What Iran—Yes, Iran—Can Teach America About the Fight for LGBTQ Rights
When Donald Trump reached out to LGBTQ people in his speech to the Republican National Convention in July, he offered them protection from a “hateful foreign ideology.” Taken with his other remarks about Muslims and Muslim communities, he seems to believe that violent repression of LGBTQ people is a feature of the Islamic faith, But Iran was Muslim before it began to target people for deviating from religious law. Today, thinking about the fragility of the 1970s gay rights movement in Iran fills me with dread, because a drastic change in government is happening here in the United States, and forces of hatred and conservatism are on the rise. Iranians are no more evil than Americans, and conservative Christian fundamentalists are just as eager to punish and repress queer people as conservative Muslim fundamentalists are.
Today, Iran is so repressive that all activism on behalf of lesbians and gay men is forbidden. OutRight Action International, which commissioned the reports that occasioned this piece, was forced to conduct its interviews with queer Iranians who had left the country. When it wanted to speak with people still inside Iran, it had to do so by telephone, because you cannot legally enter Iran to do LGBTQ rights work. In the early days of the internet, the web provided the Iranian LGBTQ community with the chance to share experiences and hope with one another. A crackdown followed, and now it’s illegal to even blog about being gay.
It could all happen here: the rollback of protections, the shift toward cultural conservatism, the social and legal violence. In the not-too-distant past, America jailed people for cross-dressing, among other “crimes” related to queer identity. Publications advocating for gay rights were considered pornographic and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. There are Americans who want to turn back the clock to when America was “great,” before “political correctness” brought us LGBTQ rights. They may not succeed, but if the election has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t assume any outcome is assured or that the underlying goodness of our fellow citizens will protect us from a disastrous result. Sometimes, tensions in a country reach a boiling point, a madman takes over, and things change drastically for the worse.
