Why are the loudest voices for “queer liberation” silent when it comes to the countries where belonging to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) community is a capital offense?
Across the globe, at least sixty-five countries criminalize homosexuality. In several—Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Algeria, the Palestinian territories, Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Somalia, and Sudan—those laws include the death penalty. Nowhere is this starker than in Iran.
The Islamic Republic punishes same-sex relations with execution. Estimates cited in government and human rights analyses indicate that Iranian authorities have executed thousands of individuals for homosexuality since 1979. Iran carried out over 850 executions in 2023 alone, accounting for a majority of documented executions worldwide. Human rights organizations document that the regime disproportionately targets marginalized populations, including LGBTQ individuals.
Analyses indicate that Iranian authorities have executed thousands of individuals for homosexuality since 1979.
Beyond executions, persecution is systemic. Iran engages in arbitrary arrests, torture, forced confessions, and digital surveillance targeting suspected LGBTQ individuals. Findings further document rape, forced marriage, and coercive gender reassignment pressures imposed on LGBTQ individuals to avoid punishment.
The murder of Ali Fazeli Monfared, a young Iranian man beheaded in an “honor killing” after being outed, and the death sentence issued against LGBTQ activist Zahra Seddiqi Hamedani for allegedly “promoting homosexuality,” illustrate the lethal intersection of state policy and societal enforcement.
The situation extends beyond Iran. In Hamas-run Gaza, LGBTQ individuals face systemic repression through intimidation, violence, and social policing. Hamas subjects LGBTQ Palestinians to harassment, detention, torture, and credible threats to their lives, forcing many into hiding or exile. Many seek asylum in Israel, the only country in the Middle East that protects LGBTQ rights and representation.
Across the broader Arab and Muslim world, from Iraq to Afghanistan, LGBTQ individuals face imprisonment, corporal punishment, and extrajudicial violence, including so-called “honor killings.” In many of these societies, their existence is not merely stigmatized; it is criminalized.
And yet, despite such facts, many of the world’s most powerful LGBTQ advocacy organizations remain largely silent.
Groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, the National LGBTQ Task Force, and ILGA World have built expansive platforms advocating for LGBTQ rights—particularly in Western democracies. Yet they rarely sustain focus on those countries whose LGBTQ members face the most extreme forms of persecution. Even ILGA World’s own data confirm that multiple countries maintain the death penalty for same-sex relations, but they do not translate acknowledgment into consistent global mobilization.
This disparity is no oversight; rather, it reflects an ideological shift, one in which political alignment dictates which human rights abuses are amplified and which are ignored. There are organizations, however, that continue to approach the problem with objectivity rather than political subjectivity.
Israeli LGBTQ advocacy groups, including The Aguda—Israel’s LGBTQ Task Force—along with regional networks such as Al Mokhtalef, Beit El Meem, and HIAS, have long been involved—often quietly—in supporting, sheltering, and in some cases helping to facilitate the escape of LGBTQ individuals from hostile environments across the Middle East. These efforts are complex, sensitive, and often dangerous. They rarely make headlines, but they demonstrate what advocacy looks like when rooted in reality rather than ideology.
Too often, the international community is not willing to consider the plight of LGBTQ people in Muslim countries.
As someone who is openly gay, for decades involved in LGBTQ advocacy, and deeply engaged in Middle East policy and human rights advocacy, I have worked to elevate the voices and stories of those living under these conditions, and engaged in initiatives and operations to rescue them—particularly in countries governed by strict interpretations of Islamic law, where LGBTQ identity is criminalized outright.
In these efforts, I have communicated with individuals forced into hiding, exile, and silence—people whose lives depend not on hashtags or symbolic gestures, but on substantive international attention. But, too often, the international community is not willing to consider the plight of LGBTQ people in Muslim countries.
Instead, segments of the global LGBTQ movement have aligned with political coalitions that frame global conflicts through a simplified ideological lens that excuses or ignores abuses committed by Islamist actors, particularly when those actors are positioned in opposition to Israel or Western powers. This has created a profound moral inversion. It has led to situations where LGBTQ activists align themselves with movements that include support for Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Islamic Regime of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—while remaining silent about these groups’ own hostility toward LGBTQ individuals. It has resulted in disproportionate condemnation of Israel—the only country in the region where LGBTQ individuals live openly and under legal protection—while minimizing or ignoring regimes that execute them.
The consequences of this selective morality are devastating. Human rights must be universal, or they are meaningless. In Iran, in Gaza, and across much of the Middle East, LGBTQ advocacy is not about identity politics. It is about survival. Silence, in this context, is not neutrality but complicity.
