The Culture War and Trumpification of Art

with my finger in the page

I’m having the rest of Mallika and I’s bottle of wine, reading, waiting for my date. I overhear two men talking about Trump. What they may or may not support. What if it was them as politicians. Then they start talking about me.

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We live as ideas do. Concepts that can talk. But like books, closed and put away. It’s all theory to them. Presidents. Politics. Influence. I close my book but keep my finger in the page like I’ll need proof of my education.

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I gulp some more wine down and light my cigarette - the smoke coming from me the words I would like to say. I incorporate my deep breathing exercises with each drag. Being [read as] a woman means everywhere can be the chambers of congress. I’m waiting for my date.

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Queerness does not need more liberally-drenched support

Queerness does not need more liberally-drenched support. Queerness should not matter in the way that heterosexuality does not matter. Queerness and heterosexuality should be equal but should not be equated when we are not there yet. I’ve felt like my [gender]queerness does not matter so much so, that it feels like it is not important enough to matter. Maybe it’s that I matter so much that my queerness does not matter. But I am queer. Either way, this kind of support creates a non-issue around gender/queerness; not in the way that should be our goal - in that it absolutely should not matter whether you are queer - but in the way that forgets us.

 

It’s almost as if liberals are so supportive of queerness that they depoliticize it. Queerness should matter because queer and trans people are being murdered, politicians seek to smother queerness in its crib through legislation, suicide rates are increasing under current laws, and we are being politically displaced. But liberal politics holds an unwillingness toward actual politics.

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The issue with liberals is that they put civility over justice, in that their concept of freedom lacks any corresponding concept of justice. Liberals want to defend civility over politics - and it actually gives way to authoritarianism. Liberalism has promoted, if not supporting queer rights, performing support for queer rights. I think liberals are part of why politics has become increasingly imaginary.

 

Our liberty cannot surpass the government’s freedom of suppression. Liberally-drenched people support queer rights until it is time to support queer liberation. They support queer rights only under the government - a government that still has the power to take said rights away. Liberal civility makes authoritarianism possible. There is being supportive and there is behaving.

 

Liberals just don’t wear the red hat.

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USA Has Been Invaded by the West

We are in a repressive country of compulsory heterosexuality. For each anti-trans/queer bill that is written, there is a part of my queerness being smothered in its crib.

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Two years ago, I wrote “I was gay before I had the words. You cannot legislate the gay or trans out of us.” Politicians don’t want to just stunt our [gender]queerness, they want to ensure it is stillborn. It’s state-sponsored murder.

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The strangulation from gender dysphoria has been increasing and anxiety has suctioned itself onto me. My gender has been hatching more lately and I didn’t think the timing would be like this. I had always thought - maybe politicians also thought - that the mold from the government’s transphobic legislation would break off, attach itself to me, and infect me. Instead, I’m scheduling a top surgery consultation. I think my queerness is always expanding and contracting; rather than [politicians] detonating my queerness, its horizon was detonated.

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There’s a quiet kind of grief that washes over you when you begin to think about the queer/trans families and adults fleeing the country - a country your family fled an authoritarian state for.

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The U.S. has been invaded by the West. Being proud to be Iranian is often thought to be antithetical to queer liberation the way being a patriotic American is deemed antithetical to queer liberation today. As the national gender policy recognizes only “males” and “females” and more anti-trans legislation is being implemented, being queer and nonbinary feels un-American lately.

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I once wrote, “I used to be Iranian but now I am gay.” There is a White grip on queerness that once made me feel like I wasn’t as Iranian for being queer and not as queer for being Iranian. The irony is that MENA countries being called upon to address homophobia weren’t even homophobic. Iran was queer before becoming political with the West. Despite wanting to reject Western influence, Iran, oblivious to the irony, depends on a concept of sexuality corresponding to the West more than that of its own culture.

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To address the oppressive politics of transphobia and homophobia includes - no, necessitates - taking apart the Western empire. Putting queer liberation in MENA countries in terms of freeing them from Arab countries disregards the actual cause: the West.

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America is not just a country; it poses a mission: the “free” world. The freedom that is inherent to equality under the law. Many queer/trans adults and families are having to choose safety over a sentiment. The Trump administration is making queerness out to be a national threat to [women’s] rights and liberties, states are passing record numbers of anti-trans laws, yet queerness is one of the last currents that can demand and actualize the freedoms America promises. The U.S. hates those who use the freedoms on which the West prides itself. Our liberty cannot be more than their freedom of suppression.

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Trump embraces the flag not like a patriot, but like he is molesting it. How for women’s rights can you be as a rapist? Criminalizing queerness is not very patriotic when the basis of this country are (supposedly) the unalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

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Middle Eastern/North African Tattoo Artists: Queering Tattoo Culture

ARYANA GOODARZI — I can attest that almost every queer person I know has at least one tattoo. It is still rare to find Middle Eastern/North African (MENA) tattoo artists in the states, and for a huge cultural moment to be generated by queer MENA people makes me proud – and its implications go far beyond tattoos. Born in the West and raised in the diaspora, these artists found themselves able to hold the at-onceness of their identities through ink.

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As I write this, I can count 15 tattoos on myself, many of which have queer and MENA undertones. I have an overtly sapphic Georgia O’Keefe tattoo, a Botero painting of a man in a dress, and more. I’m currently saving up money to schedule my next tattoo appointment for my current fixation: a sketch of one of Pippa Garner’s art pieces.

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The first time I got a tattoo, I was 20. I went to the nearest tattoo shop I could find that took walk ins. I’ve had heavily inked, tough-looking guys tattoo very queer pieces on me, as I’m sure many of us have. I didn’t chitchat with the tattoo artist, as he clearly didn’t seem to care to. After a few more experiences like that, I began to think that the tattoo artist was as important to me as the art itself. I know there are tattoo artists near me that have the artistic skill to give me the tattoo I want. However, I would rather just hold off on until I can get on a queer MENA tattoo artists’ books.

