The Ayatollah’s Gaze: A Memoir of the Forbidden and the Fabulous

The pseudonymous Parsa recalls growing up gay in Tehran in this passionate if sometimes overwrought autobiography. Born in 1981 England to an Iranian father and Turkish mother, Parsa returned to Iran with his family shortly after the revolution, and both parents “devoted themselves to the new regime.” At age nine, Parsa wanted to be a good Muslim, but at 10, while roughhousing with a neighbor boy, he felt sexual stirrings. The subsequent chapters echo other coming-of-age gay narratives in which religion collides with desire: Parsa writes of crushing on a straight friend, discovering gay chat rooms, and disavowing his first homosexual kiss with fervent prayer. By 2005, a 24-year-old Parsa had drifted away from his faith to fully enter into Tehran’s gay scene, attending underground parties in a country where acts of homosexuality were punishable by death. A friend’s arrest and execution eventually prompted him to flee Iran in 2010 for a new life in London. Though muddy chronology and some clichéd imagery threaten to derail the proceedings (Parsa refers to himself as a butterfly more than once), the author’s urgent documentation of gay life under sharia law is too moving to ignore. Despite its flaws, this resonates. (Aug.)