When Yemen’s streets erupted in protest in 2011 , Alaa Jarban quickly became a familiar face.

Young, educated, handsome and articulate, he was a favourite among English-language media as he helped smash the stereotype that Yemen was nothing more than Al Qaeda country.

On Twitter, he describes himself as an “awesome youth activist.”

Jarban is now fighting on the front lines again — and once again he faces death threats.

Last month, the 23-year-old announced on his blog that he was gay, and as the news spread to Yemen’s Arabic press this week, reaction was swift and ugly.

Jarban had to shut down his Facebook page after it filled with messages of hate. “People like you deserve to die,” one online message stated.

“I was surprised, saddened,” Jarban said Wednesday from Montreal, where he is attending a human rights conference. He said he expected threats, but was not prepared for the viciousness of the online attacks.

Jarban says his relatives have disowned him, as have the young protesters and friends who took part in Yemen’s Arab Spring, which toppled longtime autocrat President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

“We held hands and marched and demanded change for Yemen,” Jarban said softly. “Now I’m alone in this.”

That loneliness is a feeling author and Ryerson journalism professor Kamal Al-Solaylee understands well. Al-Solaylee has lived openly as a gay man in Toronto for 17 years, but when he arrived in Canada in 1996, he said he knew no one.

Just last year, he wrote his memoir Intolerable, in which he describes growing up in Sanaa, Beirut and Cairo, having to hide his sexuality. The book was the first time the 48-year-old confirmed that he was gay to his relatives who still live in Yemen.

“I think what he has done is tremendously brave,” Al-Solaylee said of Jarban. “He is facing a risk of violent homophobia.

“The fact that he is facing estrangement from his peers is a bigger blow than from the older generation.”

Yemen might have undergone tremendous change in the past couple of years but homosexuality is still considered illegal and never acknowledged.

In an interview last year in Sanaa before he went public about being gay, Jarban reflected on his country’s political transformation during the so-called Arab Spring and how that experience profoundly affected him.

March 18, 2011 — the day government snipers took to the rooftops to kill protesters — is a day he said has stayed with him. “After the prayers finished, they lit a wall up, and there was fire and smoke to hide the snipers,” he told the Star in 2012. “It was horrible. The snipers were so professional. The majority of shots were to the head and the heart.”

Jarban said he ran to a makeshift hospital to help care for the wounded.

“That’s when I saw my friend come in. He was shot in the chest. We’d been friends since high school. We used to play football together.”

His 22-year-old friend Awadh Al Yafai later died that day and more would follow over the next few months.

“I became more confident,” Jarban said when asked how these experiences changed him. “I think I became brave. If I hear bullets, I’m not as afraid any more. I learned how to plan demonstrations, learned how to protest. I’ve gained so much experience that I’m grateful for.”

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Yet this is new territory, and instead of having friends and family and much of his country fighting with him, it feels like his country is against him, Jarban says.

But he doesn’t regret declaring “I’m Queer” — even if he is uncertain what he will do or where he will go when the Montreal program finishes at the end of the month.

“Imagine waking up every day acting relatively happy, being someone else who is not you and pretending and acting as this person every single day of your life,” begins the blog passage he wrote to address his sexuality.

“People are talking about this,” Jarban said this week.

“Starting this dialogue was worth it for me.”

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