 

Several years ago, at the New York City Dyke March, amid thousands of people. I spotted someone who, by all indications, appeared to be queer. Then, judging by one of their tattoos, I realized they are also Iranian. That was the first time I saw the established traditional tattoo style colliding with MENA art. Though I yearned for it, I had never been tattooed by another queer MENA person, as I didn’t know any who were tattoo artists. I’ve often fantasized about how our culture could be embodied in traditional tattooing. I’m currently working with an artist on a lady head resting on a roaring black panther’s head as a back piece—a common tattoo flash in American traditional style—but with thick, connected eyebrows, and full, wavy black hair decorated with some ornaments in red ink.

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In August 2023, I wanted a piece of art, by a queer Syrian named Yasmin Almokhamad-Sarkisian. If I went to a MENA tattoo artist, they told me, I wouldn’t have to pay them commission. When I put out a call for one, I was introduced to several queer MENA tattoo artists – in New York City, Montréal, and Mexico City.

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This goes beyond tattoos; it’s about cultural reclamation. Historically, the experiences of queer and trans people, especially that of MENA diasporas, have been divided, kept apart by a culture that uses shame and repression, hugely influenced by Whiteness’ hold on both queerness and tattooing. There is a new generation queer MENA tattoo artists who are shifting the homogeneity of queer, MENA, and tattoo culture without permission from, or pleading with, Whiteness. These tattoo artists talk about a culture that is both necessary and beautiful for queer MENA people, and what it means to bring tattoos in.

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Nassim (Sema) Dayoub, @seem.tattoo, is a trans Arab tattoo artist based in Brooklyn, New York. I spent an afternoon last March in conversation with them as they tattooed me. We spoke further about ink and identity. Tattoos have provided life-giving moments for me, where artists are not just creators but messengers. On the Nostrand A and G train over to Nassim’s tattoo shop, the reality of the upcoming tattoo and the conversation we would be having was beginning to settle. It was deep in my stomach, where it took root, and a mix of pre-tattoo nerves and excitement grew to my head.

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Not every tattoo has to be overtly queer or of MENA influence. For many queer people, tattoos can be a form of gender affirming care. There’s sanitation, there’s some blood, and your body looks different after the process. The experience of agency that tattoos can provide can also help people get to a point to pursue other forms of gender affirmation. It’s a relatively affordable and accessible way to transition.

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Alive with the buzzing tattoo machine and the needle’s cat- scratching sensation digging into my skin, Nassim told me about how as soon as they learned what top surgery was, they knew they wanted to get it: “I didn’t grow up with a lot of money and I didn’t have health insurance. I still don’t. I was like, ‘How am I going to [get top surgery]?’ I was saving up for years. While I was saving up, I was experiencing so much gender dysphoria that eventually I decided to just get my whole chest tattooed. My friend Karina did it. That kind of held off some of the gender dysphoria for a few years. Even after I got top surgery, when the bandages came off, I remember I thought, ‘Damn, even if I got top surgery years and years ago, when I first realized it was something I wanted…If I didn’t have tattoos, I would still feel dysphoric.’ The tattoos ground me in my body in a way that’s kind of separate from gender.”

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After a break, as I laid back down on my stomach and Nassim dipped the tattoo pen in more red ink, we began talking about how their identity as a trans MENA person informs their relationship with tattooing. Scanning the walls of their tattoo shop for past stencils, they told me that their tattoo style is somewhat American traditional: “I love tattoos that look like tattoos. I like bold lines and bright colors – the technical aspects of a tattoo that make it last a really long time as someone ages. However, there’s a lot I can’t relate to at all. I like the design principles, and then subbing in gay shit. My queerness and Arabness is in imagery.”

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Meanwhile, in Montréal, 90% of the people Antar, @grungycorpsetattoo, tattoos are queer and/or trans. I hope to be one of the next. They are Coptic (North African Indigenous), nonbinary, and transmasculine, and have been tattooing for four years. Unable to fly out to them for this interview, I found my hands moving over each of my tattoos as we spoke, like they were a portal to Montréal. Art does that, makes us feel like we’re not on our own. Collecting tattoos and the practice of tattooing is more than just art to Antar as well. They started getting tattoos before they had access to medical gender affirming care, like testosterone.

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I have one of my favorite queer Iranian paintings from the Qajar era tattooed on the back of my upper arm. There was a lot of gender queerness during that time and in many paintings, you cannot tell who the “man” or “woman” is or if it even is a man or woman – perhaps it’s a queer couple. There is a Western hold on queerness that cannot fathom my Iranianness, and a lack of imagination of Iranian identity that made me think I wasn’t as Iranian because I’m queer. We are existing where others once did. There’s a tethering, a pull that the art that is these tattoos honor.

Sema started tattooing eight years ago. “At the time in Chicago, it was more underground tattooing. There were very few queer tattooers that I knew, and definitely no other queer Arab tattooers. That has changed so much in the past eight years, especially in New York – there are my coworkers Haitham, @_sukhmat, and Hassan, @scutttle.butt. It’s been the best thing, and it makes me excited to not be the only [queer Arab tattoo artist]. I’m sure I wasn’t ever the only one, but the only one I knew.”

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Ultimately, tattoos and tattoo practices are not going to change the laws; there are at least 600 anti-queer and trans bills being considered across the country, LGBTQ+ people experience higher suicide and targeted homicide rates, and housing and employment discrimination, among many other things. Still, the practices of these queer MENA tattoo artists, and their relationship to tattoos, celebrates the at-onceness of our identities through ink, both archiving our existence and increasing our willfulness.

