Do not bomb Iran’s “gaytollah” in my name
Cuts through the week's noise.
In this week's newsletter: Jude Jones, editor-in-chief of GAY45, cuts through the week's noise exclusively for subscribers, plus our essential recommendations.
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The Week in Sharp Relief
Do not bomb Iran’s “gaytollah” in my name
By Jude Jones, editor-in-chief
If there are two things that you’ve heard about Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, son of recently assassinated former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, over the last week, it is probably that: (1) less than a fortnight into his rule, he might already be dead; and (2), that he might be gay.
Mojtaba Khamenei is an elusive figure for whom only a brief biography can be written. He was 9 years old, the second of six children, when the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 swept his father to power. He studied Iranian theology as a young man, joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, then studied to become a cleric in Qom, the heartland of Shi’a divinity, late in life. And although he has only ever given one public speech and operates in the murky, abyss-like depths of Iranian theocratic politics, he is also considered among the most ruthless, radical and regressive of the nation’s litany of ideologues.
He is not, in other words, the regime change that US President Donald Trump has long pledged in Iran – behead the hydra, and it will only grow more heads.
Regardless, on 16 March 2026, the New York Post, a conservative American tabloid, dropped its exclusive report, alleging Trump and his senior officials had been briefed that Mojtaba is “probably” gay – a revelation that led to hysterical laughter and left one senior official like Chrysippus, terminally guffawing at the incredulity of the situation.
The Post, for its part, seems confident in its claim: three trusted sources confided to them the information, it writes, which itself came from a “credible” source in the US’s intelligence agency. Other tabloids pushed the rumours to their front pages; The Spectator, a British conservative magazine, punned that Mojtaba should be called the “gayatollah”.
The Right’s revelry in these whispers certainly comes from a sense of Schadenfreude: the new leader of a nation that infamously hangs gay men from cranes and which has likely executed thousands of LGBTQ+ people may now be one of a handful of sovereign states worldwide – and the only one outside Europe – with a queer ruler. “Maybe all this angst over the ‘Strait’ of Hormuz should have given us a clue,” snared The Spectator, a publication that has also run such headlines as, “Why the Tavistock Clinic [a UK gender identity clinic] must be shut down.”
There is also a not-too-subtle smattering of homonationalism in the reaction, a term coined by author Jasbir K. Puar in 2007 to describe the Western Right’s tendency to suddenly lionise around LGBTQ+ rights when it helps paint a political Other – Muslims, migrants and non-White people – as a threat to the social fabric, as “homophobic, backward, and barbaric”.
Israel is generally held as the doyen of homonationalism. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has frequently juxtaposed the legal liberties of LGBTQ+ people in Israel to the dearth of rights in other Middle Eastern countries, especially in Palestine. Social media abounds with images and clips of LGBTQ+ Israeli Defence Force soldiers flaunting Pride flags on razed land, or gay Israelis flaunting that they are still going to orgies despite the air raids, as if their sheer sexual promiscuity is a direct affront to Iranian power.
It is also a political ploy increasingly exploited by Europe’s far-right. France’s National Rally, a party that clawed into the mainstream campaigning about the “de-Islamisation” of French society, is poised to win next year’s presidential elections – and holds 27 per cent of the LGBTQ+ vote, bigger than any other individual party.
In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is polling at 24 per cent to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)’s 26 per cent. It is led by a lesbian firebrand, Alice Weidel, and has previously promoted itself by erecting billboards depicting gay men and declaring, “My partner and I don’t want to get to meet Muslim migrants who believe that our love is a deadly sin.”
Even Trump has now latched his little hands onto the strategy, declaring in a YouTube interview this week with internet influencer Jake Paul: “We support gays [a blatant untruth], but they [Iranians] throw them off buildings.”
Across Europe – Austria, the Netherlands, Serbia – GAY45 has tracked the cancerous growth of this rhetoric, where anti-gay parties use gay people as pawns in their geopolitical and ethnostate jingoism. Now, as the US and Israel rain bombs on Iran in an attack that, by all measures, is a blatant violation of international law and which has already killed hundreds, queer people are expected to be thankful – as if Iran can be bombed into so-called “civility”, as if the political schizophrenia of Trump, a man who has deported LGBTQ+ asylum seekers to homophobic countries, whose ICE agents shot Renee Nicole Good dead in front of her wife, has anything to do with LGBTQ+ advocacy.
“Trump”, Douglas Murray, a gay Spectator editor who the Centre for Media Monitoring, a Muslim advocacy group, characterised as a “far-right white supremacist” for his views on Islam, wrote this week, “may have just done more for gay rights in Iran than any activist group in the West could ever have dreamed of.”
But what exactly will the beheading of Iran’s regime do for LGBTQ+ people in Iran? Install Ali Khamenei’s son, who is more orthodox, ergo more homophobic, than him? Force trans Iranians back to hostile homes as they flee bombs and have their access cut to gender-affirming care? Continue to give clemency and support to an Israeli military that massacred hundreds of trans prisoners at Evin Prison in Tehran last year, an attack that Human Rights Watch has now described as a war crime?
I, as a gay man, do denounce the murderous homophobia of the Iranian regime, as I’m sure most sane queer people do. However, that does not mean I support the illegal bombing of its citizens – some of whom, inevitably, will be queer – by a joint coalition of a geriatric narcissist and a genocidal psychopath under the paper-thin, retrofitted veneer of queer liberation. I reject the Iranian theocracy, and I reject Western homonationalism. Do not bomb Iran in my name, whether its maybe dead leader is maybe gay or not.
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