“In Iran, we do not have homosexuals like in your country.”
— Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking at Columbia University, September 24, 2007.
While today some Occidental countries accept marriage for gays and
lesbians, in Iran, homosexuality is still punishable by death. This
sanction prohibits homosexuals from living out their sexuality openly.
Their only legal options are to leave the country, hide their sexuality,
or choose transsexuality, a practice tolerated by law but also
considered pathological.
In Denizli, a small town in Turkey, hundreds of Iranian gay refugees
have put their lives on pause while waiting to join a host country where
they can freely live their sexualities. In this context of uncertainty,
where anonymity is the best protection, this series of photographs
questions the fragile nature of identity and gender concepts. It tries
to give back to these people a face that their country has temporarily
stolen.
do you ever just want to shout like… it’s because i’m sad! like yes i didn’t do my homework, yes i didn’t text you back, yes i’ve been hiding in my room! i know and i’m sorry! but i haven’t killed myself so honestly where is my badge!
A little preview on what I’m working on! (Gil doesn’t like alcoholics)
Working on patreon content!
If we open a letter written by a young woman and read, “Often too he shared my pillow – or I his, and how sweet to sleep with him, to hold his beloved form in my embrace, to have his arms about my neck, to imprint upon his face sweet kisses,” we can reasonably assume that she and the man in question shared a sexual relationship. There is no justifiable grounds for changing that assumption when we learn that the words were actually written by Albert Dodd, a Yale undergraduate in the 1830s, describing his relationship with a fellow student, Anthony Hall. There is no valid reason to assert that passionate language in a letter between a man and a woman implies a sexual attraction, while exactly the same language exchanged between two men is “just the way male friends wrote about one another back then.” Yet this type of willful disbelief in the prevalence of historical homosexuality, and refusal to accept passionate male-male discourse as anything other than a literary convention, is all too common.
William Benemann, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America (via publius-esquire)
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