“Next Time, You’ll Be Executed”

Amir is a 22-year-old gay Iranian who was arrested by Iran’s morality police in a massive Internet entrapment campaign targeting gays. He was 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 the granting of asylum by a more gay-friendly country. In a two-hour telephone interview from Turkey, Amir — through a translator — provided a terrifying, firsthand account of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s intense and extensive anti-gay crackdown.

Amir is from Shiraz, a city of more than a million people in the country’s southwestern region that the Shah tried to fashion into “the Paris of Iran” in the 1960s and ’70s. The Shah’s efforts attracted a not-insignificant gay population, making Shiraz a favorite vacation spot for Iranian gays. 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 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, which raided the party a few minutes later. 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. Reza, the snitch, was identifying everyone as the cops beat us. 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 Soviet-era KGB’s domestic bureau, and whose prisons strike fear in people’s hearts the way the infamous Lubianka did.

“I was the third person to be interrogated,” Amir says. “The cops had seized videos taken at the party; in one 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 they beat me even 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 [about $120, a large sum in Iran]. At the time he fined me, the judge told me, ‘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, a sort of unofficial para-police under the authority of the hard-line Revolutionary Guards (called Pasdaran in Persian). The basiji — thugs recruited from the criminal classes and the lumpen unemployed — are assigned to be agents provocateurs, and given the violent dirty work, so the regime can claim it wasn’t officially responsible. 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. “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.