Gays and Transsexuals in Iran

After Iran’s president last week uttered his ludicrous statement about Iran not having any gays, here’s a Washington Post essay penned by a 25-year-old gay Iranian man, Amir, that strikes back. And here’s a NY Times article by Nazila Fathi, which essentially says the same thing as Amir’s essay – that gay culture, like many things, exists in Iran – it’s just truly on the downlow. Above you’ll see the CBC’s February report about Iranian gays. What’s interesting to me is this quote in the NYT article:

“There is a thick wall between homosexuals and transsexuals,” Mr. Kariminia [a cleric who wrote his thesis on Islam and transsexuality] said. “Transsexuals are sick because they are not happy with their sexuality, and so they should be treated. But homosexuality is considered a deviant act.”

That same cleric is featured in this fascinating Current TV report on Iranian transsexuals by Yasmin Vossoughian and Kouross Esmaeli (via Iranian Truth). Watch the whole thing.

Update: Also see this NYT op-ed, which is comprised of translated reactions to the Ahmadinejad speech from Iranian bloggers. Very cool.

Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects

Finally! A novel about Iranians in America that sounds like it might speak to/for young diaspora Iranians. No offense to all the memoirists and other fiction writers who are putting out quality work… I just think it’s time to work through and then set aside the collective post-revolutionary loss, anger, and sadness and figure out where – and who – we are now.

So, I can’t wait to read this new book: it’s called Sons and Other Flammable Objects, and its author is Porochista Khakpour, who appears to be living my dream life: not only is she a novelist, but she’s smart and pretty, and cool yet approachable. Of course this also makes her fiercely intimidating. Just from reading this really cranky Washington Post review, I think I’m really going to like her book. Everything about it is giving me good vibes, and I’m reminded of how I felt the first time I saw the cover of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. An-ti-ci-pation!

If you have a minute, definitely check out Khakpour’s really funny (and true) story, The 20-Year-Old Virgin, published by nerve.com in 2005. You should probably not read it at work. And by probably not, I mean definitely not, unless your boss is cool with you reading about eyeball-licking when you’re on the clock.

Original Pars Arts Photos by Lizzie Leitzell

I’m excited to announce the first Pars Arts-commissioned photography, featured in our homepage sidebar. Refresh the page, and each time you’ll see one of eight beautifully shot pictures of Persian artifacts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The photos we had there before were almost all pulled from the web, so it’s great to have some beautiful original shots to take their place.

Many thanks go to New York-based freelance photographer Elizabeth Leitzell. Lizzie is a really talented artist (and a member of the Pars Arts Facebook group), and I’m honored that she agreed to take on this project. Thank you, Lizzie!

Global Voices Interview

Sorry for the lack of posts this week – lots coming as soon as I have a free minute, I promise. In the meantime, check out this interview about Pars Arts with Global Voices. I really love the Global Voices blog and always look forward to seeing their updates in my feed reader. Many thanks to Hamid Tehrani for the interest, and for so kindly linking to our posts for the past several months.

Ahmadinejad at Columbia

Are you in New York? Go up to Columbia to see the madness as Ahmadinejad is giving a speech there today. Here’s an AP report of his arrival by Nahal Toosi. A friend at Columbia’s graduate school let me know they are covering the event really comprehensively today. If there are any Iranians in New York reading this who want to speak to her, please email me at editorATparsarts.com and I’ll put you in touch.

The Columbia Spectator’s site has a special web feature including an “Ahmadineblog” and will have a ton of live coverage.

Update: The event is over and here’s another live-blog that covered the speech and subsequent questions. Also see Nahal Toosi’s AP article on the Houston Chronicle about the content of the speech.

Iranians on the Internet: Wrap-Up

Unfortunately, I missed Part 3 of this event, which was a live video conference with Khorshid Khanoom (aka Lady Sun), so if anyone has any intel on what happened, please leave a comment or shoot me a note: editorATparsartsDOTcom.

I’m on a shaky road, typing on someone else’s laptop, so I’ll write a longer post on my thoughts about this event and some of the neat people I today when I get home and recover.

