Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Soul Mates: Gays and Feminist Men

Soul Mates: Gays and Feminist Men

Looking through Iranian gay blog sphere and daily lives of Iranian feminist men

M. Ali Abdi

“We do not have homosexuals in Iran.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian so-called President

Introduction

I divide my paper into two parts; in the first part I will examine the widespread use of weblogs by Iranian gays nowadays and discuss why it is becoming an important way of self-expression for them. To reach the answer, I will briefly examine the legal, cultural and historical context and existing power relations of today’s Iran which do deny any existence of gay people on the one hand and do punish them on the other. Although there is no public space for Iranian gays to come out, it doesn’t mean that nobody is claiming to be gay. I will show that the large-scale usage of weblogs among youths has provided a space for some Iranian gays to possess an identity, build networks, make cyber communities through the blog sphere and challenge the dominant oppressive power discourses while avoiding punishment.

In the second part, as I look through Iranian gays’ weblogs randomly, I will distinguish specific daily experiences of them indicated in their blog entries which are similar to those of mine as a feminist man. Do I, as a feminist man, and Iranian gays share similar experiences of oppression? I will argue that despite our different sexual orientations, the apparent (by which I mean cultural) heterosexual orientation of mine and as-they-themselves-call-it the natural (and not cultural) homosexual orientation of them, we are both punished and suppressed by discursive systems of power to which three concepts of Heteronormativity, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Hegemonic Masculinity (HCH)[i] are attached. I will show how power discourses consider gays and feminist men as deviant categories leading to their medicalization, feminization, stigmatization, marginalization, isolation or even deletion from the society (i.e. putting into jail or execution).


I first intended to interview both Iranian feminist men and gays to draw comparison between their experiences for my analysis for the second part. But the unavailability of the members of both categories, the initial reluctance of gays to talk to a researcher, and lack of time to find and persuade members of each category to talk, left me no way other than making this comparison by just referring to my own experiences as a feminist man and written daily experiences of gays in their weblogs. Concentrating on these data would have some inevitable consequences.


First; I am a white Fars[ii] middle-class student man who was living in the capital city of Tehran, and was engaged in social activism including women’s rights, students’ academic rights, and human rights movements. These characteristics of my life contributed in shaping my identity and experiences as a feminist man. That is to say that although feminist men of Iran may share similar experiences resulting from their feminist identity, I am not representing all of them and I do not necessarily have common experiences with a Kurd working-class employer in South of Iran who may call himself a feminist. Second; blog entries of Iranian gays do not necessarily provide me with the information about their writers’ race, class, ethnicity and city in which they are living.


So, through the second part of my paper, when I use the term feminist men and gays I think of myself and some gay bloggers respectively. As a result, the second part of this paper will analyze the effects of the notions of Heteronormativity, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Hegemonic masculinity (HCH) in framing the experiences of a Fars middle-class student feminist man, and randomly chosen Iranian gay bloggers whose only-known characteristics are their sexual orientation and nationality.


Historical, Legal and Political Context

Two years have passed since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, denied any existence of homosexuals in Iran during his speech at Columbia University. Nevertheless, in 2005, two years before he made his speech, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, two gay teenagers, had been executed for being gay in northeastern Iran.[1] Moreover, a recent report by Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees (IRQR) reveals that three persons have been arrested last month in three different cities, trialed and sentenced to death in different courts based on accusations of homosexual acts. They were all under the age of 18 at the time of arrest[iii], and are now waiting for their re-trial.[2]


Although these are convincing proofs for a widespread homophobia in Iran, researches show that there was a homo-erotic tolerance in Iranian history. Janet Afary argues in her latest book, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, that homophobia was actually a Western import to Iranian culture in which same-sex relations were widely tolerated for over a thousand years. Also in 2002 a book entitled Witness Play by Cyrus Shamisa, the Iranian poet and author, was banned from bookstores because it had argued for the existence of homo-eroticism to such an extent that certain notable Persian writers were engaged in same-sex relationships between 11th and 14th centuries.[3]


