This book explores the construction, enactment, and veiling/unveiling of gay identity and same-sex desire in contemporary Iran. The volume draws on ethnographic data and engages with self-identified gay Iranian men´s lived experiences. The ethnographic data was collected during several field trips to Iran, mostly in the capital city of Tehran. The research draws on diverse interpretive, historical, on-line and empirical sources, in order to present critical and nuanced insights into the politics of recognition and representation that inform narrative accounts self-identified gay Iranian men and the constitution of same-sex desire under specific conditions of Iranian modernity. It also engages with and responds to critiques of existing gay internationalist and liberationist accounts of the persecuted Iranian gay male subject as a victim of the barbarism of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In that respect the book addresses interpretive questions of sexuality governance in transnational contexts, which attend to issues of human rights frameworks in weighing social justice and political claims made by and on behalf of sexual and gender minorities. Thus, the book combines empirical data with a critical engagement with the relevant literature on sexuality governance and the politics of same sex desire for Iranian gay men. | Gay Life Stories by Jón Ingvar Kjaran, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters