| abstract
| - There is a large amount of literature in Persian that explicitly illustrates the ancient existence of homosexuality among Iranians. In Persian poetry, references to sexual love can be found in addition to those of spiritual/religious love. A few ghazals (love poems) and texts in Saadi's Bustan and Gulistan have been interpreted by Western readers as homoerotic poems. In some poems, Sa'di's beloved is a young man, not a beautiful woman. In this he followed the conventions of traditional Persian poetry. Sa'di's own attitude toward homosexuals was more negative than positive. In the Gulistan he stated, "If a Tatar slays that hermaphrodite / The Tatar must not be slain in return." Another story tells of the qazi of Hamdan whose affection towards a farrier-boy is condemned by his friends and the king, who eventually says: "Everyone of you who are bearers of your own faults / Ought not to blame others for their defects." Many misinterpretations of Persian poetry also stem from distorted translations. In the Persian language, there exists only one word for "him/his" and "her". In English translations, the translator has to select one and assign a gender to the word. Author Janet Afary, an associate professor at Purdue University, claims that "Classical Persian literature — like the poems of Attar (died 1220), Rumi (d. 1273), Sa’di (d. 1291), Hafez (d. 1389), Jami (d. 1492), and even those of the 20th century Iraj Mirza (d. 1926) — are replete with homoerotic allusions, as well as explicit references to beautiful young boys and to the practice of pederasty." She further states that "Professors of literature have been forced to teach that these extraordinarily beautiful gay love poems aren’t really gay at all and that their very explicit references to same-sex love are really all about men and women." She says that the 1979 revolution was partly motivated by moral outrage against the Shah's regime, and in particular against a mock same-sex wedding between two young men with ties to the court, and says that this explains the virulence of the anti-homosexual oppression in Iran. There are many other Iranian homosexual authors who stated similar issues. In one source, the author claims: "The 'beloved' in Persian lyrics is, as a rule, not a female, but a young male, often a pubescent or adolescent youth, or a young boy. No sense of shame, no unease, no notion of concern for religious prohibition affects the exuberant descriptions of the male beloved or the passionate love displayed by the poets for him." Such contradictory statements can be attributed mainly to two issues: 1) the authors ignore the fact that this style of poetry has been the main style of Iranian poetry for centuries, irrespective of the sexual orientation of poets and 2) except between blood relations, "love" in Western culture is often used as shorthand for sexual love, which is not the case in Iranian culture. Love between a spiritual guide and a follower and love between family members are two examples of the separation of the ideas of love and sexual love. In Sufi poetry and Ghazal, the main theme is the love story between a human and his or her beloved God, who might be described as a beautiful man. The reference to God as a "male" can also be seen in other religions such as Christianity. According to his most authoritative modern biographer, the Persian scholar Franklin D Lewis, "while Rumi seems slightly out of place in the company of Ginsberg, and seriously misunderstood as a poet of sexual love, it simply defies credulity to find Rumi in the realm of haute couture. But models draped in Donna Karan's new black, charcoal and platinum fall fashions actually flounced down the runway to health guru Deepak Chopra's recent musical versions of Rumi." In 1963, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wrote a book in which he stated that there was no religious restriction on corrective surgery. However, this applied only to intersexuals, and at the time Khomeini was a radical, anti-Shah revolutionary and his fatwas did not carry any weight with the Imperial government, which did not have any specific policies regarding transgendered individuals. Under the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last monarch of the Pahlavi Dynasty, homosexuality was tolerated, even to the point of allowing news coverage of a same-sex wedding. In the late 1970s, some Iranians even began to talk about starting up a gay rights organization, similar to the Gay Liberation movement. Up until the revolution, there were some night clubs where gay behavior was tolerated. During the Shah's time, however, homosexuality was still taboo everywhere and often one could not turn to family or friends for support and guidance. There were no public agencies to assist youth or people who were confused or questioning their sexuality. On 24 September 2007, while speaking at Columbia University, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, in answer to the question "Iranian women are now denied basic human rights and your government has imposed draconian punishments including execution on Iranian citizens who are homosexuals. Why are you doing those things?", "We don't have homosexuals, like in your country. I don't know who told you that."
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