Gay Iranian author flees to Turkey

Colin Stewart is a 45-year journalism veteran living in Southern…

Gay Asia News and the Daily Beast report:

Payam Feili (Photo courtesy of SoundCloud.com)

An Iranian poet and writer harassed, blacklisted and arrested for being gay has been forced into exile by the Islamic regime in Iran for alluding to same-sex relations in his work.
Payam Feili, 29, who was recently incarcerated for 44 days in Iran, fled to flee to neighboring Turkey and has been living there since June 13.
Under Iranian law, homosexual activity is punishable by death.
The Daily Beast reported that after Feili’s sexual orientation became known through his writings:

He was fired from his job as an editor at a publishing house, and his sister was also let go. He soon noticed his email and social media accounts were being hacked, presumably by the government.
At one point, he was on his brother’s Gmail and saw his own account sign on. “Who are you and what are you doing with my account?” he messaged on the chat platform. “Shut up,” the hacker responded, using a Farsi colloquialism.

In addition:

Not long after, the Iranian woman who had connected him with his German publisher was interrogated and threatened. One translator he was working with for an earlier book was threatened so much he dropped out. “After that, anybody I wanted to work with inside Iran, they would go to him, threaten him, and stop the work between us,” Feili remembers. Soon his friends received the same visits.
“My personal life had basically reached a dead end and the pressures on me were intolerable,” he says. “All people were scared to be in contact with me. I was even left alone by my friends—being in touch with me was causing trouble for them so they would stop.” For the last few years, he said, he had few associates left and was desperately lonely. “I was almost always cast out of society, starting from elementary school all the way up to the time I was basically living alone,” he says. In school, he was attacked so badly that he dropped out and was homeschooled for his last years before graduation.
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He has been arrested three times.
In June, he and his sister decided that they had suffered enough, so they purchased plane tickets to Turkey.
For more information, read the full articles in Gay Asia News, “Iranian author persecuted for being gay flees to Turkey,” and the Daily Beast, “Iranian Poet Blacklisted for Being Gay.”