How one man is trying to make it safer to be LGBTQ in Iraq
While Amir Ashour was growing up in Iraq in the early 2000s, he knew homosexuality existed but he didn’t know much else about it. “Aside from my personal feelings wondering ‘why am I attracted to this person?’ when I was 10 or 11, I had my first experience when I was 16 or 17,” he said recently. In […]Mari Shibata writes for The Washington Post:
While Amir Ashour was growing up in Iraq in the early 2000s, he knew homosexuality existed but he didn’t know much else about it. “Aside from my personal feelings wondering ‘why am I attracted to this person?’ when I was 10 or 11, I had my first experience when I was 16 or 17,” he said recently.
In his teens, most of what Ashour heard about homosexuality was that LGBTQ people did not exist in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. Born in Baghdad, Ashour predominantly grew up in Sulaymaniyah, in the country’s Kurdish region. Although most people around him never talked about their sexuality, he let it known among his closest friends at school and university, as well as in activist circles, about his interests for men.
He discovered more openness by going online — mostly to local gay dating websites — not to meet men but to “get answers for my questions” on homosexuality, he says. “Being LGBTQ+ was — and still is — a taboo, so this was where Iraqis who weren’t out could find each other for personal support, friendship, or more.”
When he signed up for the popular gay dating app Grindr in 2010, he remembers finding only five users in the whole country. The app would scan for users from countries as far as Iran, Turkey, Jordan and Kuwait. He remembers chatting with one man in Iran and proclaiming: “I need a visa to date you!’”
