'THEY'LL KILL ME'
-- A GAY IRANIAN TORTURE VICTIM SPEAKS
by Doug Ireland for Gay
City News
Senior Contributing Editor
Doug Ireland
Visit Doug Ireland on the web at his site,
Direland
Doug Ireland is PageOneQ's Senior Contributing
Edtior.
He is a longtime radical political journalist
and media critic and a former columnist
for the Village
Voice, the New
York Observer, New
York magazine, the Parisian
daily Libération
and other papers, and writes for a variety
of publications on both sides of the Atlantic,
as well as being a contributing editor
of Poz
magazine and In
These Times
I
wrote the following article for Gay City News -- the
largest gay weekly paper in New York City -- and it
will appear in their new issue on Thursday.
Amir is a 22-year-old gay Iranian who was arrested
by Iran’s morality police as part of a massive Internet
entrapment campaign targeting gays. He was beaten
and tortured while in custody, threatened with death,
and lashed 100 times (see
photos). He escaped from Iran
in August, and is now in Turkey, where he awaits the
granting of asylum by a gay-friendly country.
In a two hour telephone interview from Turkey, Amir
-- through a translator -- provided a terrifying,
first-hand account of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s
intense and extensive anti-gay crackdown, which swept
up Amir and made him its victim. Here is Amir’s
story:
Amir is from Shiraz, a city of more than a million
people in southwestern Iran that the Shah tried to
make “the Paris of Iran” in the 1960s and 1970s, attracting
a not insignificant gay population and making Shiraz
a favorite vacation spot for Iranian gays -- but after
the 1979 revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini, Shiraz
was targeted as a symbol of taaghoot (decadence).
Amir’s father was killed by a gas attack in the Iran-Iraq
war in the 1987, becoming -- in the Islamic Republic’s
official parlance -- a “martyr,” whose surviving family
thus had the right to special benefits and treatment
from the state.
Amir, who grew up with his mother, an older brother
and two sisters, says “I’ve known I was gay since
I was about 5 or 6 -- I always preferred to play with
girls. I had my first sexual experience with a man
when I was 13. But nobody in my family knew I was
gay.” Amir’s first arrest for being gay occurred two
years ago. “I was at a private gay party, about 25
young people there, all of us close friends. One of
the kids, Ahmed Reza -- whose father was a colonel
in the intelligence services, and who was known to
the police to be gay -- snitched on us, and alerted
the authorities this private party was going to happen.
Ahmed waited until everyone was there, then called
the Office for Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition
of Vice, headed in Shiraz by Colonel Safaniya, who
a few minutes later raided the party. The door opened,
and the cops swarmed in, insulting us -- screaming
‘who’s the bottom? Who’s the top?’ and beating us,
led by Colonel Javanmardi. When someone tried to stop
them beating up the host of the party, they were hit
with pepper spray. One of our party was a trans-sexual
-- the cops slapped her face so hard they busted her
eardrum and she wound up in hospital. Ahmed Reza,
the gay snitch, was identifying everyone as the cops
beat us up.
"The
cops took sheets, ripped them up and blindfolded us,
threw us into a van, and took us to a holding cell
in Interior Ministry headquarters -- they knew us
all by name,” Amir recounts. Iranians live in fear
of the Interior Ministry, which has a reputation like
that of the former Soviet KGB’s domestic bureau, and
whose prisons strike fear in people’s hearts the way
the infamous Lubianka once did. Amir says that, “I
was the third person to be interrogated. The cops
had seized videos taken at the party, in one of which
I was reciting a poem. The cops told me to recite
it again. ‘What poem?’ I said. They began beating
me in the head and face. When I tried to deny I was
gay, they took off my shoes and began beating the
soles of my feet with cables, the pain was excruciating.
I was still
blindfolded. They had found dildos in the house where
the party was -- they beat me with them, stuffed them
in my mouth. When I told them my father was a martyr
[of the Iran-Iraq war] they beat me up even more,
and harder. They took away my card [entitling Amir
to martyr’s benefits] and said they’d tell the local
university, where I was studying computers.”
At the same time, Amir continues, “They went to my
house, seized my computer, found online homoerotic
pictures of guys in it, and showed them to my mother.
That’s how mother found out I was gay. Eventually
I was tried and fined 100,000 tomens [or
about $220, a large sum in Iran]. At the time he fined
me, the judge told me that ‘if we send you to a physician
who vouches that your rectum has been penetrated in
any way, you will be sentenced to death.’”
Most of the anti-gay crackdown, Amir says,
is conducted by the basiji. The
basiji are a sort of unofficial para-police
under the authority of the hard-line Revolutionary
Guards (called Pasdaran in Persian.) It is
the basiji -- thugs recruited from the criminal
classes and the lumpen unemployed -- who
are assigned to be agentsprovocateurs,
and are given the violent dirty work, so the regime
can claim it wasn’t officially responsible. For example,
during recent university strikes and demonstrations,
it was the basiji who were charged with the
defenestrations and the vicious beatings of rebellious
students.
A year after his first arrest, an unrepentant Amir
was in a Yahoo gay chat room on the web. “Someone
came into the chat room and started messaging me,
but I told him he wasn’t my type and gave him a description
of the kind of guy I was looking to meet. A few minutes
later, another guy started messaging me. We exchanged
pix, and he sent me his web-page right away -- and
he matched exactly all the descriptions I’d sent to
the previous guy. It turned out later both guys were
police agents, they had so many they could come up
with one who matched the personal preferences of any
gay guy in the chat rooms.”