Iranians on the Internet: Part 2, Iranian.com

Change of schedule – Iranian.com will be part 2 of the day, not Balatarin. Nazy Kaviani is going to read a statement by Persis Karim, who couldn’t make it today. Karim’s letter talks about Jahanshah Javid’s role in the making of the Iranian diaspora via his foresight regarding the role of the Internet.

Kaviani is now reading her own letter about her “life-changing experience” of writing for Iranian.com. She highlights Jahanshah’s characteristic of not censoring or changing content, even when it’s profane or comes from “shameless or killjoy Iranians.” He was one of the first to realize that English was fast becoming the shared language of Iranians outside Iran.

Now it’s Bruce Bahmani’s turn, who is one of the first Iranian.com writers. The site allows him to express his observations. The question that stays is: when will all this talk translate to change? He’s reading this article about bowling that he wrote for the site in 2002.

Ari Siletz remarks on Call Me Anything You Want, Javid’s piece about his various names. He talks of names as larger signifiers. Words and names are powerful agents of creation. Iranian.com has given the term “Iranian” a physical presence of sorts. “What breathes life into this piece of silicon are the divine words, ‘Nothing is Sacred’” (Iranian.com’s tagline).

Elahe Enssani talks about realizing the power of Iranian.com when she announced a citizenship workshop she was running. She introduces Ross Mirkarimi, San Francisco politician (who, apropos of absolutely nothing, has the deepest, most booming voice I’ve ever heard). Mirkarimi says he has never written for Iranian.com but when he decided to run, the site was very instrumental to him because it helped rally the Iranian community in the Bay Area. Mirkarimi had 21 opponents for his seat when he first ran for his seat. When he was elected and inaugurated, there was a large group of Iranians in city hall to support him. As a first generation Iranian-American, Mirkarimi learned his own activism, doubled with learning his own identity. And he’s presenting Jahanshah with an award from San Francisco’s board of supervisors.

Finally, JJ is up: He’s thankful for this award and very humble – he says he doesn’t feel like the person everyone just talked about. He says, “All I have done is be a mediocre journalist who was very lucky to have Iranian.com in the beginning… 99% of what Iranian.com is, is what you all have contributed… thank you for your participation.”

Iranians on the Internet: Part 1, the bloggers

Bayramali
Paiom’s blog, Bayramali mostly revolves around nostalgia, poetry, culture, arts, “tanz”… he’s reading a poem/blog post about blogging. (I wonder if this is posted on his blog? Update: here it is.) – now it’s open for questions:

(I should note that a man just walked in the room with a Persian rug over his shoulder, which was very amusing had everyone distracted for a minute…)

Do you write other places or just this blog? Most of his work is done on his own blog, but now he also writes on Iranian.com sometimes.

Why did you start writing? He wanted to write for four years while in Iran, but when he moved here, he started for the similar reasons of isolation and wanting to find community.

What system do you use? Blogfa, and the format really helped him write; he’s not very technological.

Why is blogging so popular in Iran? Because it’s a vehicle for anyone to speak, without censorship.

Shena dar Shenzar
Shena dar Shenzar is the personal blog/diary of Ehsan Akhbari. He says, “I don’t really know why I blog; everything one does, doesn’t need to have a reason.” He’s reading what he calls a “nerdy” post, about corruption. I like how he is reading this; very nice inflection.

Questions:
What format do you use? It’s “zoghali” – he uses Blogspot.

Do you have any problem blogging in Persian? As far as typing and formatting, it can be a little tricky to start. This weblog used to be called “Persian-Typing Practice” because that was one of the reasons he started it. Now the name has changed and he’s almost been blogging in Farsi.

Baraneh
Mandana is the blogger behind Baraneh, which also includes a photoblog. (I’ll interject here to say I really love the photoblog.) She says writes so she’ll have something to look back on someday, to remember how she used to think. She used to write for less personal reasons, and thought you can create change via blogs, but she now feels it’s just for her. For a while all her friends were bloggers, and her socializing was very web-heavy – and it took a while to get over that “addiction” and get back to her real life.

Questions:
How do you interact with your readers? She’s generally quiet. Someone she was close to online once hacked all of her accounts.