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The Politicization of Art

Artist and activist, Goldin’s work shows the role of critical art at a historical juncture at which the construction of freedom is positioned at odds with self-determination. My San Francisco apartment - filled with books and paintings - is the kind of space that would be recognizable as the living quarters of a culture worker, or at least a culture lover. As I sit here, enveloped by artists and writers, it was clear to me: everything can be cured by thinking.​

 

In Maggie Nelson’s words, “[D]issonant chords may be difficult for a writer or artist to chime; they can be even harder for the culture to hear.” However, is art enough by itself? No, probably not; at least when it is not met with or followed up with more. Is that on the artist? The viewer? What would the dynamic between the art-viewer and art-maker have to be?

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Art as witness and warning feels especially present and urgent right now. Art can be journalistic in a sense. But does art only succeed at the level of art? Are its politics confined to the walls of art exhibitions? Or can it enact political and cultural change? If political and cultural change cannot be attributed to the piece, is that a failure on any part of the artist or a failure of broader politics?

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Nelson says that, “Neither politics not art is served if and when the distinctions between them are unwillingly or unthinkingly smeared out.” Is it just a loop of endless artistic expression? People may enjoy a Pippa Garner piece, so long as they are not challenged with information implicating them in discussions about the criminalization of trans people. People may get points for viewing a political art piece, but looking isn’t synonymous with tuning in, knowing, acting. Political art simply cannot address “tasks that may fall fairly and squarely outside the realm of art.” However, art is not apolitical - both in its intention, how its experienced, as well as the institution of art. Are we more political interested in the phenomenon of the artist or compelled by the artwork itself? So where is the line?

 

As with Nan Goldin’s work, which provokes, compels, and forces viewers to grapple with our realities, the ongoing censorship and cancellation of art exhibitions highlights the many ways where art intersects with politics. This brings about broader questions about our current cultural climate: censorship, freedom of expression, and the role (and responsibility) of art in confronting political issues and commanding attention. This art is so disconnected from the motivations of viewers and collectors; they seem almost entirely interested in dollar value, return of investment, and have so little concern for how an artwork have been politically, culturally, and artistically conceived. Who has the ability - some might say privilege - to distinguish art from politics? Art devoid of politics is art that insists on being a luxury, is that art is a lie, is a culture that asks art not be an instrument of liberation.

 

Ultimately, art doesn’t change the laws; every day genderqueer and trans people are being criminalized by a new policy. However, the archive of art functions not just as documentation, but as political intervention: a challenge to erasure and an assertion of legitimacy within both art and activism. Goldin’s art has taken the allegorical into documentarian.

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Art reaches places we may not otherwise be able to access. Does it reveal what journalism does not? Or does it just expose another angle? Placing a subject in art or on the page can disarm the piece into being somewhat easier to talk about or digest; or easier to dismiss as “just art.” I don’t think it is useful to think that art and politics have a direct, one to one relationship, but it is baseless to think there is no reciprocal dynamic at all. And due to art always being one of the first institutions to be censored and defunded, I feel its disruption is tangible.

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It’s not just citizens of the art world entangled in this dilemma, but also art museums. This has been especially present when it comes to queer artists, Palestinian artists, etc. the elusive proclamations of anti-identity politics are depoliticization tactics. The art galleries want the art, but not the artist. What does it mean to create art that refuses? Art that denies the galleries, the critics, their transactional expectations?

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The phenomenon of progressive washing, the co-optation of progressive aesthetics and rhetoric by art and cultural institutions, is a performative gesture and one of the most insidious strategies employed by capitalism in contemporary art. It upholds the manufactured illusion that art and cultural institutions are progressive while ensuring compliance with capital needs. The archive of cultural production is held in the homes of millionaire art collectors; the motivations of curators are almost entirely interested in past dollar value, return of investment, and with so little concern for how an artwork has been politically, culturally, or artistically received. Rewarding with art exhibitions, critical acclaim, and financial security, the institution aligns the artist with capitalism and itself with progressive ideals. And DEI conditions just reconfigure the master’s tool - these institutions still need funding too. Is there a way to dissent without being integrated with the mechanisms of domination?

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And if we cannot reconcile, yet cannot go as far as actual political change, there is at least a disruption. Either way, art-makers and art-viewers seem to make an indelible mark on art and culture.

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What do I do with my sexual trauma now that I've named my rapist?

This essay will not make my rapist a registered sex offender. This essay will not make men call out rapists. So why am I even writing this? I will come out from the words in this article and take you by the throat, glue your eyes open. This essay will make you look. It will turn his apologists into witnesses. The blood will not be on my hands but on my words. I could write so many articles about queerness and sexual trauma. This piece is about what I don’t get to say. After this essay, will you hear the ghosts of my guttural cries?

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It’s been two years since I outed my rapist by name (what I wrote when I named him is after this essay). Since then, five more people have also come out about him sexually assaulting them too. I absolutely know there are still more.

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It’s been ten years since the last time he sexually assaulted me; sometimes it still feels like yesterday, today, tomorrow. Although it wasn’t a crime, the first time I would confess felt like one.

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The other time confessing felt like a crime was when I came out.

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I am six years old.

I have a life size barbie doll who is my girlfriend. My parents think I may be trans - I ask for a “boy” haircut, I wear “boy” clothes, I have a list of boy names that I’ve been trying on, I haven’t gone through puberty so I can be topless, and I like girls, but I want to be “able” to like them - so I must be a boy.

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There wasn’t what we call nonbinary today. You are either one or the other.

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I am eight years old.

I create a fake? screen name and I am not necessarily a boy online, but I have girlfriends.

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I am ten years old.

I feel his erection go up against me for the first time.

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I am eleven years old.

I try killing myself more days than not. I am continuously unsuccessful so I don’t try anymore.

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I am 12 years old.

It is April and three boys are arrested for sexually assaulting an unconscious girl at the same time. I now know why she took own life the September before.

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I am 14 years old.

He is sexually assaulting me while on trial for sexually assaulting her. I am hearing about their trial, watching it happen like a threat to if I ever confess. My hopelessness is like I am encased in wax. Even if I got through this, it would kill me.

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I am 15 years old.

