Alireza Fazeli Monfared was only 20 years old when he was murdered by family members in his home country of Iran in May 2021. Reports by LGBTQ organizations and press in the area stated Fazeli Monfared was kidnapped by his half-brother and two cousins who beheaded him and dumped his body under a palm tree near the city of Ahvaz. The men reportedly contacted Fazeli Monfared’s mother afterwards to tell her where she could find his body.
Fazeli Monfared was murdered because he was gay. His half-brother learned of Fazeli Monfared’s sexual orientation through a military service exemption card that allowed Fazeli Monfared to skip the mandatory military duty required in Iran because they deemed his being gay a “mental illness.”
Fazeli Monfared’s partner, activist Aghil Abyat, spoke with the online news source Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty telling them that Fazeli Monfared was due to travel to Turkey to join him just four days later.
“He had told me that he had been threatened by his half-brother,” Abyat told RFE/RL.
Iran is one of about a dozen countries in the world that allow the death penalty as a punishment for homosexuality. Some of those, like Fazeli Monfared, are murdered before any government involvement by family members. They do so as a so-called honor killing, justifying killing a member of their family as the murderer feels they brought dishonor on the family name.
These laws, cultural and religious beliefs lead many LGBTQ Iranians to flee their homes and seek resettlement in a more tolerable country.
Arsham Parsi is the founder and executive director of the International Railroad for Queer Refugees, an organization that advocates for LGBTQ rights in Iran and works to help settle LGBTQ refugees in Canada and the U.S. He understands the plight of being LGBTQ in Iran and the need to escape the country because Parsi, who is Iranian and openly gay, became a refugee when he had to flee his home 17 years ago.
“I left on March 5, 2005 at 12:45 p.m., that’s when I crossed into Turkey,” Parsi says. “I was granted refugee status, I got asylum and then I came to Canada on May 10, 2006, which I call my second birthday.”
Growing up in Iran, Parsi says it was difficult being gay because Islamic law and culture there teaches that being gay is against God, so resources are nowhere to be found.
“We are growing up with nothing; no organizations, no books, no counselors, nothing for us to know more about ourselves,” he says. “In Iran, and even in the neighboring countries like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, we had to grow up and learn about sexual orientation in other ways. The first thing we learn is that we are sinners and we have to be executed. We have to be hanged, stoned to death. We have to be cut in half by a sword. That was the punishment for homosexuality. Imagine you are a young teenager and you feel that you are different and the first thing that you find out is the method of killing. We grew up with trauma.”
Parsi got his first taste of LGBTQ community and activism in 2001 when he was 19 years old.
“I always say Google saved me because the first time that I had internet I was told you can search anything on it, so the first thing I searched was ‘men.’ Then I searched another word, which was ‘gay,’” he says. “I learned all this new gay terminology and I found out that I’m not the only person in the world with these feelings because before that I thought it was only me.”
Most of the information Parsi found about being LGBTQ was in English, so he started to translate it and launched an online support group for LGBTQ Iranians called Rangin Kamin, or Rainbow Group, that same year.
“I found other people who were like me through chatrooms, and I found gay people in my town and even met some of them, which was a very scary feeling,” Parsi recalls. “Meeting in person is very risky and dangerous and you have to be super careful. That sense of community that we have in western countries, they don’t have that in Iran.
“One of the friends I met killed himself when his parents found out about him, they caught him in the bedroom with his boyfriend,” he continues. “That was the saddest moment of my life. At 19, I made a pledge to myself that I have to do something in order to stop the abuse. On that day I didn’t know what I had to do, the only thing that was on my mind is something needed to be done.”
Parsi’s Rainbow Group became the Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization and later the Iranian Queer Organization, expanding to be more inclusive of members of the LGBTQ community and the various people of Iran.
In 2005, Parsi found out that several of his friends who had been working with him were taken by the local authorities and that they were looking for him as well. He says because of the danger of being an LGBTQ activist in Iran many of them, including himself, used pseudonyms.
“They were looking for me but they were looking for me using my nickname,” Parsi says. “That gave me time to go. I decided that I needed to leave because I needed to keep the movement alive and I was trying to build a network of information we could share, and there wasn’t a way for me to do that in Iran now.”
Parsi took a train from Shiraz to the Iranian capital in Tehran, and then rode a bus overnight to a town near the Turkish border. Parsi boarded a train in Tabriz and crossed into Turkey, becoming a refugee.
