I grew up gay in Tehran. Here's what the morality police didn't see

Telegraph

4 days ago

In northern Tehran, Madonna's Hung Up pulses through a flat which serves as a makeshift club for the night. Alcohol does the rounds as the disco tune's refrain, 'time goes by so slowly', fades into Rihanna's Don't Stop the Music and a vibrant underground party scene stirs into life. The pleasure-seekers are all men, their hair gelled and spiked like Western boy bands, religious beards trimmed to manicured stubble and bodies wrapped in tight white T-shirts and Versace shirts. It is the early 2000s and, in a country where morality police patrol the streets and homosexuality is punishable by death, this is gay life in Iran.
For Majid Parsa*, a London doctor raised under the rule of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), this was his life, or at least half of a double existence. A gay man born in Sheffield to an Iranian father and a Shia Turkish mother (Shia being a branch of Islam distinct from the Sunni majority), his parents had come to the UK as students but 'fell in love' with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 Islamic Revolution and returned to Tehran with their two sons in 1981. Majid was still a baby. Inside the family home – as in Iranian society more broadly – daily life, behaviour, dress and socialising were all strictly governed by the Ayatollah's Sharia law. 'Dad grew a full beard, stopped smoking, and reinvented himself,' says Majid, now 44. 'Pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini decorated our walls and both of my parents devoted themselves to the new regime. Our country was steeped in culture, history, prayer and political unrest but among the chants of 'Death to America! Death to Israel!' the word gay was unheard.'
'It felt like entering Narnia – the Ayatollah's secret world'
Having spent his teenage years attempting to wash away his own un-Islamic – haram – thoughts of men and secret school crushes, he came alive in his 20s, when he was introduced to a secret but thriving gay scene. Through hidden hatches and secret apartments he found himself part of a hedonistic party scene that he has now captured in an unflinching book, The Ayatollah's Gaze: A Memoir of the Forbidden and the Fabulous, out this week. 'It was like walking into Narnia,' he says of those days. 'I thought of us as the Ayatollah's gays. Murals of him watched over all of us, like they watched over everyone else.'
In its earliest days, Khomeini's oppressive rule eliminated secular opposition, oversaw the hostage crisis in which 52 American embassy staff were held for 444 days and sent child soldiers to certain death during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. His Sharia state outlawed alcohol and, for the last decade of Khomeini's life, Western music and film too. It lastingly revoked women's rights, enforcing segregation of the sexes and strict dress codes that are still in place today: women were to cover their hair, men not to wear shorts. The IRGC, the Gasht-e Ershad (morality police), and the Basij – a paramilitary volunteer militia – were established to uphold the integrity of the Islamic Republic.
Being gay was considered a mental disorder, and being caught in a homosexual act was punishable by hanging. 'As I began to understand that I was gay, I didn't know much about the law or what could happen to me. That wasn't what I was afraid of,' Majid recalls, speaking from the smart London flat he shares with his British boyfriend of seven years and their two cats. Just home from his NHS clinic for our interview, Majid is warm, witty and candid about his life, his melodic Iranian accent still present as he speaks. 'What I was afraid of was God, of Allah and my religious upbringing. I knew all the Koran verses against homosexuality and how it should be punished. My earliest thoughts were how am I going to deal with the afterlife? How am I going to stop my parents being disappointed?'
At 22, he visited a psychologist, unsubtly asking whether a 'friend' could rid himself of same-sex thoughts. He was handed a psychiatric diagnosis and prescribed antidepressants, which he never took. Meanwhile, coming of age at the cusp of the new millennium, Majid found himself rewatching Titanic on VHS, fixated on Leonardo DiCaprio; lusting after footballer Michael Owen while watching the Euros with his family, assuming they thought he was interested in the game; and wishing he were Britney Spears in the Oops!... I Did It Again music video. It was only later, in the throes of gay life, when talk turned to the real threat that accompanied being his full self, that he understood the harsh reality. But, in an Islamic country, it came as 'no shock': 'There was no moment where I thought 'Oh god, I might be hung from a crane because of this.' I didn't agree with it but I almost accepted it.'
Parties were not a feature of Majid's upbringing: 'Any happy event or party, even for religious reason, was associated with an inherent sense of guilt. Shia Islam's mournful history didn't leave much room for celebrations.'
That changed when he went to Tehran's university, to study medicine, and his gradual immersion into the city's gay underground began. It started with Yahoo chatrooms where, at first, he posed as a girl, superimposing a hijab on a picture of actress Natalie Portman to talk to boys. It did not take long for him to discover a local gay forum: 'It was full of gay men in Tehran bustling in and out like a busy train terminal. I couldn't believe my eyes. The shock of discovering so many others existed, all arranging dates with each other, quickly overcame any guilt I had about being there.'
It was a new friend in real life 'with a strong gaydar', confidence and knowing winks who introduced him to the venues that they would party-hop together though Majid's 20s: 'He took me through the back alleys of underground gay life in Tehran. It was like another realm… North Tehran, where I lived, had a different scene from the south. In the south, people were more grounded and religious and so were its gay men.
'The north of the city was more upper class, the men mostly came from rich families, they were pretentious and bragged about trips to Dubai or Turkey, Europe and even America. When I went on dates with these men, I made sure I was in the latest look and didn't have a trace of my religious household on me.'
'We lived like chameleons, hiding in plain sight'
