SAN FRANCISCO- “I grew up knowing that I am the only gay person in the world, and that there is no way that I’m right, and I’m wrong and should correct myself” said Syrian LGBT activist Subhi Nahas in a speech at the Commonwealth club on Thursday, July 13.

It’s a story that probably many Syrian LGBT’s share, either publicly or in hiding.

There are no available statistics on the number of LGBT people in Syria. Under the authority of President Bashar Al Assad’s Baathist regime, homosexuality is punishable by up to three years of imprisonment. When in 2003, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights attempted to draft a resolution protecting sexual minorities from state violence, the Assad regime told them to postpone it. And In 2005, when the deputy Minister of Religious Endowments publicly argued that AIDS was divine retribution against homosexuality, there was no public apology, because it was not demanded by the public.

These were the conditions that Nahas, a 29-year old refugee, lived under for most of his life. He spoke about growing up gay in Syria, and the turbulent journey which brought him to the U.S. Nahas said that one can be imprisoned simply for being homosexual, even if they don’t have homosexual sex.

In addition to persecution from the government, LGBT Syrians also face a lot of societal discrimination. Prior to learning that he was gay, Nahas’s bouts of depression during his adolescence made life difficult. Concerned about his behavior, his parents sent him to go see a therapist.

But then the moment of revelation came for them and Nahas was forced out of the closet. Nahas told his therapist that he was gay, and in a breach of confidentiality, his therapist relayed the information to his parents. His parents would, from now on, keep Naha closely monitored. He was prevented from leaving his home at will, he had a strict curfew, and whenever he was alone with friends in a room, his parents would get suspicious and compel him to keep the door unlocked. Nahas was oppressed on many fronts, he was betrayed by a therapist, punished by his parents, and threatened by the judicial system.

And then, in 2012, when the rebel militia group Al Nusra took hold of Nahas’s village, and threatened to “cleanse the city of all sodomites” Nahas was left with no options but to escape Syria and eventually make his way to San Francisco in 2015.

This is only one story. Many, who are either open about their sexuality or secretive about it, suffer even the worst circumstances in territory held by ISIS. Under those circumstances, LGBT Syrians are not merely dealing with discrimination but are contending with total violence. ISIS has, afterall, infamously thrown gay men off of rooftops.

So is there any hope for LGBT Syrians in the countries future?

Could an LGBT Battallion be the Solution?

In July, Northern Syria’s anarchist militia, the International Revolutionary People’s Guerilla Forces (IRPGF) announced on Twitter that they had formed an LGBT battalion within their group.

The battallion is called The Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army (TQILA).

Their Twitter announcement stated, “These faggots kill fascists! We shoot back! The pink and rainbow flag flying in #Raqqa! Queers smashing the caliphate!” But Nahas, and some other LGBT Syrians say that they are skeptical of TQILA.

“It is dangerous to form such a group in a country that doesn’t believe in sexual minorities’ rights and ignores and denies their existence. Especially when most of these group members are not Syrians, thus making the conspiracy theory suggesting that LGBTQ community is a Western concept imported to the Middle East and not real for its community’ said Nahas.

Despite having their own history of homosexual acceptance, Many Islamic societies today associate homosexuality with Western imperialism. The history of this phenomena is complex. Maajid Nawaz, an activist against Islamic extremism, wrote in a 2016 article that homosexuality was tolerated in many parts of the Islamic world prior to the colonial period in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nawaz cited poets from the Islamic golden age such as Abu Nuwas, who wrote about his love for teenage boys and described the bond he had with another man as an ‘unbreakable rope.’

His writings are a stark reminder to the fact that the taboos of today, don’t always correspond to the taboos of the past. Attitudes toward homosexuality have varied and changed throughout time and place in the Islamic world. Nawaz said, “It is true that many early Islamic scholars condemned homosexuality, and cited scripture to justify their position. But the themes of love and sexuality have been debated and discussed by Islamic theologians and artists for centuries.”

Scholar Katerina Dalacoura argued in a 2014 article that while Islamic authorities may not have made homosexuality legal, it was widely practiced and accepted in many societies so long as it remained discreet. In fact, Dalacoura noted that during the 19th century, European travelers complained about the sexual openness with which men in the Ottoman Empire expressed their passion for boys.

During the colonial period, however, the European attitude toward homosexuality was adopted by elites in the Islamic world. By the 20th century, according to Dalacoura, intolerance of homosexuality became associated with modernization, whereas homosexuality became associated with backwardness. To be a forward-thinking, liberal intellectual of the colonial periphery, one had to have an illiberal approach to LGBT issues. This was the unquestioned assumption of the time.

In the second half of the century, concurrent with the expansion of Western imperialism throughout the Middle East, Western attitudes toward homosexuality became more accepting, while in Islamic societies things went in the opposite direction.



