are at last protected by tolerance and the rule of law. "People who were born in Canada," he says, "have no idea what freedom really is."
|
