The Secret Double Lives of LGBT Iranians: An Interview With Majid Parsa
Image: Michael Wave
Iran is one of 65 places in the world where homosexuality is against the law, and one of 12 in which it’s punishable by death. And yet, pulsing beneath the surface of authoritarian Shia theocracy is a thriving scene of youthful rebellion, queer love, and LGBT nightlife. In his newly published memoir, The Ayatollah's Gaze: A Memoir of the Forbidden and the Fabulous (2025), author Majid Parsa peels back the curtain to reveal a hidden world that, in many ways, seems too wild and contradictory to be real — one in which he came to discover and embrace his life as a gay man. As life stories go, Parsa’s is as fascinating as they come.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Majid (a pseudonym adopted for his safety). We discussed his memoir, his formative first same-sex relationship, Iran’s peculiar embrace of trans women, the war between Iran and Israel, Islam and LGBT rights, the dangers of mixing religion with politics, and more.
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Jamie Paul: Your story is a little bit unusual because you were born in the UK but then moved to Iran as a small child. It's usually the other way around.
Majid Parsa: So my parents used to live in the UK. This was pre-Revolution. Then they got married and moved to Iran, but came back to the UK to study in college before the 1979 Revolution. That's why my brother and I were born in the UK. I was born in 1981, and when I was six months old, my parents decided to return to Iran. They had both become extremely religious and felt very in touch with the Revolution. They wanted to be where it was all happening. They’d reinvented themselves and they wanted to be home.
JP: What was your motivation for writing this memoir?
MP: When I moved to the UK about 15 years ago, and I’d talk about growing up in Iran, Tehran's gay scene, and just my day-to-day life, I realized that what was “normal” for me was met with wide eyes and dropped jaws. I started to think, “Okay, maybe there’s a story there, one that hasn’t been told.” Not only the gay scene in Iran, but also the culture, the way Iranian society worked, plus the added layer of my religious background, upbringing, and the family. [Western] people don’t know much about these things. So that was the initial spark. It was a few years later when I realized I’d better start writing this all down.
JP: One of the most interesting things about Iran is how defiant and in some ways secular its youth culture is, but then you also have this repressive regime looming over everything. I can't think of any other country that has a dynamic quite like that. What's it like to live in that situation?
MP: Yeah, you're right. It's quite interesting. Like any other population, there are sections of people who are completely religious, including youth who are religious and some who are in line with the regime. It’s a minority, at least in my experience. My generation had this urge to just party and get out and do lots of things that were frowned upon. It's true what they say: if you try stopping someone from doing something, they just want to do it more, especially for young people. There was this real drive to do exactly what we were told not to do or what we were told was wrong. I grew up in line with the Sharia, until about my early teens. Then I discovered through my friends at school that there was a hidden layer of society with all these people who just get out and party. Even before I accepted that I was gay, I got exposed to these sorts of underground subcultures filled with young people wanting to have fun and be rebellious. People who wanted to break free from the chain of religion — to be able to choose to live the way they want. That's always been there in Iran.
JP: You wrote about a bisexual man, Kian, with whom you had an off-and-on long-distance relationship. How did that relationship help shape you?
MP: It was the very first relationship I had with a man — as close as a same-sex relationship can really get in Iran. We hit it off online on Yahoo. Everything happened online at the time [2005]. Way before we met in person, we used to just chat on the phone for long hours. I was completely taken with him and head over heels in love, even over the long distance. Part of it was that I hadn't completely come to terms with my own sexuality and here was someone who was so confident and comfortable in himself. Then he mentioned, “Oh yeah, I’ve also had relationships with women”, and just the ease with which he said it was alluring to me.
At the same time, [his bisexuality] also made me a bit insecure. I thought, “What if he starts seeing women again?” The competition felt like double the size — not just other men, but also women. But that only made me all the more more desperate for him. It was a long-distance relationship, and I had to lie to my family to be able to kind of run away for a couple of nights and spend them with Kian. Those were among the best two nights I've ever had. But eventually the long-distance side of things started to take over and wasn't working for me anymore. At the time, I’d also begun finding out about Tehran's queer scene.
JP: Did you know a lot of bi people in the queer scene?
MP: No, the truth is that not a lot of people used to come out as bi. Reflecting back on that era, bisexuality in men was seen as a sign of masculinity. It was sort of like, “Oh God, if you can seduce girls, then you must be really masculine,” and that was an attractive thing. It was a big thing at the time [the 2000s], especially in Iran. And so when Kian said he was bi, I found it sexy in a way.
JP: Iran is known for having strangely embraced trans as a kind of “cure” for being gay or bi. Could you talk about that a little bit?