On the contrary to this historical tolerance, according to the current conservative interpretation of Islamic Sharia’[iv] all sexual relations that occur out of a traditional, heterosexual marriage are illegal. Article 111 of the Iranian Code of Islamic Punishment states: “Lavat (Islamic word for sodomy) is punishable by death so long as both the active and passive partners are mature, of sound mind, and have acted of free will”.[4] According to the Boroumand Foundation[5], there are records of at least 107 executions with charges related to homosexuality between 1979 and 1990.[6]


These oppressive laws against homosexuals are one of the clusters of forces within which men and women have been convinced and forced to admit that marriage and heterosexuality are inevitable. But these are not only legal establishments which reinforce heterosexuality. Through the last thirty years of the history of Islamic Republic, none of the grand Ayatollahs, members of the parliament, right or left wing politicians, political dissidents, women’s rights activists, psychologists, journalists, writers, film directors, photographers, lawyers, intellectuals, doctors, university professors, even social activists and human rights defenders, who are living in Iran, have ever raised the issue of homosexuality publicly.

Although the sixth reformist parliament passed CEDAW[v] in 2002, and grand Ayatollah Saanei has recently issued fatwa[vi] in favor of legal equality between men and women, and even social activists are documenting human rights violation in Iran on a daily basis, nobody – and indeed nobody - raises any concern about homosexuals publicly. It seems that there is a huge silence compassing homosexuality in public spaces.


On the contrary, there is “steady proliferation and multiplication of discourses” concerned with homosexuality.[7] There are numerous times – and indeed numerous times - that the state TV or pro-hard liners’ newspapers mention the term “sodomy”, especially when they want to stigmatize reformist politicians or social activists or undermine the western culture and take advantage of what-Gayle Rubin-calls moral panic[8]. Paraphrasing Rubin’s words, the criminalization of apparently harmless behaviors is justified by portraying them as threats which may lead to something worse.[9] Moral panic, as it is illustrated in the example below, is a strong weapon in rationalizing certain restrictions:


When Tehran’s prosecutor Saeid Mortazavi was asked about the necessity of the new Islamic Codes regulating men’s hairstyles and clothes, he answered:

In some western countries there are immoral groups like heavy metal music bands or sodomites that promote perverseness with their distinctive clothes and hairstyles. So we invite (sic) youths with abnormal ways of dressing to show them pictures in western magazines in order to prove that their hairstyles are like sodomites’ hairstyles which will promote aberrancy. Once our brothers (moral police) saw a young boy in the mountains who was wearing a western T-Shirt behind which was written I am an object. When they told him of its disgusting meaning the boy immediately took it off … They (youths) generally obey our orders … they themselves do not want to advertise sodomy.[10] (emphasis added)[vii]


In this example, Tehran’s prosecutor justifies new restrictive regulations concerning men’s clothes by using moral panic. In other words, by pointing to the possible provocation of homosexuality which may result from non-Islamic dressings he finds a ground for his claim and at the same time reinforces the homophobic culture. Rubin would probably identify Mortazavi’s narrative also as a “brainwash theory” because it does assume a hierarchical valuation of sex acts (heterosexuality is more valued than homosexuality) and does not respect the concept of sexual variation.[11] I would also like to use Tehran’s prosecutor’s words to elaborate three intertwined notions of HCH, their effects on the lives of gay people, and the consequent emergence of gay bloggers in the next part.


HCH and the Emergence of Gay Bloggers

Michael Warner calls the sets of lifestyle norms embedded in Mortazavi’s narrative, which on the one hand systematize certain gender roles for each sex and promote heterosexual relationships, and on the other hand ban and punish certain forms of behavior which are not fit into it, heteronormativity.[12] Thus even a white middle-class apparently heterosexual healthy man, like the young boy wearing a western T-Shirt climbing a mountain, can violate heteronormative assumptions. If he had resisted taking his clothes off and conforming to heteronormativity, he would have faced persecution.