Trial outcome: not guilty.

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He keeps sexually assaulting me and others.

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I only think about boys now. I don’t make it about my sexuality at the time, but it makes me think I am straight. I am trying to guess everything they could do as if it will keep me from any more sexual trauma. I hate them. I know not all men, but I also know it’s the men who say that. I have sexual trauma that I can’t seem to define.

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I see him luring another, trying to sexually assault her. I haven’t talked to him since. 

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I am in the dark, faced with the light of my computer screen. I read an article that gives me a definition of sexual assault I hadn’t yet heard. The kind that tells me I have been being sexually assaulted for the past five years.

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I am 20 years old.

I knew I liked girls before the first time I was ever sexually assaulted. I know my sexual trauma did not cause me to be gay. For years, I also didn’t know if I was gay or just could not get with men because of the sexual trauma.

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I come out for the first time, but do not know yet I am nonbinary. I still haven’t come to terms with my sexual trauma. I won’t even use the words sexual assault. They assault me more than he does.

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I always had this coercive return to womanhood: what I feared men would do to me. My womanhood was defined by the sexual assault. It’s just part of being a woman, right? It was only a matter of time. I thought contending with misogynistic violence, the sexual kind included, must have made me a woman or femme. Except it’s misogyny and transphobia, not femininity, that causes this. Many trans men and other queer people are affected and it’s not because of their femininity, but because of homophobia.

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It’s taking so much to take apart compulsory heterosexuality. I made the choice not get with guys just because I could. I wanted to make myself be so ok with being gay, make myself own my queerness. It’s how I was able to figure out what were my own choices and what was compulsory heterosexuality/internalized homophobia. I also liked this me more. The me that doesn’t have to be associated with men anymore because I’m gay; the me who I thought could never be sexually assaulted again.

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I am sifting through photo albums. I don’t usually do this because I don’t like looking at the little girl who was being sexually assaulted. I don’t want to see him in the photos. For the first time I’m looking at myself, for myself, beyond the sexual trauma. I’ve always been gay. It’s one of the first things I remember knowing.

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I am 22 years old.

I am up until 6 am having a panic attack. I throw up 5 times from the anxiety and there’s blood. I’m having scary thoughts. I was sexually assaulted. He was sexually assaulting me for years.

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Four nights out of seven I have nightmares about him.

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I am 23 years old.

I am not a woman.. that doesn’t sound right.. I am not not a woman either.

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After confessing to the sexual assault and coming out, I did not want to confess a third time: that I’m nonbinary.

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Like the first two times, saying I’m nonbinary felt like confessing a crime all over again. Maybe I wasn’t so nonbinary, after all? I would tell myself that for about four more years. Maybe I was, I don’t know, like a girl? Would coming out actually take away my anxieties, or just cause more? The latter. I don’t have to be out to be nonbinary. I would just “choose” what gives me gender dysphoria. As much as I could, I try not place my identity in what people use to identify gender. Until the gender dysphoria became so much that I couldn’t take much more of it.

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If gender performance is about an avowed relationship a particular gender, then transphobia affects us all. Complete alignment with gender ideals is impossible. No one can successfully perform every single part of their gender.

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My childhood sexual abuse is a court case. The DA says he will try to indict him as an offender on the official sex registry. That’ll do. That doesn’t go away after x amount of time. Just like what he did to me doesn’t.

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I am 24 years old.

I am told that if I don’t go through with the trial I should think about when he rapes again. They put it on me - not on the rapist or courts that time and time again do not put rapists away.

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He pleads guilty. The still court does not out him as a sex offender, so I would.

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After the trial, I think about my sexuality a lot.

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I couldn’t be with a guy without anxiety and I had a therapist once tell me that even if I was straight, it was very likely I wouldn’t like sex with guys. Before I had the words for being nonbinary, being with men also reinforced my womanhood in a way that was felt gender dysphoric. And how could it not feel like I was undoing the years it took to own my queerness? (This is not to say that bi people or anyone whose queerness includes men are not as queer or opting to be straight. They are queer, and they are also able to opt out of queer oppression in a way that gay people cannot. And sometimes we make choices not out of queerness but out of internalized homophobia/compulsory heterosexuality.) What do I do with my womanhood now that I’m nonbinary? And if all that was the case, what exactly was the capacity of my queerness when there’s no sexual trauma or comp het?

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From the piece I named him in on April 4th, 2023.

My rapist is at a court hearing this morning at the Santa Clara County court, waiting for the case to be called.

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55 weeks ago, I researched my jurisdiction and the police station that took his last sexual assault case. I drove to the local PD, given his name is already in their system, to tell them how the rapist they gave 30 days to, to do on the weekends — even though she killed herself, even after he took photos when he was done, the one with the Netflix documentary — kept doing it to other girls.

The sergeant looked at me like he saw a ghost. As if I took the words right out of him, he just stood there staring at me waiting for me to say the name he knew I was going to say. I saw the recognition of his name on the cop’s face as it became increasingly white. He then had me accompany him into the station to take my statement and interview me for just under 5 hours — defining fingering, defining it all.

 

The first time it happened I was 10 or 11. I went from wanting to kill myself from being bullied by him to “consenting” to being sexually assaulted because it was better than not wanting to be here anymore. As a young girl who was also being sexually abused by him and hearing about the other case, I thought maybe the other girls rape was not within the legal definition.

 

Intrusive thoughts that domino effect: I thought she must not have been sexually assaulted, because if you are, you would think the justice system would give your rapist more than 30 days to do on the weekends. I thought I must not have been sexually assaulted then either. Even if I was, his degrading conviction told me reporting it would be like screaming for your life when no one can hear you.

 

The September after I went to the cops, the DA agreed there was no question that he sexually assaulted me. The attorneys also compared our cases and realized that he sexually assaulted me the day after he did the other girl. That he was sexually assaulting me while on trial for sexually assaulting her. But, the DA wasn’t confident there was legal basis to prosecute anymore.

