Iranian LGBT Refugees in Turkey

Before leaving Iran, Amir Hossein excelled in his studies, and took part in Iran's national Math and Chemistry Olympiads in 2012. But 40 days before his 18th birthday, he left for Turkey, where is now a refugee. “My parents deprived me of education because I am LGBT,” he says. “But I want to continue my studies to prove to my family that being gay does not mean I am a pervert — and that I can be successful and useful.”

Amir’s mother gave birth to three daughters before getting pregnant with Amir at age 40. The couple had wished for a son, and finally it happened. But Amir was different: when he reached puberty, his voice stayed high-pitched, and he even walked differently. When his breasts began to grow, his parents referred to him as a “eunuch” or a “safety match.” Since he had no interest in girls, they began to think he was sexless or defective. They wanted to “cure” him.

His family believed that hardship would make a “man” out of him. On several occasions, they took him to the hospital and subjected him to electric shocks to change who he was. But nothing changed. Amir Hossein fell in love with a young mullah — a love that neither family could possibly endorse.  

But Turkey did not give him the security he was hoping to find. His story — like the stories of so many other lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Iranians living in Turkey — is one of constant harassment, stress and discrimination. 

In fact, Amir is more fearful than ever, and worries about his safety. Once, while shaving his beard in a public bathhouse, one of the masseurs working there suddenly grabbed him from behind. Another time, in an ancient fort in Istanbul, a man emerged from under the shadow of the trees and asked him for sex. When he refused, the man touched his bottom before leaving. And there are other examples of harassment too, memories that leave Amir afraid and nervous. 

“It’s like your leg is falling off and you’re taken to the emergency room but then nothing is done,” he says when asked what it is like to be a LGBT refugee in Turkey. “Not only will you lose your leg, but you are also losing your life.”

Amir took refuge in Turkey close to two years ago. In late 2015, the UN approved his request for asylum, and he is currently waiting to travel to Canada. UN officials informed him that it is now up to the Canadian embassy to process his claim, but this is problematic for him, as the Canadian government continues to prioritize the claims of Syrian refugees. In the meantime, sexual minorities face violence, harassment  and discrimination on a daily basis. Homophobic attacks are on the rise, with LGBT people reporting increased violence against them in the streets and alleys of Turkish towns and cities. “When I returned home from my interview at the UN,” Amir Hossein says, “I said that if I could, I would take this piece of paper, jump in a boat and leave Turkey.”

Driven to Suicide

In some ways, Amir Hossein is one of the lucky ones. In early July, two Iranian LGBT asylum seekers committed suicide.

According to Saghi Ghahreman, the director of the Iranian Queer Organization, close to half of all LGBT refugees flee Iran — traveling to Turkey and other countries, including Malaysia — without any resources in place. From the first day of their life as refugees, they require financial support for expenses including rent, food, medicine and, in some cases, hormone therapy. They also need help to pay for transport, taxes, mobile phones, and access to the internet. Refugees might wait two or three years for their cases to be resolved, and very few of them have adequate resources to pay these expenses.

LGBT asylum seekers often leave Iran when they are 17 or 18 years old. A number of them are very ill and suffer from stress; some are dependent on tranquilizers. Life in Turkey costs close to $700 per month for these refugees, but they have little or no job prospects. As with Amir Hossein, often their families have rejected them because of their sexual orientation and refuse to provide them with any financial help. And in addition to attacks and verbal and physical sexual harassment, sometimes they even face violence from within the LGBT community itself.

Journalist Farid Haerinejad has been reporting on the LGBT community since 2006 and has made two documentaries about LGBT Iranians living in Turkey. He says that although the rate of suicide within the LGBT community is high, there are no accurate statistics about these suicides, or even about the murder of homosexual or transsexual people. “There are very few in this community who have not thought about suicide or have not attempted suicide,” Haerinejad says. “The reason is the constant violence in society toward them, and the fact that their families are often against them. Beside the pressures and the discriminations of traditional Iranian society, we have a government that basically denies the existence of this community. The government not only does nothing to enlighten people — it considers their sexual relations to be criminal activity or a disease, and so reinforces this same idea in society.”

When Victims are Held Responsible

Many LGBT refugees in Turkey are not willing to go to the police to report sexual harassment, believing that either the police will refuse to register their complaints or that their complaints might prolong the process of seeking asylum.

According to Farid Haerinejad, in some cases the police have held the victim of violence responsible. “This is the same way that LGBT people are treated in Iran,” he says. “If in Iran their human and citizens’ rights are officially trampled, in Turkey these refugees do not enjoy the full protection of the law.”

And some LGBT refugees in Turkey face another type of sexual and psychological harassment. In order to get their requests for asylum approved, some non-LGBT refugees offer LGBT refugees financial support. In exchange, they ask for the LGBT person to file joint claims for asylum with them, and to falsely state that they are involved in a relationship with the person offering them financial support. At times, this type of arrangement is made as a result of threats and intimidation. But for many LGBT refugees, financial difficulties make life so difficult that they accept the offer even if it entails violence. There have also been reports of a number of LGBT refugees being forced to sell their bodies in exchange for a degree of financial stability.

Some LGBT refugees in Turkey have complained about the organizations that have supposedy been set up to support them, accusing them of using them to procure funds for their budgets but not actually extending help to them. But Saghi Ghahreman disagrees, and says that her NGO, the Iranian Queer Organization, has never received any funds to help LGBT refugees directly. According to her, most of the financial help that these refugees receive come from individuals or private foundations.

But rumors about these support organizations continue, with some Iranian refugees in Turkey claiming that LGBT support organizations receive $1,000 per refugee. “There are budgets for other services to the LGBT refugee organizations,” Ghahreman says. “They are mostly spent on education and publications or the development and expansion of internet sites, or on organizing workshops in which some asylum seekers themselves participate. Funds are also used to travel to countries that accept asylum seekers to present their cases to various organizations. These budgets must be reported to the donors and it must match the specifics of the projects for which the funds were provided.”When Amir Hossein read the news about the recent LGBT suicides in Turkey on Facebook, he could not stop crying. “When you take refuge somewhere, it means you want to try to create a new life for yourself,” he says. “But when someone commits suicide, it means they have reached a dead end. I myself have thought about suicide many times. At such times you ask yourself: Is this much struggle worth it?”

When he arrived in Turkey, Amir Hossein imagined that he had achieved what he had been looking for all along. But now he lives in a single room without a bathroom, surrounded by the homeless and the vulnerable. “I am a prisoner without having committed a crime,” he says, “and I don’t feel safe.”