Although understanding the concept of heteronormativity allows us to get critically engaged in discerning certain forms of behavior which power discourses encourage or punish, we may not be capable of explaining all assumptions embedded in power practices and relations which tend to subordinate and marginalize certain people with certain behaviors and life styles. Heteronormative discourses ascribe masculine and feminine roles and characteristics for men and women respectively, but they may not distinguish that the terms masculine and feminine also point “beyond categorical sex difference to the ways men differ among themselves, and women differ among themselves, in terms of gender.”[13]


R. W. Connell, in her book Masculinities, argues that although the concept of masculinity exists in contrast with femininity, it doesn’t mean that, for instance, white men’s masculinity is constructed only in relation to women’s femininity, but also it is sustained in relation to black men’s masculinity. In other words there are “multiple masculinities” which are at the same time hierarchical in relation to each other. So a homosexual working-class man is considered to be less masculine, or more feminine, than a heterosexual middle-class one.[14]


But even within the same categories of sexuality, race and class there are hierarchies based on masculinities to which different social and cultural values are attached. As Connell says, “at any given time one form of masculinity rather than the others is culturally exalted”[15] which then he calls this concept the “hegemonic masculinity”. For instance, Tehran’s prosecutor also assumed that the young boy had become less masculine by wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan of I am an object, pushing him towards the less masculine non-heteronormative category of homosexuals.


Since I have studied gays’ weblogs, I think it’s highly probable that the young boy has been really a homosexual wearing that T-shirt sending signals to other gays around in the mountain. Although he was hindered by the “brothers”[viii], he was lucky that they couldn’t think of that possibility. Not surmising the probability of the homosexual orientation of the boy lies within a culture in which “compulsory heterosexuality” is the default and innate sexuality.


Raising the characteristics of male power and putting them into eight categories, Rich argues that male power is manifested, maintained and survived by compulsory heterosexual relationships between men and women.[16] Although she argues that the enforcement of this compulsion is a means of “assuring male right of physical, economical, and emotional access”[17] (emphasis added), homosexual men also do suffer, because they are expected to marry the other sex and form a patriarchal family, otherwise they are marginalized or isolated.


Living in such society is which HCH is firmly attached to power practices is not easy for Iranian gays. But as Foucault has discussed in The Repressive Hypothesis, although such suppressive networks of power radiate discourses aimed at sexuality and consequently intensify people’s awareness of it as a constant danger, they at the same time “create a further incentive” to talk about it.[18] Thus, the exertion of the restrictive power would provide what Foucault calls “maximum places of saturation.”[19]


Iranian gays have found these places to be certain restaurants (such as Jaam-e-Jam in Tehran), coffee shops (such as Tito), shopping centers (such as Golestan), parks (such as Mellat), squares (such as Vanak) and most noticeably internet weblogs.[20] The number of all Iranian weblogs is estimated to be between 200,000 and 700,000 (one estimation has put it up to 3,000,000[21]) in a country which more than 60 percent of its 70 million population are under the age of thirty.[22] Young Iranian bloggers, who face hindrances from the government, break forbidden barriers by writing in their weblogs. Blogging in Iran is both a means for emotional release for reducing social, political, cultural and financial pressures and a relatively safe space for criticizing the government's policies.


Iranian gays use weblogs for various reasons; 14 of the 40 most visited bloggers had indicated their incentives to start blogging in their blog entries including: to emphasize their existence, to help homosexual bloggers to overcome their possible shame of their sexual orientation, to share personal diaries and experiences with their readers in order to feel engaged in a civil society, to help religious homosexuals to take over their inner challenges, to write about shared pains, to force government officials to recognize gays’ existence and rights, to raise public awareness of homosexuality and to write more and more about homosexuality in order to make it normative. Hamzaad, who has recently published a book of his erotic writings through the internet, puts it this way:


Suppose a man who is confined in a dark, tight, windowless room; now imagine there is little hole on the wall of this room … this tiny hole enables the man to breathe, to see the light, to shout and call for help, and retain a hope to come out of this confinement. Cyber space generally, and writing weblogs specifically, is this tiny hole for us … Writing has also helped me to know myself better, to form my identity.[23]


Beside the mentioned reasons, Iranian gays use weblogs to make communities by linking to each other’s homepages. Each blogger puts the addresses of between 10 to 150 gay weblogs on the corner of his page. There are few non-gay weblogs to which gay bloggers tend to link. Also, among the well-known non-gay weblogs that I knew, just one had put the address of a famous gay weblog in his homepage.