The first house party he went to would become a mainstay of his secret life: a flat, entered through an escape hatch with a host whose gatherings, music and shisha earned him and his apartment the nickname Café Soosan: 'It was a hub, quite relaxed. If you went for one evening, you might see 20 people come and go over a few hours. Each time I arrived, I felt the relief of leaving my double life behind.' He discovered more and more hidden doors and bigger gatherings: 'People would turn their homes around; they turned them into nightclubs with homemade hooch and loud music.' There would be dozens of people at each event: 'You saw a lot of the same faces. There were a few queens and lots of gossip about how one party was better than the other, who was new or who had slept with whom.'
The parties grew wilder and more jaw-dropping, none so much as one held by a trans woman and 'temporary bride' of a top-ranking member of the Revolutionary Guard. (The 'temporary marriage' – or Islamic sigheh – allows Shia men to take a second wife for a predetermined amount of time.) The guard put her up in a lavish penthouse, which turned into a party spot. Majid describes 20 other trans women dancing and taking drugs against a lavish backdrop including paintings of semi-naked women in gold frames, Romanesque statues and heavy velvet decor.
'Other than my friend and I, everyone there was trans, chatting, laughing and dancing to Western music.' The host wore a tight, golden leopard-print dress and long false fingernails painted gold while guests thrashed their bodies to house music, high on coke and ecstasy: 'I hadn't seen that before. I remember her telling me: 'It has not been easy for most of us, that's why some take drugs and need this escape'.'
The more Majid immersed himself in the scene, the more comfortable and confident he became in his own sexuality, dating men and becoming a common feature of gay life. On party nights, close friends would often serve as decoys if his family asked about his plans and he would leave home in a white vest with a shirt over, removing it when he arrived. In Tehran's streets, the regime's grip had tightened again under a new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who came to power in 2005. Majid remembers: 'More women were stopped on the street to fix their headscarves or remove make-up and more men were stopped because of their spiky hairstyles and tight T-shirts. Cars were held at random checkpoints to see if everyone inside was behaving in line with the Sharia.'
Gay men were 'like chameleons', though, particularly in north Tehran where they blended in with the fashion-conscious crowd who looked to the West for cultural cues. And it was not them that the morality police were most concerned with. 'Their biggest concern was men and women being together,' says Majid. 'Premarital relationships and sex among defiant youth crawled under the skin of this religious society. Gay parties took place with much less hassle than those where men and women planned to mix. If the police dropped by, as long as they didn't find the alcohol stash, there was no grounds for arrest. The system inadvertently made being gay easier.
'All the worries and the threats floated somewhere in the distance. They didn't feel real. When you were part of gay life, it felt like there was no stopping any of it.'
Majid's parents never found out about the parties. If they knew their son was gay, he says, 'It remained unspoken. It still is.'
After graduating from university, he spent 18 months in compulsory military service – first in training, then as an officer completing mundane paperwork. By the time he finished in 2007, he knew he wanted to leave Iran. 'Not because of my sexuality alone. I was tired of the system. Having a beard or a prayer-stone mark on your forehead got you any job, any application processed sooner, or queue-jumped.'
'Escaping Iran meant losing everything, but gaining freedom'
In 2009, amid the Green Movement protests demanding the removal of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and following a disputed election, he left Iran – leaving behind a boyfriend and his gay life – to begin a master's course in London.
'The moment I stepped off the plane, I knew my life had changed,' says Majid, then 29. 'There were more opportunities and many more gay men but mostly London gave me independence.'
Telling stories from home to the friends he made here would ultimately inspire his book: 'The idea percolated for years. I used to retell stories about the military, the parties, normal daily life to me but their reaction was shock. The younger me would have been so much more hopeful and less lonely if I had seen stories like this, that there was life outside the religious world I was stuck in.'
In his decade and a half in Britain, Iran has rarely left the headlines or the apex of geopolitical tensions: 'Each time I see news from home, there's a sense of 'here we go again'. It's not something that shocks me anymore but the repetition of stories about unrest or the regime is sometimes exhausting. I've seen it unfold in so many different ways and it always finishes the same way.'
He adds: 'I often feel frustrated that all people here see is the negative. I sometimes think they forget that all the other days of the year, when they hear nothing from Iran, people are just living a life that is normal for them.'
His dream for Iran's future is to see Pride in the streets of Tehran: 'But that is a dream,' he says, smiling. 'Iran has suffered in many ways and as much as I hate seeing the suffering, real and sustainable change comes slowly. It is already happening so, I am hopeful.'
Leaving it behind was not as easy as people imagine: 'One thing I speak about with my gay friends [in Iran], who say they're never leaving, is the life that they've built there: the family, friends, networks, jobs. They are realising that leaving, being an immigrant, isn't necessarily fun, particularly for those I know who have had to seek asylum. The idea of being a free gay man in the West is the ideal but the reality is that being gay is only one part of my life here.
'I was an anomaly. I left the family home single, without a wife, and came to Britain for a career but I had to restart, alone, without friends and family and that has been hard.' He wouldn't change his journey but there is one part of Tehran that he misses most: gay life. 'I left this vibrant life and people; the loud music, alcohol, Madonna, house music and a party never ended without Persian dance music. I loved it. It was the best I could get and it's where I was happy.'
He is smiling broadly now: 'I remember the thrill I used to get each time I left my religious household and stepped into a party: it was the feeling of stepping into potential – a new face, new date, everyone gossiping. I haven't experienced that since.'
* Majid Parsa is a pseudonym.
The Ayatollah's Gaze: A Memoir of the Forbidden and the Fabulous is published by Neem Tree Press on May 29