The Dangers of Being Young, Gay and Iranian

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, beaten and tortured while in custody, threatened with death, and lashed 100 times. He escaped from Iran in August, and is now in Turkey, where he awaits a grant of asylum by a gay-friendly country.

In a two-hour telephone interview from Turkey, Amir -- through a native Persian 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 the city a favorite vacation spot for Iranian gays. But, after the 1979 revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini, Shiraz was targeted as a symbol of taaghoot, or decadence.

Amir's father was killed by a gas attack in the Iran-Iraq war in 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, said, "I've known I was gay since I was about five or six -- 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," he recalled. "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 transsexual -- 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."

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 terror in people's hearts the way the infamous Lubianka in Moscow did.

"I was the third person to be interrogated," Amir said. "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."

Amir said that, at the same time, "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 $120, 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.'"