“I just felt that I’m stepping into exile and I can’t go back,” Parsi, noting he was crying when the train left Iran and entered Turkey, said during a 2014 interview with the Washington Blade. “It’s such a difficult feeling that you have to go and you have no rights to come back. If you go back, they may kill you.”
When Parsi resettled in Toronto, Canada about a year later, he continued his advocacy for LGBTQ refugees by launching the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees. The group’s name is meant to honor Canada’s part in the Underground Railroad, a network of people offering shelter and aid to escaped slaves from the South in the 19th Century and was the first Iranian nongovernmental organization in the world.
The organization later updated its name to the International Railroad for Queer Refugees in 2016 when it became a 501(c)3 and the Canadian government asked them to expand their services to support non-Iranian LGBTQ refugees as well and since 2018 has been assisting LGBTQ refugees from several countries including Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.
Parsi says the IRQR has helped about 2,200 LGBTQ refugees get into Turkey, a majority of who are granted refugees status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, but are now stuck in limbo waiting to come to either Canada or the United States.
“When President Trump took office, they stopped all of the refugee programs for five countries, including Iran, and that was bizarre for us,” Parsi says. “On one hand you disagree with the Iranian regime and you call them bad people, then on the other hand people who are trying to escape from that same regime that you say you hate, you say to them you can’t come to the United States.”
On Jan. 27, 2017, then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order referred to by opponents as “The Muslim Ban,” that banned travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — and suspended the resettlement of all Syrian refugees. Several iterations on the order would go on to include countries in South America and Africa, and essentially killed any idea of resettling refugees in the U.S. during the Trump administration.
“A lot of them had already processed their application when everything was stopped by the United States and they are still now stuck in a limbo situation,” Parsi says. “The UNHCR were not able to refer them to other countries because they were already referred to the United States and were not rejected. They received a referral and told to wait. Nothing happened.
“There are a lot of refugees still waiting to be resettled in the United States, and the U.S. accepting them was a big factor for the U.N. to accept them,” Parsi continued. “There number was about 10,000 refugees a year from that region of the world and it is basically about a thousand right now.”
With the Muslim Ban stopping refugee resettlement in the U.S., the IRQR turned to Canada to take in more.
“The Canadian government increased their quota for refugees but it’s not enough,” Parsi says. “Immigration Canada is facing 1.8 million applications to review and they are basically asking us for solutions how they can overcome these backlogs, and the answer is very easy — hire more people, hire more immigration officers to do the work.”
Parsi added that the rise of COVID on top of the U.S. ban and Canadian backlog is overwhelming the system.
“COVID stopped everything and it’s become a new excuse for not doing the job,” he says. “I am told ‘because of COVID everything is delayed,’ yes but you have to do something about it. COVID is the new excuse but we are not giving up, we continue to fight. We always try to maintain the level of emotional estate of the refugee and on the other hand ask the international community and governments to do more in order to save these people because we don’t’ want to lose them while they are in Turkey.”
According to the UNHCR, there are more than 26 million refugees worldwide, with nearly 4 and a half million being asylum-seekers. Parsi says that LGBTQ refugees are some of the most vulnerable among them and need to be prioritized.
#SaveLGBTRefugeesInTurkey pic.twitter.com/HO7COAr9Ax
— Save LGBT 🏳️🌈 🇮🇷 refugees in Turkey (@LGBTrefugees) June 17, 2018
We call upon resettlement countries and UNHCR to act immediately in order to save lives of hundreds of #LGBTrefugees and to resettle them in a safe country. #saveLGBTrefugeesinTurkey @MichelleRempel @JennyKwanBC @HonAhmedHussen @JustinTrudeau @HRC @ILGAEurope @LGBT_Amnesty pic.twitter.com/jytIo0spnB
— Save LGBT 🏳️🌈 🇮🇷 refugees in Turkey (@LGBTrefugees) June 17, 2018
“LGBTQ persons are not even 1% of the refugees,” Parsi says. “Turkey is a very conservative and religious country, so they don’t like the LGBTQ refugees being there. They don’t want them there. I try and tell the government, compared to the total amount of refugees, if you were to take all 2,200 of the LGBTQ refugees, it is basically nothing. But it doesn’t happen.”
While not as conservative as the countries they came from, Turkey is far from being an accepting place for LGBTQ people and has been a hostile environment for refugees who identify as LGBTQ. Many have experienced discrimination, harassment and in many cases violence against them.