 

A few months later, on October 13th, I got a call from the DA. He told me that the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office was going to press charges against my rapist, with the intent of indicting him as an offender on the official sex registry. That doesn’t go away after x amount of time. Just like what he did to me doesn’t. The only justifiable sentence.

 

But this past week, I got another call from the DA — he assured me nothing would happen, and I was left with a court given “acknowledgement” of sexual assault, simply because it went to trial. The prosecution said there was no possibility of sex registration — not even a day in jail. I thought about taking my life when I was younger. I spent more time unable to sleep with the lights off, and wheezing crying, sleeping on the bathroom floor because of how often I’d throw up from panic attacks when he will spend with a conviction.

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His name is Saha Ghafouri. He sexually assaulted me when I was 10 until I was 15. He legally changed his name to Nicholas Cyrus Ghafouri a few years ago, assuming because he does not want to be associated with his past legal case as the rapist he is.

 

We both deserved this trial.

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Today is April 4th, 2025 and I am 26 years old.

The trial was two years ago. Five more people have since said he has also sexually assaulted them. How many others has he raped? How many more has he raped in the last two years?

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I think back to the time when I told myself for years I wasn’t sexually assaulted, that I wasn’t queer, that I wasn’t nonbinary. What else was I keeping from myself? Now, the choices I make are based on my queerness, not out of comp het or because of the sexual trauma.

 

Trump is president again, but despite all of the anti-queer/trans legislation, I am undoing this martyrdom I’ve always had. I feel sorry for the moments of happiness I withheld from myself as a tradeoff for the need for illusory justice. For years, I have thought my joy had to be in resistance. That my joy could not just be. For the first time, I am choosing a joy that is mine — not always, or only, in resistance to politics or our president. And that is not a betrayal.

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True Liberation: Navigating Queer Identity and Middle Eastern Heritage

Since Oct. 7, a common phrase discouraging queer individuals advocating for a ceasefire and Palestinian liberation is, “They would kill you [in Palestine].” “Pinkwashing,” a term typically emerging in the context of Israel-Palestine, refers to a propaganda strategy that diverts attention from Israel’s underlying oppressive, colonial politics by highlighting LGBTQ+ rights. Along with the Israeli government, the United States and its nationalists are guilty of using this tactic. The utility of pinkwashing in colonial politics lies in a country attempting to seek solidarity from queer communities in the name of bringing LGBTQ+ rights to a nation through imperialism.

 

There is a widely circulated photo of a gay Israeli man holding a rainbow pride flag with “In the Name of Love” written across it. The photo was taken atop ruins in Gaza, conveying that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is the only army that demands gay rights. However, these flashy pictures distract from the killing of more than 20,000 Palestinians by Israeli military campaigns, including LGBTQ+ Palestinians. The propaganda strategy uses the language of queer and trans rights in one country, or the absence of those rights in another country, to defend their operations in that country. Pinkwashing makes queer Middle Eastern folks choose between being queer and being Middle Eastern. The propaganda insists that Israel or the United States is a haven for queer people, suggesting that LGBTQ+ Palestinians should flee there. To stand with the LGBTQ+ community is equated to standing with Israel. However, it is more than unlikely that LGBTQ+ Palestinians would experience queer refuge in colonial Israel, considering the inequalities faced by Palestinians –– gay, straight, or otherwise. 

 

Opposing the pinkwashing tactic is the “Queers for Palestine”– a slogan used to identify the interrelatedness of queer and Palestinian liberation struggle. This movement criticizes the presumption that being queer and protesting for Palestinian liberation is inherently illogical, as it suggests using one’s queer identity as the basis to support a Middle Eastern country that penalizes queerness. The notion that queerness is an illogical framework for a popular resistance movement in the Middle East region resonates with assumptions about queerness in Iran. However, for queers of color – including Palestinian queers, emphasizing queerness is crucial because the Palestinian and queer struggle intersect. As a queer Iranian-American woman, I can attest there is no queer liberation without equal rights as both a woman and an Iranian. One common misconception is not only that Iran is inherently homophobic but also that there are no LGBTQ+ Iranians. Yet, we exist, and so do queer Palestinians. 

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Queer Palestinians have demonstrated the coexistence of their intersecting identities as queer and Palestinians through the platform known as Queering the Map. The interactive website has the mission of gathering submissions from queer people to create a global digital archive of queer memory. Users can pin their queer and trans experiences, stories, and memories on a worldwide scale. This platform has become essential for queer Palestinians whose existence could have disappeared beneath the rubble. 

 

Many queer Middle Eastern people have grappled with a sense of not fitting into their Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) identity. Some hesitate to come out, fearing it might diminish how Middle Eastern they are and sever ties with their cultural heritage. Pinkwashing implies that pride in one’s Middle Eastern heritage and solidarity with its resistance movements seems antithetical to queer liberation. Reflecting on this, I feel a sense of shame and embarrassment for having once downplayed my Iranian heritage due to the influence of mainstream American assumptions that made me, as a lesbian, feel estranged from Iran. The immediate assumptions that people think I do not like being Iranian because I am gay or that I am not out in the Iranian community because I am ashamed to have made me feel un-Iranian—such assumptions situate queerness in the West or as Western.

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Contrary to the message that pinkwashing implies, LGBTQ+ folks do not need to go to the Middle East to experience queerphobia. Thirty-one killings of transgender people were reported in the United States (US) between October 2022 and 2023. American transgender youth have fled their home states because of state government laws. A state of emergency was declared for LGBTQ+ individuals in June 2023 by the Human Rights Campaign, one of the most prominent LGBTQ+ civil rights organizations, due to a “record-breaking wave of legislation targeting the LGBTQ community” and a growing hostile environment. Moreover, the Department of Homeland Security warned of increasing threats to the community in 2023. Paradoxically, while the US perpetuates harm to LGBTQ+ individuals within its borders, it purportedly supports global LGBTQ+ solidarity and employs imperialistic approaches in the process. In 2020, Trump and the GOP referred to Iran’s persecution of LGBTQ+ citizens as a cause for military action. Military intervention will not bring the LGBTQ+ community rights. The IDF, while raising the pride flag “in the name of love,” are killing queer Palestinians for being Palestinian.