What about inappropriate comments? That happened when she was single. Since she’s gotten married, that doesn’t have that happen so much.

Should one moderate or delete later; what’s ethical? It’s a matter of style/taste. She lets people leave comments and delete later, but says she doesn’t know how to moderate them in advance. She would like to filter certain words, that would be ideal for her.

Baloot
Leva Zand writes Baloot (here’s her English blog). She uses Movable Type and writes about anything and everything. She’s going to read a story and warns that it’s a little R-rated. It’s pretty funny/snarky, about a woman seeing an acquaintance in the salon while getting her face threaded.

Questions:
Why did you have a problem with this acquaintance? It’s fiction, no such woman exists.

What do you do with comments you don’t like? She says she deletes rude comments about other people. Sometimes she lets things go, but she thinks of her blog as her home and if others want to make such comments, they can start their own blogs.

Why is your blog popular? Iranian blogs abroad, she thinks, are updated more frequently because of their circumstances. And being outside of Iran can be interesting for people inside Iran. It gives them a lens.

Why is your blog filtered in Iran? She doesn’t know. She sent an email and they gave her an address Iran to visit to follow up. She clearly hasn’t gone to do that.

What’s your opinion on using somewhat objectionable language on blogs? Everyone has their own standards; Leva says it’s personal.

Nazy Kaviani
Nazy Kaviani’s blog is in English. She says one of the things that makes her different is that she’s older than other bloggers. She wants to be part of something exciting and fabulous, and the draw for her is being in touch with young Iranians. She has become a writer over the last year and a half, for various media, and having the blog is a perfect place to write. She writes in English because she lives in America and has two children who were born and raised here.

It is her diary, in a way, but it’s a medium for her to promote what she knows about Iran and America. She feels lucky because she has lived a good life in both places. She writes a lot of different things, both happy and sad. Today she’s reading about her younger son’s first girlfriend. Everything she writes is true, and she gets permission from the people she writes about. She got a lot of comments about her being a bad mother because she’d raised “shitty children.”

Questions:

Sometimes your comments are very comprehensive; why do you pay so much attention to them? She says: I treat my commenters like guests at my house. Because the posts I write seem to have attracted really smart people, I try to engage them in dialogue.

You have a lot of smart readers from Iran; why is that? She’s not sure, but says perhaps it’s for them to practice their English. (Sorry, I missed the second part of this answer…)

Can you talk about using your real name vs. using a pseudonym? She says she would always use her real name, because she wants her readers to know who she is.

Farangeopolis
Sima Shahsari writes Farangeopolis, a blog that looks at Iranian blogs, which is what Shahsari studies. She hasn’t written on the blog in some time because she’s working on her PhD dissertation about gender and sexuality in the Iranian blogosphere (aka “weblogestan”). Her diss is “Blogging, Becoming, and Belonging.” Her MA thesis was about Iranian queer diaspora.

She almost chose LA-based Iranian satellite stations as her PhD, but discovered blogs accidentally when a friend referred her to queer blogs written in Iran. She wasn’t really interested in those blogs, but then learned about the larger world of blogging. The narratives on Farsi weblogs seemed very optimistic. Blogging was called the “turquoise revolution” several years ago.

Many Iranian bloggers live outside Iran, where freedom of speech is assumed to be a right. The figure of the Iranian woman becomes a signifier of freedom and democracy. In what context and how are issues of gender and sexuality discussed, though? She studies Iranian blogging out of DC and Toronto. She argues that post-9/11, Farsi weblogs were popularized. Her research is qualitative and not quantitative. (I apologize for not getting a lot of this – she is a really fast talker!)… Now she is reading an ethnographic account, about Sibil Tala, which Sima found via Hoder. Sibil said that a video interview she gave to the CBC was edited to show her only saying that she writes about sex, which caused her to be ostracized by the blogging community and contributed to the end of her relationship (which was abusive). She was misrepresented. This happened around the same time the Iranian elections were going to happen. Sibil said that many people admonished her via comments and Yahoo chat. This isn’t unique to Sibil; Sima says the expectation of bloggers’ readers turns into self-censorship. Traditional notions of womanhood seem to be upheld and have been transported to cyberspace. So while women are taking center stage in weblogestan narratives, they are subject to much disciplining. While some women take advantage of cyberspace as a new frontier, there are gender-specfici consequences for writing that can spill into real life.

