This is a guest post by Carl Packman
Data revealed by a porn search engine PornMD [as you might expect, not safe for work] has shown that gay porn is most popular in some of the world’s most notoriously homophoic countries.
In Nigeria for example, where homosexual acts are punishable by death, the fourth most popular keyword search on porn sites is ‘South African gay porn’. The top search in Kazakhstan, a country which also heavily frowns upon homosexuality, was ‘Russian gay porn’.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the amount of very public hostility against homosexuals in the country by its President, Iran’s search behaviour showed gay porn to be very popular as well.
The fourth most searched term in Iran was ‘daddy love’, the fifth being ‘hairy’ used specifically for men, the sixth, seventh and eighth were ‘hotel businessman’, ‘iranian’ and ‘shower’ respectively, all sourced through gay websites, frequented by male browsers.
While this shows that President Ahmadinejad is quite wrong to say “in Iran we don’t have homosexuals”, the popularity of gay pornography in Iran, as a means to express one’s sexuality, over being recognised as accepted citizens, shows how deeply problematic the country’s repressive and homophobic measures are.
This doesn’t necessarily have historical precendence. In A.D. 637, Persia, after a some initial intolerance toward homosexuality, were more accepting of it to the extent that much of the celebrated male Arab poetry was to do with boys and their beauty. To this end pedastry, largely assumed to be Greek-influenced, was celebrated.
Furthermore it is known that under the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, gays had increased rights in Iran. The last monarch even allowed news coverage of a same sex wedding. The subject was still taboo, but it could be open – there were even talks of a popular gay liberation movement, but the moral outrage that reached its peak after the revolution drove homosexuality back underground where it remains, mostly, today.
Today the Iranian government believes gays are deviants and need help or punishment. This month Mohammad Javad Larijani, the secretary general of Iran’s high council for human rights, described homosexuality as an “illness and malady”.
A study last year conducted by Small Media, a non-profit group based in London, found that homosexuals are being systematically persecuted.
Their report reads:
“The bastions of the Islamic Republic of Iran fully realise that an established (albeit secretive) LGBT community exists beneath the folds of fundamentalism in [the country],” however the “Iranian government is doing its utmost to sweep the community under a densely woven Persian rug.”
Despite the official line, homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran. One forum considers the case of Hamoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni.
“Hastily convicted and executed by hanging in a public square for the rape of a 13-year-old boy, Asgari and Marhoni were listed in court documents as being sixteen and eighteen-years old respectively — yet many international organizations in and outside of Iran vociferously condemned their execution arguing the boys were in fact younger and the sex had been consensual and not rape.”
The findings that gay porn searches are popular in Iran provide a two-fingered salute towards President Ahmadinejad and his homophobic government, but they also reveal a very serious systematic repression of the freedom to express one’s sexuality. All credit goes to those LGBT communities that still try, amid all the barriers, to become accepted in their own country for who they are.