 

Labeling Israel and the West as a supposed haven for LGBTQ+ rights rests on an Islamophobic assumption that most of the MENA region is inherently homophobic. While the United States and its citizens may take pride in the rights Americans possess, it doesn’t dismiss the ones Americans lack. Despite the open expression of LGBTQ+ Americans, an increasing sense of insecurity prevails. The onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation reached a staggering 505 bills. Some of these bills, from states such as Florida, not only outlawed gender-affirming healthcare but also criminalized it. Perhaps discussions about gay rights in Middle Eastern countries would carry more credibility if the US also addressed the challenges within its borders. An Islamophobic lens of queerness furthers the conception that LGBTQ+ individuals who are also Middle Eastern need to be saved.

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While persistent protests in the West rightly challenge the homophobic governments in the Middle East, it’s essential to dismiss the assumption that all Middle Easterners are homophobic. Many Middle Eastern individuals proudly identify as queer. If two countries are homophobic, it is illogical to condemn one while absolving the other. Rather than assuming a savior role to remove an LGBTQ+ individual from their current situation, genuine progress involves reimagining a future where both their Middle Eastern heritage and queer identity co-exist harmoniously.

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Perspective | Women Made of Fire Cannot Be Burnt

Since September 2022, I have been actively participating in New York-based protests in solidarity with the Iranian revolution’s fight against femicide and struggle for justice and equality. During one of these marches, I found myself face-to-face with an individual I had previously seen in a viral video, bravely cutting their hair just as I had done. This symbolic act of defiance has been adopted by Iranian feminists as a powerful message to the Islamic Republic: “[You] are losing a part of [your]existence, I am also losing a part of my existence with my own hands because of the tyrannical government.”

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When I introduced my girlfriend to this protester, they surprised us with their response, “No way, I’m also queer.” Until that moment, I had never been around another openly queer Iranian. It was a revelation for me to discover that there are more individuals like us. When I shared my astonishment with them, they pointed to a few others they knew at the protest, and at that moment, I was overcome with tears of relief and a profound sense of solidarity.

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I used to struggle with the idea that I might not be as connected to my Iranian heritage after coming out. As an Iranian-American, I am often asked by Iranians and Americans about “what it’s like” to be both, as if being queer in the United States does not bring its own set of anxieties. Some Iranians who emigrated to the United States in the wake of the 1979 Revolution assure us that, here, we can at least be queer. Can we?

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Their observation that Iran is relatively more homophobic should not diminish the experiences of queer women in the United States. Likewise, acknowledging that we may have more rights and acceptance in the United States should not delegitimize the significance of being queer in Iran. The challenging political climate in Iran should not be used to dismiss LGBTQ+ rights violations in the United States. 

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It is worth addressing that some may not be aware of the recent developments in the United States. For instance, since 2021, numerous state laws have not only banned but also criminalized gender-affirming healthcare, with some of these laws going into effect as recently as September 1st of this year. Some states, such as Florida and Arkansas, are trying to legislate us away. 

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Making an equivalence between the United States and Iran is an extreme comparison, but it is also an oversimplification to associate the United States solely with instances of perfect equality, justice, and legal redress.

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At one of the protests in support of Iran, an Iranian protester did not so much ask as tell me why we, queer individuals, were making this about us and questioned whether this was really the right time to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. They pointed at my protest sign adorned with a pride flag. I couldn’t help but ask them, “Am I not Iranian? Am I not a woman? I am queer. How is this not about us too?” It is not the responsibility of those of us in the diaspora to lead the revolution. Instead, our role is to amplify it. The assumption that advocating for LGBTQ+ rights at this time will distract from the ongoing struggle for women’s rights in Iran is unfounded. Within the LGBTQ+ community, there are numerous individuals who identify as women. And thus, promoting LGBTQ+ rights inherently advances the cause of women within the queer community. 

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The current moment, in fact, presents an opportune time to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights in Iran. In the published words of Suzanne Pharr, she writes, “To be a lesbian is to be perceived as someone who has stepped out of line, who has moved out of sexual/economic dependence on a male, who is woman-identified. A lesbian is perceived as someone who can live without a man, and who is therefore (however illogically) against men.” Homophobia is yet another means to reinforce sexist stereotypes that are often attached to gender. Supporting a more just Iran involves supporting queer Iranians.

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When I first heard about the protests in New York, my immediate thought was to be there. I yearn to join the protesters in Iran and fight alongside them, but being that I am queer, I cannot. My outspoken support for the female Iranian revolutionaries and my advocacy for the inclusion of queer and trans people have led me to forfeit the option of returning under the current regime’s rule. In the eyes of the Islamic Republic’s law, my presence would mean arrest and the potential sentence of capital punishment. 

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That is why I find it so pressing to be as out as I can be here in the United States, where I have a right to protest without the looming threat of arrest or rape. The courage displayed by the protesters in Iran is something I hope I will never have to summon, but that does not mean the United States is a haven of justice and equality for queer people. 

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The Pride protests I attended this past June were not my first ones, but it was the very first time I was marching as an Iranian during Pride, not just as a lesbian. I owe this empowering experience to the fierce Iranians who I witnessed standing up for their rights back home. To express my solidarity, I wrote “Iranian Lesbians Exist” on my Pride flag. At the Dyke March, amidst thousands of protestors, I spotted a woman who, by all indications, appeared to be both queer and of Iranian descent, judging by her tattoo. As she read my sign and our eyes met, we gravitated toward each other and embraced. That day, she taught me the word “Queerooni,” meaning queer Irooni (Iranian), adding depth to our shared experience.

