Apr 25, 2008  |  By: KATHERINE VOLIN  | COMMENTS     

At a time when the Middle East is at the center of the world stage, this year’s Equality Forum theme of gays in the Muslim world is a perfect fit.

Next week’s Equality Forum, an international gay civil rights conference held in Philadelphia, also features its ninth annual art exhibit, including the work of world-renowned gay photographer Duane Michals. Michals will be at the conference and participating in a lecture on April 30, a reception on May 1 and a tour of the exhibit on May 2. All the events are free.

“He is a photographer of international stature in the major museums around the world,” says Equality Forum Executive Director Malcolm Lazin. “[He] was out back in the 1980s — early in the movement — so among his friends whom he photographed were Andy Warhol [and] Keith Haring, among others.”

Michals’ work can be found in the permanent collections of Jerusalem’s Israel Museum, Los Angeles’ J. Paul Getty Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Japan’s National Museum of Art, among many others.

The exhibit, titled “The Facts of Life,” is a 40-year retrospective of his work, including new pieces from his books “The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy” and “Ten Poems by Cavafy.”

FOR GAY ACTIVISTS, though, the real meat of the week-long conference lies in this year’s theme, which is partially addressed on May 4 by a talk from Irshad Manji, the best-selling author of “The Trouble With Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith.”

There will also be a panel on May 1 at 7 p.m. featuring Afdhere Jama, editor of queer Muslim magazine Huriyah, Parvez Sharma, director of the documentary “A Jihad for Love,” John Scagliotti, creator and executive producer of PBS series “In the Life,” and Arsham Parsi, whose sexual orientation changed his life in more ways than just romance. If Parsi was going to lead a free existence, he had to flee his notoriously anti-gay homeland of Iran.

“Iran is not the same as other countries, including other Muslim countries. Iran is totally different,” Parsi says. “We’re born as Muslims and we know many things about the Islamic culture and homosexuality is illegal.”

Once Parsi realized he was gay in his late teens, he had to contend with the guilt he experienced because his feelings didn’t conform to Islamic law.

“I felt I am a sinner and I have something totally wrong and I’m against God,” he says.

“All of Islam fasts for one month [during Ramadan] and I fasted for three months because I decided I have to practice because I have something wrong.”

Eventually, Parsi explored sexual orientation on the Internet and discovered that being gay wasn’t illegal and sinful everywhere.

“I read many articles and I accepted my sexual orientation as a normal thing,” he says.

But he took his newfound self-acceptance a step further in 2001 after two of his close gay friends committed suicide. Parsi created a gay Iranian support and information web site, now known as Iranian Queer Organization, www.irqo.net, that year.

“Because of my activities, the police were going to arrest me and I decided to leave Iran. I call it escape. I identify myself as living in exile,” says Parsi, now 27. He fled to Turkey on March 4, 2005. There he pleaded for and eventually received refugee status from the United Nations based on the sexual orientation discrimination he experienced in Iran, and he then immigrated to Canada on May 10, 2006.

GIVEN HIS EXPERIENCES, it’s important to Parsi that gay rights are viewed as a separate issue from spirituality.

“Religion is your beliefs. You can change your religion. Maybe today you like the red color and maybe the next day you can say I don’t like anymore the red color, I’m going to the blue color. Everything is changeable,” Parsi says. “But the sexual orientation is not in your hands. The sexual orientation is not your choice.”

Parsi’s upcoming trip, which will include stops in half a dozen other U.S. cities from New York to Los Angeles, will be his first visit to the United States.

“It is very important for me because I’m Iranian, and as you know the U.S. and Iran, they have an especially sticky political situation,” he says. “I have a message that for American people that we can accept and we can respect human rights for all people regardless of political activities. Maybe the United States and Iran have many problems, but we are all human beings and we can all respect each other.”

For Parsi, ...