The culture/nature debate also exists in the Iranian gay blog sphere. 18 of the bloggers have indicated that their sexual orientation is natural, essential and God-given. So nobody can change it. One has stated that he doesn’t care whether his sexual orientation is natural or is culturally constructed. He assumes the ontological debates concerning homosexuality to be fruitless. 21 remaining ones have stayed silent or have not raised this issue in their blog entries. 32 of them call themselves “Ham-Jens-Gara” (the Persian translation for homosexual), 3 call gay, 1 call queer, and 4 don’t use any specific term to be identified with. When I wrote to Reza, the most famous Iranian gay blogger whose weblog is an umbrella for the gay blog sphere, that I may become gay in the future, he wrote back:


Oh! Most of the gay bloggers will laugh at you if they hear such claim! I don’t believe in what you said either … If homosexuality (heterosexuality) was this much fluid, I would try my best to be heterosexual so not to think about the bitter future which awaits me. But reality is something different.



Although I cannot reach a general conclusion by interpreting Reza’s quote, it seems that concerning homosexuality as a natural fact is more functional in challenging biases and sexual discriminations in Iranian context where HCH discourses are very likely to misuse the cultural ontology of homosexuality by arguing that non-normative sexualities are changeable then, which would justify discrimination against sexual minorities.


Except one, who is a Muslim homosexual and argues for the compatibility of Islamic orders and homosexuality, all bloggers use their first name or a nick name for privacy reasons. Government officials usually filter or remove gays’ weblogs. Persian internet service providers (ISPs) are all owned or supervised by the government, so they obey the orders of their superior. If a weblog is filtered, the blogger usually starts a new one, adding a letter or a number to the previous address.


Gay bloggers sometimes invite all members of their cyber community to write about specific questions or subjects altogether (which they call Weblog Games) such as “What was the first queer weblog that you found?”, “A Day against Homophobia” or “How do you evaluate Iranian LGBT organizations functioning out of Iran?” and they give virtual gifts to the ones who write the best texts.


Subjects of blog entries range from general ones found also in non-gay weblogs such as political issues of the time, daily diaries, and non-erotic personal writings and poems to more specific ones such as homo-erotic pictures and stories, news concerning LGBTs worldwide, AIDS, homophobia, transphobia, safe-sex, Islam and homosexuality, queers and queer politics, queer films reviews, heterosexuality, heterosexual morality, gay marriage and etc. 13 of the bloggers hadn’t written anything unrelated to sexuality, while the other 27 ones had some blog entries addressing other issues as well.


In the next part I will focus on the weblogs of Iranian gays and, as I discussed through the introduction, I will look for similar experiences of mine as a feminist man and those of Iranian gays which are shaped by oppressive power relations based on HCH.


Soul Mates: Gays and Feminist Men

Gays and feminist men may not appear soul mates at first glance, for the former term invokes the realm of sexuality and the latter one calls on gender. However, since both of them challenge HCH assumptions, violating normative sexualities and confusing gender roles, it’s probable that they face similar forms of oppression caused by discursive networks of power.


Coming out as a feminist or a gay man, results in the construction of new non-normative categories. As Foucault argues, after each deviant category is made, power relations try to “isolate”, “intensify” and “consolidate” it.[24] This would lead to the more “visibility” and “permanent reality” of these categories.[25] So while many centers have begun to produce discourses on feminist men and gays, trying to make the distinction between licit and illicit or normative and non-normative more concrete, feminist men and gays are more visible and active.


