Perhaps it’s my big balls, and the hormones. I prefer to stay single at the moment and enjoy sex – I hook up several times a week, whenever I need to. The girth’s 8 inches, and I have pretty big balls. My dick’s close to 10 inches long, and uncircumcised. I was 12 or 13 when I first realized I have an above average-sized dick. I’m just over 6 feet tall, and have US size 12 feet. I guess you could say I’m pretty big all over. As horrifying as this tragedy is, we might only be able to make it worse.I’m a 25-year-old gay man from Spain, living in London. Ironically, by demanding tolerance of “homosexuality,” Americans can inhibit the tolerance of forms of sexuality and gender identity that are long-standing traditions in non-Western culture.įor all these reasons, don’t expect the Obama administration, or the LGBT movement, to raise a hue and cry over this latest travesty of justice. Moreover, says Puar, Americans frequently impose their own conceptions of sexual and gender identity onto other cultures, stomping out indigenous ways of thinking about sexuality and gender, and perpetuating the myth that sexual diversity is a Western invention. (Puar might prefer the term “imperialism.”) Even as conservatives fight LGBT equality at home, Puar says, they champion it overseas-as long as it serves their interests to do so. The phenomenon of invoking LGBT equality as a justification for American foreign policies, which theorist Jasbir Puar calls “homonationalism,” has been around for several years.
Thus the administration is hit from all sides-at a moment in which it is trying to pursue its dicey diplomatic agenda. But the fact remains that when Iran persecutes gay people, conservatives in the United States suddenly become enamored of gay rights-and bash the Obama administration for not doing enough to defend them. And Democrats as well as Republicans routinely criticize Iran’s repression of gays and lesbians. To be sure, not allowing gays to marry is hardly the same as putting them to death. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chris Smith, and Ed Royce, who used Iran’s human rights record as evidence against the Obama administration’s policy of engagement. Just a few weeks ago, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on human rights in Iran at which progressives such as Hossein Alizadeh of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission testified about Iran’s hideous record of criminalization and persecution.īut at that same hearing, some of the most vocal defenses of human rights came from Robert George-the intellectual father of the right-wing “religious liberty” movement and, domestically at least, a zealous opponent of LGBT equality-and Republican Reps. In the topsy-turvy world that is international LGBT politics, Iran’s record on homosexuality is more a conservative cause than a liberal one. The execution of two gay men, while it may not be surprising, certainly doesn’t make that “engagement” any easier.Ĭonservatives who favor a hawkish foreign policy will claim otherwise, of course. punditocracy, the administration has argued for a policy of constructive engagement, pursuing diplomacy over military action to halt Iran’s nuclear program. Fending off Iran hawks in Congress and the D.C. journalists, and the continued oppression of women, the Obama administration has been attempting a rapprochement with the Iranian regime. We do not know for certain that they were executed for being gay- one Iranian source says they were, another is vague about their “crimes” but calls them “immoral villains.” If these men were hanged for consensual homosexuality, however, this could be another LGBT headache for the Obama administration, which has been trying to walk a tightrope between LGBT human rights on one end and international politics on the other.ĭespite Iran’s state anti-Semitism, the recent arrest of U.S. Their deaths are part of a wave of executions in Iran, with more than 400 in the first half of 2014 alone, according to the NGO Iran Human Rights. (Sign a petition! Demand human rights!) Yet in practice, those most attentive to LGBT concerns may be the least eager to pick this fight.Īs Nina Strochlic reported in these pages Sunday, the two men, Abdullah Ghavami Chahzanjiru and Salman Ghanbari Chahzanjiri, were hanged in southern Iran on August 6, possibly for consensual sodomy. The tragic hanging of two “sodomites” in Iran may seem, in theory, like an obvious cause for U.S.