MP: In Iran, if someone identifies as trans — and I'm talking about trans women specifically — they have to kind of make a decision about their genitals. To be recognized as a trans woman, you can't have a penis, and the government will fund half of the costs of undergoing bottom surgery. If a trans woman is wearing women's clothes and behaving like a woman, that’s seen as a perversion unless they get rid of their penis and reconstruct their genitalia to appear female — then that makes them a true woman in Sharia law. So the Ayatollah issued a fatwa and said, yes, you can transition and the government is happy to help you, but you cannot live as a trans woman with a male genitalia. And hence, after Thailand, Iran performs the largest numbers of bottom surgeries, which is kind of twisted in a way.
JP: At one point you wrote about watching a Britney Spears music video and sort of wishing that you were her. Did you ever consider getting this type of surgery?
MP: No, I never really wanted to be a woman. It was more that, as a teenager, I just felt feminine rather than actually feeling trapped in the wrong body. The feminine side of me felt a closeness with women that I kind of got in touch with, but I never felt that I was trans.
JP: Did you know any gay men who got trans surgery even though maybe they still felt like men, simply because it was easier than being gay?
MP: [pauses] No. I think all people I knew who took that route of just having a surgery were actual trans women. The majority of trans women in Iran do get the surgery done, either in Tehran or in Thailand. And the trans party that I describe in the book, I think all of them had already had surgery.
JP: So if you're a gay man in Iran, homosexuality is illegal and you have to live a secret double life, but it’s very rare to see cis men opt to get trans surgery just for expedience.
MP: Yeah, that's right.
JP: Have you found that your experience gives you a different perspective on trans issues compared to people in the West?
MP: I mean, my exposure to trans people was very limited to these parties, but it's definitely opened my eyes. Trans issues are kind of non-stop [in the English-speaking world], and my experience has definitely changed my perception. I feel there's always a kind of middle ground that people tend to lose. Also, being a doctor in the UK, I've seen a different layer, including all the discrimination that goes on.
JP: In Iran, people have been fed up with the regime for decades, and there's been all sorts of protest movements and unrest, and yet very little seems to change. Do you think war with Israel could finally lead to some kind of real change?
MP: There have certainly been lots and lots of protests. This recent war is surreal. I wrote a short, reflective piece on it just recently. I haven't published it — I just felt I had to write something simply to get my emotions out. It's very, very difficult to detach from reading the news that this street or that street was hit by a rocket, because my initial feeling is that these are places I’ve walked through many times, places I know like the back of my hand. And I have to check on my family, or this person and that person who’s living there. Recently, a rocket hit not very far from where my parents lived. So at the moment, that feeling of attachment and concern surpasses any considerations about what might topple the regime.
That said, I think this conflict might finally be the moment things change in Iran, but to be honest, there have been so many “moments” in the past few years in which I’ve thought, “Oh this is it”, and then nothing changes, so that feeling itself has become a bit blunted. Right now, what's bubbling inside me is fear and worry for friends and family. But there is that sense that, “Shit, this might be it [for the regime].”
When I chat with my friends in Iran, I cannot believe I'm using the word “war.” One of my friends who lives in Tehran just sent me a voice note, and you can hear the rattling sounds of the war. It was also reminiscent of when I was a kid during the Iran-Iraq War. It’s hard to believe that this idea [of a war with Israel] we’d always heard about but said would never happen is actually happening.
JP: Switching gears slightly, do you think Islam can ever be reconciled with LGBT rights? Do you think that kind of reform or perhaps reformation is possible?
MP: I think all religions have managed to kind of bend their rules — or maybe it’s that queer people have kind of bent the rules of specific religions to match their sexuality. The same goes for Islam. When I lived in Iran, I went on dates with religious gay Muslim men. I went on dates with guys who had their prayer mats in the corner of the room. After we had sex they’d do the little [Islamic] ritual shower — which I used to do when I was religious — and then offer their prayers. So there are people there that have found that balance and who pick and choose the bits of the religion they enjoy and connect to and reinterpret the parts they don’t connect to, and that works for them. It never worked for me, and it never will.
So on an individual basis, it’s possible for people to find peace between [Islam and LGBT rights]. But I don’t think Islam itself is dynamic enough to suddenly change its view, or that hardcore followers will ever find that homosexuality is acceptable and no longer sinful.
JP: That’s a worrying prospect for the Muslim world. What would have to happen then? Broad secularization in general, I guess?
MP: Yeah. The first thing that the Islamic Revolution did to Iran was merge religion and politics. Sharia became the law. I think for any country, that's probably the worst thing that could happen: merging religion with politics.
JP: What happened in the Iranian Revolution would basically need to happen in reverse across much of the region.
MP: Yeah, I think you're right [sighs]. As soon as religion becomes politics, it’s a problem because of the nature of religion, which is very inflexible. It's not progressive. It doesn't work with the community. It just gives you a set of rules and says, “This is it, or you burn in Hell.” That's just not how a free society works.
Majid Parsa is the author of The Ayatollah's Gaze: A Memoir of the Forbidden and the Fabulous. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Published June 26, 2025
