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ROB ANDERSON
Friday, October 14, 2005
THE PICTURES CHANGE everything. They really do.
The image reproduced most frequently shows two Iranian boys, one 18, the other still a minor, in their final moments, blindfolded, nooses being tied around their necks by balaclava-clad executioners.
Another is more harrowing in its subtle grotesqueness: Minutes before their executions, the weeping boys are behind bars with lowered heads, chained together by a pair of handcuffs. The picture captures their youth and their confusion, and it reflects a fear that all of us share: that we can be killed simply for being who we are.
For many gay Americans, the pictures from Iran that spread around the Internet in late July represent a watershed moment, a time when we realized that on top of demanding our rights and equality at home, we must also actively seek to influence the lives of LGBT people abroad.
We are now educating ourselves. Before July, many of my friends and I weren’t aware that LGBT Jamaicans are frequently attacked and driven from their homes, and that the police, instead of investigating the complaints, often join in the attacks.
We weren’t aware that in March of this year, Saudi Arabia imprisoned and flogged 100 gay men for attending a party — they were dancing and “behaving like women,” one Saudi government-affiliated newspaper reported.
And we certainly weren’t aware that LGBT Iranians, even minors, could be imprisoned, tortured, and publicly executed for engaging in same-sex activities. News of more sexuality-related Iranian executions surfaced in August.
Although it is hard to confirm the exact reason for the executions because of Iran’s opaque justice system, to the best of our knowledge, the killing of LGBT Iranians continues.
WHEN HISTORY IS written, minority groups are defined both by the restrictions placed upon their freedoms and by the ways those groups faced — or chose not to face — the challenges spurned by those restrictions.
European Jews of 20th century, for example, are defined both by the acts of Hitler’s Nazi regime and by the ways they responded to those acts. Likewise, African Americans are defined both by the atrocities of Jim Crow America and by the ways they reacted to the brutalities of that system.
Those who oppress LGBT people have already written half of our history. It is our part that remains unfinished.
Photographs, Susan Sontag argued in “Regarding the Pain of Others,” have the ability to objectify. They transform an event or a person into something that can be “possessed.” We can use photographs, the ones we lay claim to, to deepen our sense of reality.
Let us possess the pictures of these boys, not in some oppressive, imperialist way, but in a manner that respects them, that honors their lives and condemns their deaths.
LGBT THEORISTS OF the generations before mine — Gen Y, the 9/11 generation, whatever, I’m 23 — are deeply cynical about LGBT Americans’ ability to succeed as a positive force in the world. This was captured best in Larry Kramer’s 2004, post-election speech, which is now available in book form as “The Tragedy of Today’s Gays.”
“More and more I feel that gays shall never get anywhere as a people,” Kramer argues. The past may justify Kramer’s sentiment. But I, for one, reject it. I can’t accept it, and I won’t. Not today, not ever.
Older LGBT generations might be faltering, but my generation will not.
If the leaders of the U.S. LGBT movement won’t effectively pressure our institutions, our corporations, and our government to do something — anything — to bring about change outside of the United States, then we need new leaders.
Not to replace the ones we have, but to supplement them, to give voice to a younger, different generation of LGBT Americans. Perhaps the time has come for a new generation to begin writing its own chapter of our history.
For this is what the pictures tell us: While the lives of our brothers and sisters abroad hang in the balance, our credibility does, too.
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