“With this second guy, I was really excited, and
we made a date for that afternoon
at a phone booth near Bagh-e-Safa bridge.
When I got there, we started to walk away to talk
and get to know each other. But within 30 seconds,
I felt a hand laid on my shoulder from behind -- it
was an undercover agent in regular clothes, whose
name turned out to be Ali Panahi. With two other basiji,
he handcuffed me, forced me into a car, and took me
back to the Intelligence Ministry headquarters, a
very scary place. There I denied that I was gay, and
denied that this had been a gay rendezvous -- but
they showed me a printout from the chatroom of my
messages and my pix.”
Then, says Amir, the torture began.
“There was a metal chair in the middle of the room
-- they put a gas flame under the chair, and made
me sit on it as the metal seat got hotter and hotter.
They threatened to send me to an army barracks where
all the soldiers were going to rape me. There was
a soft drink bottle sitting on a table -- Ali Panahi
told one of the other basiji to take the bottle and
shove it up my as, screaming, ‘This will teach you
not to want any more cock!’ I was so afraid of sitting
in that metal chair as it got hotter and hotter that
I confessed. Then they brought out my file, and told
me that I was a ‘famous faggot’ in Shiraz. They beat
me up so badly that I passed out, and was thrown,
unconscious, into a holding cell.
"When I came to, I saw there were several dozen
other gay guys in the cell with me. One of them told
me that, after they had taken him in, they beat him
and forced him to set up dates with people through
chat rooms -- and each one of those people had been
arrested, those were the other people in that cell
with me.”
“We were eventually all taken to court, and cross-examined.
The judge sentenced four of us, including me, to public
flogging. The news was printed all over the newspapers
that a group of homosexuals had been arrested, with
our names. I got 100 lashes -- I passed out before
the 100 lashes were over. When I woke up, my arms
and legs were so numb that I fell over when they picked
me up from the platform on which I’d been lashed.
They had told me that, if I screamed, they will beat
me even harder -- so I was biting my arms so hard,
to keep from screaming, that I left deep teeth wounds
in my own arms.”
After this entrapment and public flogging, Amir’s
life became unbearable -- he was rousted regularly
at his home by the basiji and by agents of
the Office for Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition
of Vice [which represses “moral deviance” -- things
like boys and girls walking around holding hands,
women not wearing proper Islamic dress or wearing
makeup, same-sex relations, and prostitution.
But after
the hangings of two gay teens in the city of Mashad
in July of this
year (at
left) -- and the world-wide protests that
followed those hangings -- Amir says that things got
even worse for him and other Iranian gays. Amir was
under continual surveillance, harassed, and threatened:
“After the Mashad incident, the ‘visits’ from the
authorities became an almost daily occurrence. They
would come to my house and threaten me. They knew
everything about everything I did, about everywhere
I went. They would tell me exactly what I had done
each and every time I had left the house. It had gotten
to the point where I was starting to suspect my own
friends of spying on me. On one of these visits, Ali
Panahi --the one who’d arrested me the last time --
grabbed me by the hair and asked me if I’d suck his
cock if he asked me to. One of my friends was raped
by Ali Panahi, who fucked my friend in exchange for
letting him go without a record.
"They would arrest me all the time, take me
in for questioning in the middle of the day -- when
I left the house, they’d hassle me, ask me if I was
going to go looking for dick, and tell me not to leave
my house and to keep off the streets.In one of these
arrests, Colonel Javanmardi told me that if they catch
me again that I would be put to death, ‘just like
the boys in Mashad.’ He said it just like that, very
simply, very explicitly. He didn’t mince his words.
We all know that the boys who were hanged in Mashad
were gay -- the rape charges against them were trumped
up, just like the charges of theft and kidnapping
against them. When you get arrested, you are forced
by beatings, torture, and threats to confess to crimes
you didn’t commit. It happens all the time, it happened
to friends of mine.
"I could not get a job because of my case history.
Since I was obviously gay I couldn’t get a job anywhere,
and could not get a government job because of my record,
Amir says. ” By the last time the cops came to his
house, Amir had decided to try to leave the country:
“I invented an excuse, and told them I had to go to
Tehran to take my higher university entrance exams.
I already had a passport from three years ago. In
Tehran I borrowed a little money from a friend and
came to Turkey by bus. At the border, I really lucked
out -- I was terrified because I had a record, and
not enough money to get out or pay a bribe.” But indolent
border guards didn’t bother to check on him -- they
just took his passport, stamped it, and let him leave.
That, says Amir, was about a month ago.
When asked what message he wants to send to the world
about what’s happening in Iran, and what
he thinks about his own future, Amir pauses, then
says: “The situation of gays in Iran is dreadful.
We have no rights at all. They would beat me up and
tell me to confess to things I hadn’t done, and I
would do it. The gays and lesbians in Iran are under
unbelievable pressure -- they need help, they need
outside intervention. Things are really bad. Really
bad! We are constantly harassed in public, walking
down the street, going to the store, going home…anywhere
and anywhere, everyone, everyone! One of
my dear friends, Nima, commited suicide a month ago
in Shiraz. He just couldn’t take it anymore. I don’t
know what’s going to happen to me. I’ve run out of
money. I don’t know what to do. I just hope they don’t
send me back to Iran. They’ll kill me there.”
My profound gratitude
to Dr. Houman Sarshar for his generous
translation and research assistance in the preparation
of this article.
