DAY 183.1 | "My biggest dream is a Gay Pride in the streets of Tehran"

Risky Business: A Clandestine Gay Pride in Tehran

My biggest dream is that there will be Pride in the streets of Tehran

Growing up in Iran, where homosexuality is punishable with the death penalty, Majid Parsa (pseudonym) struggled to accept his sexuality - until he discovered Tehran’s secret gay scene. But it was only when he moved to the UK that he found love and liberation, as he reveals here in Attitude's Rainbow World feature

I was born in Sheffield in 1981, but my story truly begins in Iran. My parents had been living in the UK while they studied, but just six months after my birth, they returned home, driven by a newfound devotion to the Islamic Revolution. My father, once liberal in his views, became deeply religious, and by the time the Iran-Iraq war erupted, he had signed up to fight. My childhood was shaped by the echoes of war: sirens blaring, nights spent hiding under our dining table, the fear of bombs falling on our home.

Life after the war didn’t bring relief. Instead, our house became a shrine to the Islamic Republic. Images of the Ayatollah adorned the walls, Qurans, and prayer books filled every surface, and religion dictated every moment of our lives. I prayed because my mother did, because that was expected. But inside, something was shifting.

“When I was 15, I made the mistake of confiding in my mother”

I was eight years old when I first felt it – a longing for the boy next door, a desire to be near him, to touch his hand. It was innocent, untainted by guilt, but as I grew older, that changed. By my teenage years, those feelings became impossible to ignore. I’d develop crushes on actors, musicians, footballers, and each time, I’d push the thoughts away, convincing myself they weren’t real. When I was 15, I made the mistake of confiding in my mother, telling her how much I loved watching a music video by the boy band 911.

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” she warned. At that moment, I learned that this part of me had to be hidden.

At first, I tried to suppress it. I prayed harder, begging for it to go away. I tried dating girls, convincing myself that if I followed the path expected of me, the feelings would disappear. I went through the motions of dinners, hand-holding, conversations about the future, but there was always something missing. It felt like a performance – and deep down, I feared the truth would catch up with me. But it didn’t. Instead, it became a secret. I collected magazine cut-outs of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jason Priestley – men whose faces I’d stare at in private. The feelings I had were undeniable, but I had no one to share them with. In Iran, there were no LGBTQ+ role models, no one to tell me that what I was feeling was normal.

And then the internet arrived.

“Conversations turned into clandestine meetings”

I still remember stumbling upon a Yahoo! chatroom labelled ‘Gay Asia’, only to realise it was filled with messages from Iranian gay men. It was as if an entirely new world had opened up. My heart pounded as private messages poured in. At first, I panicked and closed the chatroom. But curiosity brought me back. Conversations turned into clandestine meetings. Nobody dared exchange photos, so we would just try to describe how we looked and hope for the best. My first date? I took one look at him from across the street and ran the other way.

Eventually, I was introduced to Tehran’s underground gay scene. A friend of a cousin took me to Café Soosan. This wasn’t a café at all, but the flat of a man who had turned his home into a sanctuary for people like us. The owner, a flamboyant character with a sharp wit, had been affectionately nicknamed Soosan by the community, as the name evoked the image of a middle-aged woman who smoked and knew all the neighbourhood gossip. There, over cups of tea and shisha, we exchanged stories, made connections and could breathe freely.

“The morality police were a constant presence”

Alongside Café Soosan, another key meeting spot for the gay community was an upscale food court in northern Tehran. Every Tuesday night, it became a gathering point. It was simply a collection of tables where we sat eating fried chicken and sipping soft drinks, but in a society where being publicly gay could endanger your life, this was our version of a Pride parade. Unlike Café Soosan, where we would speak openly in a private space, the food court allowed us to exist in plain sight. It was a different kind of connection, one that came with an added thrill of visibility.

Of course, there was always the fear. The morality police were a constant presence, but ironically, they were more preoccupied with heterosexual couples. Two men together weren’t seen as a threat. But the parties were risky. If alcohol was found, there were lashes. If a party was too loud, it could be raided. Some of my friends were arrested, beaten, imprisoned. I even knew men who had been executed. Not for being gay, officially, but for ‘crimes against the regime’. My close friend Farid had been caught at a party and later detained. His real crime, though, was his activism – his work in a gay rights awareness campaign marked him as a target.

Despite the danger, I stayed in Iran until my late twenties. The underground community gave me joy, but the weight of daily religious oppression – the prayers, the rituals, the way my own home felt like a prison – became unbearable. When the opportunity to move to the UK for a master’s degree arose, I took it. In 2010, I left Iran.

“I’d sit alone at the bar in G-A-Y and feel like an outsider”

London was liberating, but not as easy as I had imagined. At first, I’d wander through Soho, sit alone at the bar in G-A-Y, and feel like an outsider. It took time to break into the scene, to unlearn the years of secrecy. But slowly, through friends and the internet, I found my people.

And I found love.

I met Benjamin seven years ago through a dating app. As our relationship progressed, his family became my family. I am still not out to my parents, not fully, though I have hinted at it. Their reaction? “We don’t need to know.” It’s a compromise, but for now, it’s enough.

“Change is coming”

I never set out to write a book. I thought my life was ordinary. But when I started telling stories – about the hidden parties, the secret signals, the risks we took – people were fascinated. They had never heard of this world. And so, I wrote The Ayatollah’s Gaze.

My biggest dream is that one day, there will be Pride in the streets of Tehran. That no one will have to live in fear for simply existing. It won’t happen tomorrow. It may not happen in my lifetime. But change is coming. The people of Iran are finding their voices. And for as long as I have mine, I will use it to remind the world: we are here. We exist. We thrive. And we are never going away.

➡️ The Ayatollah’s Gaze by Majid Parsa, published by Neem Tree Press, is available to buy now.

➡️ This article first appeared in issue 364 of Attitude magazine, available to order here, and alongside 20 years of back issues on the free Attitude app.

Source: attitude.co.uk, Dale Fox, June 24, 2025

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