One of the categories to which feminist men and gays are both pushed to is the category of unnatural. Summarizing the most prevalently held assumptions about sexuality in the twentieth century, Padgug explains that sexuality is widely believed to be “universal, static and permanent” located within the individual as a “fixed essence.”[26] A heteronormative discourse misuses this assumption to conclude that heterosexuality is the only natural and universal sexuality while homosexuality is an unnatural and deviant phenomenon.


Also, since a feminist man is challenging the patriarchal relations and men power over women implanted in HCH discourses, he is seen as a man who is fighting against members of the group of males to which he belongs, so he becomes an unreasonable person. Reason is, within a liberal discourse, what “distinguishes human beings from animals”;[27] so it’s what all people possess inherently, otherwise they are not human beings. Thus, if one wants to remain a human being, he must have reason, and as far as feminism is represented widely by HCH discourses to be the war against men, it’s unreasonable for a man to be a feminist. Feminist men then are put into the category of unreasonable, and consequently unnatural, where gays were previously pushed to.


The categorization of feminist men and gays as unnatural phenomena is then followed by their medicalization. That is to say doctors are the ones who feel the most responsible to subvert the unnatural and put the disordered society into an ordered one. Foucault argues that medicalization of homosexuals “was constituted from the moment that homosexuality was characterized”[28]. Iranian gays write about their experiences with their psychologists:


When I don’t feel good I think of going back to my stupid psychologist. He is idiot! He thinks he can change my nature. Sometimes, because of difficult circumstances of Iranian homosexuals’ community, I feel that it may be easier to change my nature than to find a partner, a sympathizer.[29]

Pesar (Boy), Reza, Gay Blogger[ix]

Psychology is one of the realms in which heteronormative assumptions are embedded. As Gayle Rubin says, psychology is “the last resort” which refuses to recognize that non-normative sexualities are as conscious and healthy as longstanding monogamous heterosexual relationships.[30] Although in recent years Iranian psychologists’ views towards homosexuality have changed dramatically[31], many gays are advised by their psychologists or psychotherapists to change their sexual orientation.


Besides, psychologists may be asked by their gay clients not to let their parents know about their sexual orientation. Iranian gays usually do not come out as homosexuals to their parents. In fact among the weblogs that I studied, none of the gay bloggers had come out as a homosexual to his family. No official or academic survey has been done on the attitude of Iranian families towards homosexuality but one can assume that the past generation, passing the revolutionary era of the 80’s and living within pro-Islamic anti-imperialism HCH discourses, would not tolerate non-normative sexualities.

Daddy! If I found a partner to marry, would you participate in your son’s marital ceremony? And would you say with high dignity to everybody that this man is my son? … Well! I don’t think so! Even if I found some body, even if I marry him, I am sure you would not even look at my face …[32]

Objective, unidentified name, Gay Blogger


Every now and then my parents ask me why I do not get marry, I make different justifications each time … But imagine! How can I tell to my dad, mom, brother and sister that I do not feel any sexual or emotional attraction to women? Indeed how can I tell this part of my soul, my essence, my body, to people who would not understand it at all?


Man-Zan-Nemikhaam (I do not want wife), Saeed Homo, Gay Blogger


If our families got to know who we really are, they would dismiss us … To be optimistic, even if they accept our sexual orientation the life would be a hell afterwards, because they would limit us by all means.

Bayut, Sina, Gay Blogger


But these are not just gays who are forced to marry or change their essence by their families and psychologists respectively. I also remember my own consultations with a prominent psychotherapist in Tehran to whom I went for my apparent depression resulting from a break-up with my ex-girlfriend. As a matter of fact, the issues discussed in three of the five therapy sessions were not about the ways to overcome the problems I had after the separation, but rather about what-the-psychotherapist-himself-called the natural masculinity of mine which was in danger of deficiency:

Why you have become a feminist? Don’t you think your girl friend split up because you were feminized? You know what! Women want a powerful man to rely on. You are losing your natural masculinity Ali. You may not be able to build longstanding relationships with women anymore. This is how the world works.[33]


