Gay persians

The tragic death of Alireza Fazeli Monfared, a year-old gay man, brutally murdered by his own family members, has ignited a global outcry, thrusting Iran’s treatment of its LGBT community into the harsh spotlight of international scrutiny. Your Website optional. IranPride is a facilitator & promoter of Iranian LGBTIQ+ & theirs alliances to participate in Pride Parades around the world and hopefully one day in Iran.

Alexander was a military genius, perhaps the greatest field commander the world has known, who could read a battlefield as a grand master reads a chessboard. Darius in the Shadow of Alexander by Pierre Briant. [Western] people don’t know much about these things. But Iran's gay community has succeeded in carving out greater space for itself in recent years and gaining some important social recognition.

This work alone offers ample evidence for the cultural sophistication that the Greeks had achieved and that Alexander brought to the rest of the known world. Not only the gay scene in Iran, but also the culture, the way Iranian society worked, plus the added layer of my religious background, upbringing, and the family.

So that was the initial spark. Iran is among the few countries in the world where gays still risk execution for their sexual orientation. Unlike the dynamic Macedonian kingdom that nurtured Alexander, Persia was a cultivated, centralized, and relatively static empire.

It was a few years later when I realized I’d better start writing this all down. Before Alexander, civilization had generally flowed from east to west; Alexander reversed its dominant direction for the next few centuries. Log In My Account. Next Article Short Reviews.

This I learned from a fellow Iranian LGBT released from police custody, who told me the authorities were looking for “a gay activist named Arsham.” I was forced to flee Iran on March 5, due to my fear of persecution and possible execution under Iran’s harsh Islamic legal code of Lavat, by which gays in Iran can be sentenced to death.

In pre-Islamic Iran, a tradition of homosexuality existed, however most were intolerant of pederasty and sexual activity between two men, especially the Zoroastrians. Even under the current reign of the highly anti-LGBTQ+ Islamic Republic, Iranian students learn Persian poetry and literature that is filled with male homoeroticism.

Such an approach is announced in the very title of Darius in the Shadow of Alexander, a work newly translated into English. Published in: September-October issue. Your Name required. Introducing the book and elaborating on its title, Briant acknowledges that his subject is not only Darius III, the last of the Achaemenid rulers of Persia, but also Alexander the Great, the bisexual Greco-Macedonian king whose conquest of the Persian Empire in BCE at the age of 25 ushered in an age of Hellenistic influence and a geopolitical sea change that reverberates to this day.

Your Email required. Don't subscribe All new comments Replies to my comments Notify me by email of follow-up comments. Compounding our difficulty in understanding Darius—and Alexander—are the Persian and Greco-Roman texts upon which our understanding is based. By all accounts, Darius was a loving husband and father whose thoughts in wartime were for the safety of his family.

Homosexuality has been viewed as a sin in Islam, and is outlawed in almost all Muslim-majority countries, including Iran. Home Articles.