You seem to have a predilection for bringing up controversial issues, Hossein; don't you? I was recommended to watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (on Bravo, Tuesdays) and I did. It was okay, I guess. It was aired between two Boy Meets Boy shows, which made Bravo look like a gay channel. There is a lot to be said about gays and how they should be dealt with in a professedly Islamic country. There are, I happen to know, male prostitutes in Pakistan who are tolerated by the general public (as long as they bribe the cops). Quite an interesting phenomena...

How long does your wife speak to her mom? 12 hrs every sunday as a revenge? ;-)

There are two points when it comes to gay community in Iran: 1. Social factor: It will take time for the public to accept and co-exist with the official gay phenomenon. It will take time and effort (such as "exposure" you said, etc) 2. Legal/Political factor: The currect system in Iran will never ever "recognise" this phenomenon, because it is clearly against the teachings of the religion. So thinking about gay "rights" is pointless at this stage. 3. In any nation, the gay community itself needs to seek its rights through political and legal activities. It's impossible to do so before solving the problem mentioned in (2).

The points about gay rights in Iran are well made but I think Hossein is bringing gays as an example of change via exposure and saturation. Consider for example "Hijab" in Iran and how most women deal with it. There are always women who are constantly pushing the limit of Hijab and since i was a kid, conservative people were aginst these women, but apparently there are far fewer of those conservatives these days in Iran ... Maybe one of the girls should write something about this phenomenon here ...

I second Kaveh’s point. Also I wanted to add that I agree there are certain changes that would be much faster if laws were at least silent about them. But even when we have harsh laws prohibiting or slowing the rate of change, persistence can still yield to appreciable changes. Kaveh mentioned the phenomenon of Iranian women changing the definitions of the appropriate Hijab during these years. I also wanted to point out the gradual softening of society, though still quite small but nonetheless measurable, in another social taboos in Iran. Consider divorce for an example. Two generations ago it was out of question. For our parents it was hardly possible, now it’s still heavily frowned upon but the fact is you can see more and more incidents of it occurring in spite of the cruel laws and the social stigma. And I’m sure even if the regime in... [more at the permalink of the entry above]

Just want to say Iranian culture is not that much against homosexuality. I remember when I was in high school some students were bragging about having homosexual relations with other students. They only needed to tell us that they were the "man" of the relation.

I appreciate Elnaz's detailed commentary/observations on how a social phenomenon finds its way amid all the objections of large portions of a society. Examples are well-chosen. One thing though, that I think you wouldn't disagree with me on: The process of change is not always without backlashes, as we have seen, time and again, regarding the case of Hijab in Iran. Some freedom is tolerated for a while, but all of a sudden we have thugs turning the clock back to square one (sorry about mixing up the metaphors). The subject of Hijab deserves to be dealt with in a separate article. I personally have no clue what the Islamic Republic is going to make of it in future. Thanks (I'm being sarcastic) to Hijab's being mandatory, Iran is deprived of the otherwise great tourism industry that it could have enjoyed, and this is but one instance of how... [more at the permalink of the entry above]

I just did some research (God bless Google!) and found the word "ephebophilia"! For more details see: http://www.glbtq.com/literature/mid_e_lit_persian.html

1.Dont forget media, almost all sitcoms these days have a gay character or at least talk about gay-issue in almost all episodes. Tomorrow's culture can be seen in today's TV. 2.Economical factors should also be considered, coroporates are among advocates of gay life-style.

This is an interesting subject, thank you Hossein. Is metrosexuality the next topic :-)!? I would like to separate two different issues here. 1- In some cases the law is against the flow of the society and it is bound to change somehow. An example is the issue of hijab or the fact that women are allowed to study whatever they want compared to couple of years ago when “some” majors were inappropriate for women :-| ! 2- In the opposite case, the law doesn’t prevent something but the moral values and traditions make it a taboo like the divorce mentioned above. As much as I know, a guy can divorce his wife whenever he wants to (but it is not considered appropriate of course). 3- Unfortunately the issue of homosexuality is a combination of both. It is a completely weird issue for the traditional society. And also the... [more at the permalink of the entry above]

Shiraz, Thanks for the clarification. I forgot to mention that I was talking more about the women's right to divorce and their social status after divorce. (getting custody specially over male children is not a big problem for a father who is say, not addict.) I accept that there is negative social value for men who divorce their wives as well but from my observations (non scientific at all. mostly gatherings from the way people talk) the effect of this negative value is still much larger for women. Just a spontaneous idea: maybe if people start to form supporting groups and publicize their services, the moral support (which is the least these groups can do) would accelerate the change and ease the burden on individuals.

Thanks Hossein for starting this interesting discussion. I think your point about the importance of interaction between the minority and majority in recognition of the rights of minority is very important and well articulated. Meanwhile, I can also think of several cases were such coexistence has not been as helpful. You can think of Afghanies in Iran, Turks in Germany, etc. My point is that to get deeper into this discussion, we need to specify mechanisms that facilitate/hinder such recognition of rights of minorities, even if there is a reasonable level of interaction (when there is not so much interaction, e.g. Iranians in US, we are dealing with a fairly different phenomenon). I havn't thought about or studied this issue, so I just toss out some raw ideas. The collective and organized efforts of minority should be influential. For example, in case of gay community in US, they are... [more at the permalink of the entry above]

I enjoyed reading the new comments above, because they were well-thought-over (as opposed to my own rather arbitrary, somewhat irrelevant comments). I have a big issue, though, with the overall feel of Hazhir's purely *mechanical* approach to the issue of gays in Iran. I think the case of minorities cannot be easily given a general grand formula. Any attempt at such sweeping generalizations is bound to miss the point (or at least, *a* point!) The case of the gay minority is a far cry from the case of, say, Kurdish minority, which is in turn very different from the case of Baha'i minority. I believe that these cases must be dealt with completely differently, because the parameters are simply too numerous for the phenomenon at hand to be easily "engineer-izable".

Good clarification senior grad. I didn't want to trivialize the issue or over-generalize it. In fact my comment was in the same direction: we can't say from observing the gay situation in the U.S. that in general interacting with minorities is enough/necessary/the main factor to change the relationship of minority and majority. My speculation over a few possible reasons for differences across cases was also in the same line (that we need to specify more dimensions in order to understand the phenomenon across different cases). However, you may be alluding to something more general, that we can't use the case of gay community to learn so much of useful generalizations/anologies which inform us on the case of Kurdish minority in Iran. I think I would disagree with this possible interpretation of your comment. The whole field of social movements is created based on the premise that we can learn... [more at the permalink of the entry above]

As an outed iranian gay i want to say something. Recently in a essay a french historian said that freudian sexuality doesn't exist in Rome empire. Means that everybody had sex with others men or women. Tabou was to have sex with people who are not in the same social position. i beleive to this opinion that we are all bisexual and because our religious culture, christianity, judaism or islam they push people to choose between gay or straight. Sa'adi, shakespear, Mowlavi, and many others let proof about their bisexuality. Hope one day our nature could win our culture behavior.