Since I hadn’t told my psychotherapist that I recognize myself as a feminist, my parents had probably informed him of my identity. They were, and still are, are very concerned about my future. As the oldest son of the family, I bear foremost the responsibility of continuing the line of my paternal ancestors. This is one of the assertions underlying what Butler calls “heterosexual matrix”, a complex of assumptions reinforcing the idea that real boys and girls grow up to be real men and women “whose realness is realized by their natural desire for the members of the opposite sex.” And psychologists, in both cases above, tried to make me and that gay blogger conform to this matrix, by forcing the latter to be heterosexual and the former to be more masculine.


But I was not just perceived as a feminine (or not enough masculine) man; I was even put into the category of females, as if this is my gender which determines to which sex I belong. Judith Butler would be interested to know that there are examples other than “drag” by which she could argue “if the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”[34] I didn’t put on the clothes of the other sex, but my feminist identity and non-normative gender practices put me into the category of females, as will be illustrated in the following example.


According to the Iranian civil law, the testimony of a woman in the courts is valued half the testimony of a man. Keeping this legal sexist distinction in mind, I want to raise the memory of a meeting in my ex-university’s student council where the members were discussing how to protest against the imprisonment of one of the political dissidents, and one of the suggestions was to be voted. Students raised their hands and, as a matter of fact, the one who was counting the raised hands, glibly and teasingly started counting girls’ votes half the boys, and when he reached me, he also counted me as a half while saying that “according to the Law women are half the men!” Feminist identity had pushed me out of my biology. Gender had overcome my sex.


Although I couldn’t find an example in gays’ weblogs which serves as an illustration of their femalization, there are numerous blog entries indicating their feminization:

We have a male dominant society. Men in our society ought to have a rough and masculine face. When the society cannot accept homosexuality, it tries to belittle gays by making them a subject of laughter… they call us “eva-khahar” (a flamboyantly feminine man or sissy) … It does not matter who you are or what position you do have, people disrespect and contempt you.

Interview with a Gay Blogger


Since gays and feminist men are both non-heteronormative, the heteronormative discourse depreciates them, and it does so by referring to them as “eva-khahar” (sissy) or regarding them as women. In fact, heteronormative discourses, produced in the patriarchal culture, presume that the two notions of masculinity and femininity are defined relationally as the basis of an ordered normative society, belonging to men and women respectively. Like all dichotomies of the post-enlightenment era, one notion is believed to be more valued in this relational mutuality, and masculinity is the one which holds the exalted position. This have been said, calling a man with a feminine term is a form of disparaging him.


Devaluation of feminist men and gays also occurs by discourses which do not necessarily make them closer to women. There are many other categories to which gays and feminist men can be attached:

Asshole, jakes, horny, depressed, capricious, pederast, sick, devilish, patient, pervert, abnormal, bastard, sodomite, fucked guy, faggot … You guys are familiar with these words? Aren’t you? Words that were repeated and repeated day by day and suddenly when I look at myself I say Oh! I am exactly that homosexual! The one whom people are scorning!

My Gay Day, unidentified name, Gay Blogger


Some heterosexual men and boys are then driven out from the circle of legitimacy by hegemonic masculinity discourses. “The process is marked by a rich vocabulary of abuse: wimp, milksop, nerd, turkey, lily liver, jellyfish, candy ass, pushover, cookie pusher, cream puff, mother fucker, pantywaist, mother’s boy, four-eyes, Milquetoast, Cedric” and so on.[35] Feminist men are not immune to such labels as well. I was usually called by my friends with the same derogatory words they use to call gays. In fact, calling both feminist men and gays with these labels is a form of stigmatization which is fundamentally implanted in HCH discourses.