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For too long, we have endured the flames ignited by oppressive governments, while they remain relatively unscathed by the sparks of our resistance. But no more. Together, we stand united in our battle against the patriarchal systems governing us. Whether it is the Islamic Republic’s ruthless enforcement of unjust laws, or the United States’ lawmakers crafting legislation that will intensely increase the frequency of suicide among LGBTQ+ individuals, the forces are closing in.

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This marks not only the one-year anniversary of “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (translated as “Woman, Life, Freedom” and adopted from Kurdish feminist thought), the resounding cry that emerged during the protests in response to Jina Mahsa Amini’s death in Iran. It also signifies 43 long years of injustices under the Islamic Republic, without any meaningful redress. Furthermore, it represents over four decades during which we have confronted the injustices faced by the LGBTQ+ community in America. Nevertheless, within us, our ever-emboldened fight continues to burn brightly. Women made of fire cannot be burnt.

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I Now Pronounce You Trump and Sexually Traumatized

These words have been piling up since Monday, the end of Pride month. Until yesterday, when the words came out like diarrhea and I didn’t have constipation typing anymore.

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On June 30th, 2025, I was reading a piece by a trans woman in regards to her gender affirming care appointment juxtaposed with the recent Supreme Court ruling. On June 18th, 2025, United States vs. Skrmetti upheld Tennessee’s 2023 statute, which prohibits puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and gender affirming surgeries for anyone under 18 when the purpose is to address gender dysphoria.

The law does not apply to the same medical interventions for cisgender kids with other diagnoses. Gender nonconformity in cis kids is medicalized to ensure alignment with their gender, yet the same for trans individuals is criminalized. As of now, there are 25 states that have banned gender affirming care for minors, 23 states that have not, and 2 states that have it permanently blocked.

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She starts by saying “I don’t really talk about this, but I am the product of not being allowed access to gender affirming care growing up.” At those words, I was buckled into place. As I’ve written about my own sexual trauma, her words took me by the throat, sewed my eyes open, and made me look. I still had whiplash.

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What she talked about felt almost like her own sexual violation. All of your years as a child trying - no, begging - to be heard. My knee jerk reaction to the gut punch (at least the first few times) was to scream, but I didn’t have the air for years. I tried putting words to the sexual trauma, to my [gender]queerness but shrank from confirming it - and now, more than ever, it can feel like slamming into the entire weight of the government.

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I’ve been digesting her words since Monday (it’s Thursday) and “I am a product of” holds the before, during, and after of what didn’t have to be. She didn’t have to be denied access to gender affirming care; and when she did start HRT and get gender confirmation surgeries, it didn’t automatically address her gender dysphoria. I didn’t need to be continuously sexually assaulted for years if the judge rightfully jailed him the first time he was caught (he had already been sexually assaulting girls). The strangulation may have stopped but we try to catch our breath for years. Politicians don’t want to stunt our queerness, they want to ensure it is still born. Being alive was like playing dead - can’t be too loud about the sexual assault and can’t be too out about queerness.

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Being denied access to gender affirming care growing up seems (as I took it) like sexual trauma, too, in a way. Sexual in that it’s about sex organs. Being denied choice and care. Recognition withheld. Eyes wide shut. It living in you, you living in it. My own sexual trauma became gender dysphoria. The years of childhood sexual abuse almost trapped me in my womanhood - I always had this coercive return to it. It felt like sexual assault tightened the screws of my gender in a way that my puberty had not yet approached. I went from childhood to girlhood.

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Our demonstration of gender queerness is a capital offense that most react to with an irrational fury. The right-wing trips over themselves trying to implicate us into their political vision. We are the sexual perpetrators. Their sexualization of queerness and sexual trauma precedes us. We have to carefully detonate or suffer from their explosions.

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Part of my rapist’s family apologized to me recently - not his immediate family, but family friends I always associated with him. I couldn’t help but cry as they apologized. I appreciated it. I fell to the floor after. I laid on the shower floor until 5 AM that night, sobbing. I threw up from the 48 hour panic attack it caused. It brought all the sexual trauma that is always at the back of my head, to the front. They had written me after reading what I’ve put out on him. I cried as she read it to me, though not because of her words but because of the years childhood sexual abuse. They may not remember when they told me to stay still while he did it so maybe then he wouldn’t continue. I realized I didn’t need their apology so much as I liked watching them apologize. An apology that I don’t think would have come had I not called out one of them a few months ago for knowingly surrounding themselves with rape apologists (one of which they said is still their best friend as they apologized - though they have stood up for me to her, they ensured).

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If you aren’t loud about it, you support it. And when one day everyone will have been against transphobia and sexual trauma, don’t come apologizing when you could have done more before. At least not to me.

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Party Politics, Art and Queerness​

Last week, I heard the national anthem coming from the apartment above me and my hands started sweating immediately. Trump was being sworn in as president.

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I’m American. Iranian American. On November 5th, I took the bus over to my friend’s apartment with two bottles of wine (we ended up having five), because I was too anxious to watch alone.

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I poured myself and my friends almost a full glass of wine each and sank back into the couch as that familiar feeling of dread sank in that comes each time our rights are up for vote.

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We all huddled together on the couch as if watching a scary movie. Even the overhead lights were on to try and dim the fear. But there was no hiding from the red spreading across the map of the US, like blood pooling in real time.

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I felt like I was underwater, slowly drowning, everything outside muted and faraway. The United States was rotting in blood, that it itself amassed, and we were sinking with it too. The United States is responsible for oceans of blood. Native Americans mass murdered; the AIDS epidemic; carpet-bombing Afghanistan; queer and trans homicide and suicide; over 600 anti-trans bills being considered across the country; police brutality; the indeterminate killing and ongoing genocide of Palestinians. And so much more.