Questions:
Nazy Kaviani asks: Can you describe if there are any changes in your observations from the time you started studying this? Sima says: Iranian women have never been naive or unsexual, but the idea that speaking about this stuff is allowed is prevalent online. Just the fact that one person speaks about this becomes a sort of liberating disruption. Even if it doesn’t necessarily inform the reader, it still breaks down norms and may have a trickle effect.

Jahanshah Javid asks: What is the discussion about homosexuality like/reactions about things you’ve written? Sima says: Some people’s ideas haven’t changed over time, there hasn’t really been a wave of gay friendliness that’s washed over the Internet. Some comments have been that homosexuality is a disease, and she has received hate mail, but there is a lot of variety in responses.

Berkeley Forum
Arash Aramehr blogs at Berkeley Forum. It started in March 2006, with three bloggers. Arash is now the main contributor, but there are others. It’s primarily political, but sometimes not – a few days ago, Arash posted photos about some deer he saw, for instance. Here’s the post he read. He chose it to show that the blog tries to be neutral (the post is more conservative).

Questions:

Isn’t it the nature of blogs to be politically tilted? Weblogs are not news agency, so being neutral doesn’t seem like a necessary attribute for weblogs. Arash says: Blogging was something new in communication. There are many very influential and powerful blogs now. However, he doesn’t find that blogs necessarily need to be biased. You can have a blog to have lots of different voices. It’s not a con for blogs to offer a forum to be heard, to be neutral.

Who is your audience? I’m interested to the appeal to the second-generation Iranian audience. Arash says: Seventy percent of hits come from the U.S., and secondary is Iran.

Do people leave comments? Arash says: Sometimes, and Berkeley Forum doesn’t really delete – the only time they deleted stuff was when it was promotion of a porn site in the comments. He gets a lot of comments asking about why he writes about American politics if he’s an Iranian, and he believes it’s important to integrate in this society.

Saat Sheni
(The blogger at Saat Sheni asked me not to use her name earlier, so I won’t)… She’s reading a more comical post about Halloween.

Questions:

Why do you write so little? Saat Sheni says: I used to write more. Blogging creates this strange tension of wanting to be read or not wanting to be read… so writing becomes a little difficult.

How long were you in Iran? Saat Sheni says: I completed high school and attended college in Iran, but didn’t finish college there.

Do you get comments that are discouraging? Saat Sheni says: Not really, as most of my comments come from my friends. Strangers don’t leave a lot of comments.

Closing
Now Haji Agha is reading an email from someone in Iran… sorry, I didn’t catch the name (please leave a comment if you have it).

There’s now a ney performance…

Iranians on the Internet: Intro

Haji Agha kicks it off by talking about the Internet’s effect on society, particularly the democratizing nature of it in Iran… this is the first Iranian blogger/web guru gathering of its kind here in the United States.

The first part of this program will be about bloggers, the second about Balatarin, and the third about Iranian.com. We’ll also have a video conference with Lady Sun (Khorshid Khanoom).

Now Omid Memarian… he’s introducing himself and says that generally journalists/reporters don’t give blogging and bloggers a lot of credit. They don’t see it as first-class work. But if we look at blogs in America now, some of the most important newspapers and companies are engaging in blogs. Second, there’s the question of business and blogging. Journalists are moving from the newsroom to blogs. He’s now introducing various bloggers… and check the individual posts to follow for that.

Iranians on the Internet: Omid Memarian

Nazy Kaviani is introducing me to everyone here – thanks, Nazy! Just chatted with Omid Memarian, who’s going to be making the introductions when this starts. He is a journalism grad student at Berkeley. Most of the stuff I’d read by him was very Iran-politics oriented so I sort of assumed that was what he’s still writing, but I just learned his beat for this semester is west Oakland. He noted that being a journalist in the U.S. with an accent has its challenges when digging around for a story via phone – so he usually shows up in person.