So no reason is left for gays to come out in public space. Through my study I encountered a weblog which its blog entries were deleted by its gay writer because a close friend of him had discovered that the weblog belonged to him. Another blogger showed his concern in this way:

I do not feel good; I guessed that this would happen sooner or later but … it was a funny situation. I was typing something. My brother was in the room and in-the-middle of our conversation he said: “I’ve seen your weblog.” While continuing my typing and pretending to ignore what he had said, I asked: “Which weblog?” He replied: “Hamzaad.” I felt cold. My fingers got stuck on the keyboard. I just gazed at the monitor. For a thousand years I gazed at the monitor. I asked silently: “How did you find its web address?” He said: “I found it somehow.” He has found it somehow. I don’t feel good. You read here. It’s not good …

Hamzaad, Mehdi, Gay Blogger


HCH discourses force gay men to have perpetual masks on their face, or in other words they are forced to feel to be in the closet even in the cyber space. As Sedgwick points out in his article, Epistemology of the Closet, there are very few of even the most openly gay people who are not intentionally in closet with someone “personally, economically or institutionally” significant to them.[36] In the example illustrated above, Mehdi is not satisfied with the disclosure of his sexual identities because of the possible heteronormative ideas of his family members and the compulsory heterosexuality practices of the society in which he is living.


Feminist men also do not come out as feminist in all situations. I remember, many times, while I was collecting signatures in favor of changing discriminatory laws against women for One Million Signature Campaign[x], people in the street were asking me if I was a feminist, and my answer was usually negative. I was always scaring that coming out as a feminist man in front of others would prevent people from signing the petition of the campaign, for people may make certain judgments of a feminist man’s character because of the lessons they have learned from heteronormative discourses.


Although both feminist and gay men may feel to be in the closet in many circumstances, consequences of coming out as a gay man differs from that of a feminist man. First; the punishment that each category encounters is much different. Although I experienced prison because of collecting signatures and my activism as a feminist man, execution is not my destiny at all. Second; while it’s not probable for a feminist man to be asked “How do you know you are really a feminist?” questions of “authority and evidence”[37] can be the first to arise against a gay man after coming out. In fact the identity of gay is more debatable than that of a feminist. Third; coming out as a gay man is more probable to put the gay’s family members into a new closet in their communities[38] than coming out as a feminist.


After all, in all of the cases discussed above, the loud and clear voices of HCH assumptions are resonating. Heteronormativity assumes that I, as a man, can attract women only I possess certain gender roles, while in gays’ cases it holds the hands of compulsory heterosexuality assuming that men’s sexual attraction to women and vice versa are the only possible, recognized, natural and exalted forms of sexuality. Hegemonic masculinity also alerts me that I am becoming less masculine, or more feminine, or in Butlerian terms less “real”, because of being a feminist and not conforming to the normative gendered order of the world, while compulsory heterosexuality prevents gays from practicing their realness.


Conclusion

I have shown that although there is a history of homo-erotic tolerance in Iran, nowadays any expression of gay identity in public space is faced by legal and social punishments. Besides, nobody dares to talk for gays’ rights, for the possible stigmatization she/he would face in a society in which HCH discourses are dominant. This has led to the emergence of gay weblogs. Their numbers have increased remarkably through the last ten years, for there is no other space but cyber space in which Iranian gays can express their real identity, make gay communities and find partners.


I have also proved that there are many experiences that feminist men and gays share because of challenging heteronormativity, compulsory heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity discourses. There are similar reasons which discourage feminist and gay men to come out and express their identity. After coming out they are both put into the category of unnatural which then need to be medicalized. Their families and psychologists try to question or change their gender and sexual identities in order to make them obey the heteronormative gender roles and have proper sexual orientation. Femalization, feminization and stigmatization which then results in the isolation of both categories are the powerful tools in the hands of HCH discourses by which they destroy social status of feminist and gay men.


There are two subjects that I think of for further researches. First, I’d like to contextualize the experiences of gays and feminist men to see how their race, class and ethnicity intervene in shaping their experiences for having a distinctive gender and sexual identity. Second, while I was writing the last part of this paper I found a book called Men Doing Feminism edited by Tom Digby. It has provoked the idea of doing a research on social movements to see how the experiences of feminist men are shaped by their presence in men and women’s rights movements and how it’s linked to that of gays in gays’ rights movements. Can I analyze these experiences by using HCH as a framework? Or do I need more theories to shape my analysis? These are some of the questions which need further analyses.