The counter-cultural and queer liberation movements had left their mark in the US and Europe, and paved the road for a long and ongoing battle against the dehumanization of LGBTQI peoples in the West. But with the growing tolerance towards LGBT people, the script would be flipped in favor of western imperialism. For now, to be liberal was to accept LBTQI pride, and to be backwards was to center heteronormative ideas about sexuality. Even more simply, the west was seen as civilized because it had a counter-culture, and the colonies (and former colonies) were regressive because they did not. Inversely, many people in the Middle East now began to associate homosexuality with the “Cultural onslaught against ‘authentic’ Middle Eastern cultures.”

Dalacoura provides one example of this shift in viewpoints from the Iranian revolution. “Ali Shariati, a Leftist-Islamic thinker whose writings were pivotal in the intellectual movement against the Shah, condemned the Western ‘cultural revolution,’ especially the emancipation of women, and denounced the Western ‘recognition of an openly gay lifestyle.’”

Nahas’s concern about TQILA making LGBT people appear to be agents of the West indicates that this association of homosexuality with attempts to destroy ‘authentic’ Middle Eastern culture pervades to this day. The presence of so many foreign fighters in TQILA could potentially provide further justification for this association, thus further endangering Syria’s LGBT community.

So is There Any Hope?

I asked two Syrian LGBT members what they believed to be the solution to Syria’s societal homophobia.

One bisexual woman, 23, who kept her name anonymous for safety reasons, said that she was afraid to reveal her sexuality to even her closest friends, let alone go out to protest the issue in the streets of Syria.

“Homophobia is so engraved in our society, even in the most open-minded people. I am afraid to go public for example because I’m afraid of the reaction of some of the closest friends of my parents who are supposed to be intellectuals, writers, poets, and scientists. They are still deeply homophobic but they hide it.” She said

A deeper look into her life also shows the often complex ways families from Syria respond to LBTQ relatives. In her case for instance, she told me that her own parents had accepted her, and that she had even brought both boyfriends and girlfriends to her home in the past.

The woman said that she believed the way to increase LGBT acceptance in Syria was for more people to talk about the issue. She said “I think talking about it more and more would help on the long term.”

But with a pause, she also insisted that there did not appear to be a solution in the short term. “The problem of LGBT rights in Syria and in the Muslim world comes hand in hand with the issue of women’s rights.” She believes that all three major Abrahamic religions had a problem with LGBT people because they were “disrupting divinely assigned gender roles.” The woman said that gender roles were as prevalent among Syrian Christians as they were for Muslims.

This is why in Syria, she said, homosexuality and effeminate qualities in men are viewed with so much disdain. “Part of the problem comes from the fact that men are terrified (in my opinion of course) of losing their position of power and superiority and that’s why for men to be compared to women, it’s an insult,” she said. The way she sees it, to Syrian society at large, it’s dishonorable for men to be even slightly effeminate, whereas it is less problematic for women to be masculine. But even for women, people are not accepting of same-sex relations, she said.

The woman’s comments raise two different issues. One issue is men being viewed as ‘effeminate,’ and the other is homosexuality. Though these two qualities do not always overlap, they are commonly associated with one another. The comments suggest that it is insulting for men to be referred to as effeminate and thus assumed to be gay. In other words, the crime of gayness is that it is feminine. Thus, patriarchy and homophobia are tied by the same thread, to be a women in Syria is to be viewed as inferior, and to be a gay male is to be viewed as a womanly man.

Syria has several discriminatory laws based on gender. Some of these laws are religiously inspired. Under Islamic Sharia Law Polygamy is permitted, allowing husbands to have up to four wives. Women cannot marry without the consent of a male guardian. Both Islamic and Catholic laws allow men advantages in child custody. The anonymous woman’s comments indicate that abolishing laws such as these in Syria may help to not only further women’s rights, but also the rights of gay men and effeminate men perceived to be gay. If women are elevated in Syrian society, then perhaps it will become less of an insult for men to be compared to women. It remains unclear, however, what the solution is to Syrian society accepting homosexual women.

One gay Syrian man now living in Germany, Ali Apohassan, 23, said that art was a way to heal LGBT and other societal issues in Syria. Apohassan, a graphic designer, said, “Art is the only language that can talk to any heart. I know it looks quite dreamy and not real, but I think so.”

In the past, Assad’s regime has threatened artists with torture for violating strict censorship laws, forcing many to flee to the West. This could make the possibility of an LGBT art revolution much less likely. It’s possible, however, that refugee artists like Apohassan have the power to inspire change in Syria from the outside.

Based on my interviews with the three Syrians that I spoke to, the way forward for Syrian LGBT is not clear cut. It appears, however, that amending religious laws in Syria are a large part of the solution. But with a regime that shuts down dissent so brutally, what are the chances of this happening?

Things don’t appear to be changing anytime soon.