Death of the Persian Boys

In his classic “Desiderata,” the poet Max Ehrmann warned us that “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain & bitter; for always there will be greater & lesser persons than yourself.” This is especially true when we compare the condition of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people in the United States of America with those in other countries. On the one hand, we have places like the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and Spain, which recently legalized same-sex marriage. On the other hand, we have the Islamic republic of Iran, where two gay teenagers were recently executed for committing homosexual acts. Or so it seemed.

To make a often-told story short, on July 19 two teenage boys were executed in the Iranian city of Mashhad. Prior to the execution, Mahmoud Asgari, 16, and Ayaz Marhoni, 18, were held in prison for 14 months, severely beaten and flogged 228 times. They were then convicted of sodomy, which along with murder, rape, armed robbery, apostasy, blasphemy, serious drug trafficking, adultery, prostitution, treason and espionage is a capital offense under Iran’s Shariah law. The boys responded to the charge by alleging that they were not aware that homosexual acts are capital offenses and, in any case, these are things that Iranian boys of a certain age do all the time. Rohollah Razaz Zadeh, Asgari’s lawyer, added that his client was too young (16) to be executed. The Iranian Supreme Court rejected the defense argument and the boys were hanged in the Mashhad town square. GLBT activists around the world soundly condemned the executions, and the governments of Sweden and the Netherlands placed a moratorium on the extradition of gays and lesbians to Iran. Quite a comedown for a country which, as Persia, once sang of the love of males in the works of its poets Hafiz and Rumi.

Supporters of the Iranian government were quick to point out that the teens were not executed for having consensual homosexual acts with each other but for raping a 13-year old boy. They charge that the defendants seized their young victim and gang-raped him along with three other boys, who are still at large. The alleged rape occurred at least 14 months before the executions, which indicate that the boys were minors at the type of the alleged offense. Queer activists were not satisfied, noting that Iran has repeatedly used trumped up charges to justify its brutality. Nor, they say, is this an isolated incident. According to British activist Peter Thatchell, over 4,000 lesbian or gay Iranians have been put to death since the Ayatollahs took over in 1979.

It is easy to hate Iran, a Muslim theocracy and a member of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil.” But is it fair? After all, several American states were sentencing juveniles to death as recently as a few months ago, when this barbarous custom was finally done away with by our “activist” Supreme Court. Faisal Alam, founder of the GLBT Muslim organization Al-Fatiha, pointed out that “the hysteria surrounding the executions was clear enough and only fed a growing Islamophobia.” Nor is Iran the only country that puts its gays to death. Both Nigeria and Saudi Arabia recently executed gays, though their deaths did not lead to a world wide outcry similar to the one that followed the Iranian executions.

Why did the executions of Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni become such a cause celebre? Pardon my cynicism, but could it be because the boys were young and (if the photos published on the Internet are any indication) cute? Sympathizing with a victim’s plight because he or she was young and/or attractive seems to be a common human response: Watch any news program on television and you will see heartbreaking stories about pretty young girls or women who were kidnaped, raped or murdered. Closer to us, the gay-bashing death of Matthew Shepard in Laramie became the symbol of the violence that GLBT people face every day and everywhere in part because Shepard was an attractive, young college student. Will Asgari and Marhoni become the Matthew Shepards of the 21st century? Is Iran worse than Wyoming?

Don’t get me wrong. The judicial murders of these two Iranian boys were horrible and should be condemned, regardless of the charge, just as Shepard’s murder was horrible and rightly condemned. We should condemn all acts of violence perpetrated against sexual or gender minority members, not just when the perpetrator is Iran and the victims are teenage boys. After all, the USA has its share of Christian “ayatollahs” who would love to bring back both the death penalty for sodomy and the death penalty for juveniles. For all we know, the next time an incident like this happens, it might happen much closer to home.