“We were eventually all taken to court, and cross-examined. The judge sentenced four of us, including me, to public flogging. The news was printed all over the newspapers that a group of homosexuals had been arrested, with our names. I got 100 lashes -- I passed out before the 100 lashes were over. When I woke up, my arms and legs were so numb that I fell over when they picked me up from the platform on which I’d been lashed. They had told me that, if I screamed, they will beat me even harder -- so I was biting my arms so hard, to keep from screaming, that I left deep teeth wounds in my own arms.”
After this entrapment and public flogging, Amir’s life became unbearable -- he was rousted regularly at his home by the basiji and by agents of the Office for Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice [which represses “moral deviance” -- things like boys and girls walking around holding hands, women not wearing proper Islamic dress or wearing makeup, same-sex relations, and prostitution.
But after the hangings of two gay teens in the city of Mashad in July of this year (above) -- and the world-wide protests that followed those hangings -- Amir says that things got even worse for him and other Iranian gays. Amir was under continual surveillance, harassed, and threatened: “After the Mashad incident, the ‘visits’ from the authorities became an almost daily occurrence. They would come to my house and threaten me. They knew everything about everything I did, about everywhere I went. They would tell me exactly what I had done each and every time I had left the house. It had gotten to the point where I was starting to suspect my own friends of spying on me. On one of these visits, Ali Panahi --the one who’d arrested me the last time -- grabbed me by the hair and asked me if I’d suck his cock if he asked me to. One of my friends was raped by Ali Panahi, who fucked my friend in exchange for letting him go without a record.It's all here.
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