[i] I will use HCH as an abbreviation through my paper

[ii] Fars, is the majority ethnic group in Iran according to Statistical Center of Iran Website (http:// http://www.sci.org.ir/)

[iii] According to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, the age of legal responsibility is 18. Iran has joined the convention in February 1994. Nevertheless, Iranian civil law considers boys over the age of 15, and girls over the age of 9, as adults.

[iv] Sharia refers to the legal framework within which the public and private aspects of life are regulated for those living in a legal system based on Islamic principles. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia)

[v] The Sixth reformist parliament passed Convention of Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, but the Guardian Council, which examines the compatibility of the passed laws with Islamic orders, suspended the parliament’s decision, arguing for the irrelevancy of gender equality with God’s rules.

[vi] A fatwā in the Islamic faith is a religious opinion concerning Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatw%C4%81)

[vii] Since most blog entries and available data were in Persian language, I have translated them word by word. Yet, words cannot be translated from a language to another while holding the same meaning in each context.

[viii] An Islamic word used to address your male colleagues.

[ix] I write the source of the quotes like this: Name of the Weblog, Name of the author, Gay Blogger

[x] One Million Signatures Demanding an End to Discriminatory Laws, also known as Change for Equality, is a campaign in Iran to collect one million signatures in support of changing discriminatory laws against women.


[1] http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=25296

[2] http://www.irqr.net/English/226.htm

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Iran

[4] Translation of the civil law is done here http://www.irqr.net/English/3.htm

[5] http://www.iranrights.org/

[6] http://www.iranrights.org/english/document-181-349.php?searchtext=aG9tb3NleHVhbA%3D%3D

[7] Foucault, Michel. 1978. Part II, “The Repressive Hypothesis”, in The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, An Introduction. New York: Pantheon, p18

[8] Rubin, Gayle. 1984. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Carol Vance, ed. London: Routledge, p297

[9] Ibid.

[10] http://www.ab-tin.blogfa.com/post-17.aspx

[11] Rubin, p306

[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronormativity

[13] Connell, R. W. 1995. “The Social Organization of Masculinity” in Masculinities, Berkley: University of California Press, p69

[14] Ibid., pp67-79

[15] Ibid., pp76-77

[16] Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5 (4, Summer): 182-85

[17] Ibid., p191

[18] Foucault, p31

[19] Ibid., p47

[20] All data and names of the places are taken from gay blog entries.

[22] "Iran: Country Brief" in Development Economics, Development Data Group (DECDG)., World Bank, June 2009

[23] Hamzad, in an interview with Radio Zamaaneh, talks about different aspects of his weblog http://zamaaneh.com/literature/2009/05/post_527.html

[24] Foucault, p48

[25] Ibid., p44

[26] Padgug, Robert. 1979. “Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History” Radical History Review (Spring/Summer): 8

[27] Tong, Rosemarie. 1998. “The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Roots of Liberal Feminism and Liberal Feminist Action” in Feminist Thought, Boulder Colorado: Westview Press, p10

[28] Foucault, p43

[29]http://5pesar.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%B4%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B3-%D8%A7%D8%AD%D9%85%D9%82/

[30] Rubin, p306

[31] In fact, Iranian gay community was pleased to hear that Dr Ohadi, a psychologist in Tehran, had recognized that homosexuality is not a disease or even a disorder publicly. http://yryd.blogfa.com/post-180.aspx

[32] http://obje.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/333/

[33] Since I cannot remember every word of my psychotherapist, I tried to put it as closely as possible to what he actually said that day.

[34] Butler, Judith. 1990. “Subjection of Sex/Gender/Desire” in Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London/New York: Routledge, p7

[35] Connell, p79

[36] Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. “The Epistemology of the Closet”, in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Abelove, Henry, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds. New York: Routledge, p46

[37] Ibid., p53

[38] Ibid.