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We turned the TV off as if it would pause the horror movie that is America. I knew Trump was going to win. With the undertones of our rights being taken away, I lost myself in the girl I had been talking to for a few weeks. I needed to feel like I existed, that my queerness was still mine. We slept together that night, during which Trump was being elected. I was trying to hold on to the shrinking feeling that maybe, just maybe, we won’t have to think about our rights being taken away more than we already do. If not, I thought to myself, “this is me protesting right now.”

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I reached for my phone after. Trump is America’s new president-elect. I said America hates women and queer people more than it hates rapists. “America doesn’t even really hate rapists,” she said.

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I almost gave up on writing last summer because of the intense, immense emotions that overcame me in those months. With Gaza, Trump’s upcoming presidency, I didn’t know what anything I had to say would do. Sometimes I wouldn’t know how to hold onto moments when I was commissioned to write an article. I quickly descended into its contradictions, like my participation in the very political context that is complicit in I am writing about. My interests were in conflict. I could suggest pieces to commission as well as pitch my own, which even at this insignificant level, I felt could make a mark. Then, I would open my phone to see a protest of the same institutions I was writing for, one that I could’ve attended. Were my gestures to write problematic? Was the writing just a measure on their part to avoid larger disruptions or can this be considered tangible progress? I was torn.

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I fell into an uncharacteristic yet epochal bout of partying. Constantly lubricated, it was a wall behind which I sheltered. Each weekend, and the occasional weeknight, everything around me melted away. I was numb. Even when that became to feel like too much, I’d party and do it all again. Even though I was no longer I writer, I was still among artists and creatives. What was I doing? Research for life, I resolved. How to live better, I convinced myself. Rather than feel claustrophobic around everyone, I felt warm and enveloped. All I had to do was follow orders. I was told where to go and I was there. I didn’t have to think. I liked knowing where I was going but not necessarily what I’d find there. Why does it feel like so many queer people are into partying? Does it portend a kind of politics, or is it just a party, after all?

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I’d been creating a world that was isolated, but no less real. It would be 5 AM and guys with a right-wing aesthetic would start talking to me about my queerness and rights. There were the guys with bisexual girlfriends who thought that bought them into my company. I liked that they knew that the patriarchy was affecting them and how. I disliked their pretensions that just because they knew this, they could aim to claim that as basis which would relieve them of any further undoing. It felt imaginative; they were just saying the right things amidst performative allyship. There is a heterosexism that seeks to do away with queerness and transness and a heterosexism that aims to claim queerness for its own use. One way or another, there were always party politics. Or was I making it political, and everyone just wanted to party?

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As someone with sexual trauma, there is something about having a man who has been been accused, and indicted in civil court, of sexual misconduct by 27 women, and seems to get happy at the thought of taking rights from queer, non-binary, and trans people, women, and others, whether they “like it or not”, and whose first pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, has been accused of molesting a seventeen year old girl that brought it all back up to my throat.

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The American flag is the lodestar of patriotism for both Republicans and Democrats. Patriotism is supposedly a vigorous, many times vicious, objective devotion to equal rights. But the way Trump literally embraces the flag is like he’s molesting it. Even queer people can embrace the aesthetics of our culture without necessarily taking on its politics. There is a Western hold on queerness that cannot fathom my Iranianness, and a lack of imagination of Iranian identity that made me think I wasn’t as Iranian because I’m queer. Many people feel they are relieved of any further undoing by sole ownership of the word queer.

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Things are chalked up to paranoid fantasies, injustices so small and individual that we are being sensitive. There is a deeply political juxtaposition between the people who are coming down on trans people’s gender identity because they think their gender identity is being taken away and trying to take another’s right to their gender away in the name of upholding their own. The executive orders may not uphold in court but signing it says enough about being LGBTQ+ under Trump.

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When I wasn’t working my copywriting gig, I was recovering. The only other plans I stuck to during those months were going to museums and cafes. Going to art galleries is where I like to go when I’m not writing – or when I feel like I can’t awaken the region in my brain that can orchestrate my next paid, written piece. Art makes me feel like we’re not on our own. It’s why I now write mostly about the imbrication of arts and culture with politics, rather than just politics. Art gets us to where we wouldn’t be able to get to any other way. I allowed myself this, to become distracted from the events in Gaza and the rights that would be repealed by Trump.

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Just this last week, National Gallery of Art closed its office of belonging and inclusion, following one of Trump’s executive orders. Even before this, the Smithsonian Museum side-stepped, diluted, erased, and burden-shifted the queer and AIDS memorial that is “Portrait of Ross in L.A.” Senator Jesse Helms attempted to ban art about queerness and HIV/AIDS in the ‘90s. Representational politics of the museum are sometimes not much more than identity politics for consumption. Art cannot transcend its political context.

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Art permanently affects culture in a way that politics just cannot. It brings up the question of who is a museum for? And for whom are art exhibitions made? Even as curatorial and artistic roles are increasingly occupied by LGBTQ+, Black, Middle Eastern, Asian people, etc., they are usually empty gestures of politics and identity – the administration of inclusion rather than dissecting why inclusion is needed to begin with. Despite my disillusionment with art institutions, is there utility to engaging with them to challenge them and what would the varying levels of it be? Art history is an accomplice to creating in politically trying times.

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We made Trump. But America is also made of us. Me writing this, those of us who cried when he won and have been having panic attacks since, those of us who have always been in Trump’s America before it was ‘Trump’s America’. With Trump’s presidency, it's been almost impossible to think about anything when you’re seriously considering what the next four years is going to look like. Will Democrats block anti-trans policies? Can our rights make it through a Republican-controlled Congress? What kind of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation can Trump enact without Congress? Do we want revenge or reparations? The pendulum of culture and politics goes both ways – so yes, we can come back from Trump.

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Having sex on election night almost felt like an intruder was in the house approaching us. Maybe queer sex is going to feel like that for a while now. This isn’t the first time we’ve been criminalized, which I am equal parts haunted and inspired by.