“For four years they are in a limbo situation,” Parsi says. “For four years they have had to pay rent, for four years they had to work and risk being arrested in Turkey because refugees cannot work there, they do not have work permits. Four years is a lot of days, a lot of hours not knowing what is going on. That is a lot. When Biden took office we were all happy that something may happen soon, something is going to change but still we don’t see a vivid change. Because it’s been ignored. They see there are refuges who are stuck and they say ‘oh we are so sorry about this.’”
When President Joe Biden took office, one of the first things he did was reverse The Muslim Ban enacted by the previous administration. On Jan. 20, 2021, Biden issued a proclamation “ending discriminatory bans on entry to the United States” and refugee advocates rejoiced. But now more than a year later, little is being done to start the process back up.
In February, more than 100 immigrants’ rights, civil rights and civil liberties, and community-based organizations committed to protecting the rights of Muslim, African, Arab, Iranian, Middle Eastern and South Asian communities signed on to a letter to the Biden Administration calling for more to be done in the wake of the Muslim Ban reversal.
“Those refugees have paid a political price and the U.S. has stopped, the Canadian pipeline is overwhelmed and then COVID happened,” Parsi says. “President Biden promised he was going to start it back up and we don’t see the tangible movement right now. They tell us that stopping the program is easier than starting it back up and that reinstating it will take time. I understand what they are saying but I disagree. If there was an executive order to stop refugees processing then there should be able to be an executive order to immediately start it back up and begin the process.
“He was put in office in part to fix this and I’m sure that the Americans who voted for him, especially those who are LGBTQ, one of the reasons they did was the refugee crisis,” Parsi continued. “There’s a lot of U.S. organizations that work with refugees, they have to be prioritized. Especially the LGBTQ ones. I’m not an American citizen, but if I was I would be asking President Biden, ‘What happened to my issues?’ So I ask all Americans to hold your politicians accountable.”
With the Canadian system backlogged and the U.S. system essentially nonexistent, the IRQR has started up an LGBTQ refugee sponsorship program in Canada.
“This sponsorship program is something we can do within Canadian immigration guidelines,” Parsi says, “and it allows a private sponsor to bring over a refugee. We have to pay for the first 12 months of their expenses. So we fundraise, we raise money from friends, family and others, and we were able to sponsor about 70 refugees, and all but about 20 of them have come to Canada in the last two years. The rest are in process.
“Right now, if we have 23,500 Canadian dollars, which is about $19,000 U.S., we can bring someone from Turkey to Canada,” Parsi says. “This fund is for their first 12 months of expenses. 23,500 dollars for saving someone’s life. When they are sponsored over, they are given a residence to live and they get a work permit so they can work. They have health care. They are given a chance at a life.”
Parsi is coming to Florida for a lecture series to discuss his activism and the work of the IRQR, as well as raise awareness about the refugee situation and the sponsorship program. He will be at New College’s Sanier Hall in Sarasota April 5 at 6:30 p.m. and Rollins College’s Bush Auditorium in Winter Park April 6 at 6 p.m.
For those who want to help, Parsi says there are several ways that you can get involved.
“The easiest thing someone can do to help is keep asking your senators, your representatives for help; tell them they need to do something,” he says. “Demand that the government, on any level, do something. Petition, hold events to raise awareness, hold your politicians accountable. If you are able to support the sponsorship program, then donating is a big way to help. Even if you don’t have the financial means to bring a refugee over safely, they can start fundraising. Talk to other people, friends and family about helping.”
Parsi adds that in order to get LGBTQ refugees to safety, it’s going to take action and support from a lot of dedicated people but it is something we all have to be a part of.
“Iranian LGBTQ refugees; they are being killed, they are being discriminated against on a daily basis and we need to do something for them,” he says. “This is our social responsibility. Our social job isn’t to share something we saw on social media and then we are done. We have to roll up or sleeves and do more than just these things online.”
“LGBTQ+ Refugees: Securing Safe Passage from Iran” with Arsham Parsi is a part of the Sarasota World Affairs Council lecture series and will be April 5 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. in Sanier Hall at New College in Sarasota. The event is free but you must register at SarasotaWAC.org.
“Arsham Parsi Talks” will be April 6 from 6-7:30 p.m. in the Bush Auditorium at Rollins College in Winter Park. This event is free to attend. For more information, go to Rollins.edu/Events.
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