By: Ryan Prout
(Cultural Centre of Belgrade, Artget Gallery, 15 September 2022)
On the way to the Artget Gallery in Belgrade Cultural Centre I crossed paths with a
small anti-Pride demonstration. Flanked by a man in priestly garb at one end, and, at
the other, by religious imagery, this small group of mostly young men were chanting
against EuroPride and carrying a banner that said, I think, ‘No gays in public spaces in
Serbia.’ This demonstration of an intolerance tacked on to sacred imagery made for
an unintentionally apposite prelude to a piece of theatre about the flight from an
intolerance in Iran that justifies itself in religious dogma.
After chanting about gays, the protestors started chanting about Kosovo. Of course,
that makes perfect sense, since separatism, aspirations for self-determination, neo-
nationalism, and sectarianism are always and only a conspiracy led by the LGBTQI
community. In case this is quoted out of context: this is irony. Doesn’t it occur to the
protestors that there might be LGBTQI people in Kosovo, too, who are more concerned
with simply surviving as themselves than they are with what it says in their passports?
In one of the Artget Gallery spaces, an actor we can know only as Nasim, told his life
story in a narrative developed with the director, Sahand Sahebdivani. ‘No photos’, and
‘Switch off your phones’, attendees were instructed as we went in to the performance.
Even in exile, an openly gay Iranian man must be discrete about his identity. This
performance of Four Weddings and an Iranian Funeral, in Belgrade, was the first
outside Holland, where it has been put on fifteen times before, sometimes leaving
even exiled Iranian spectators with mouths agape, surprised at what they didn’t know
about the challenges of living as a gay man in the republic of the ayatollahs.
The piece opened with a clip of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad telling an audience, with
enormous satisfaction in what he was saying, that there is no homosexuality in Iran.
Next to this projection stood Nasim, his back turned to the audience, and facing a wall.
Nasim’s turn towards the audience also opened the book on his journey from
persecution and prejudice in Iran to self-discovery and self-fulfilment in Holland. The
audience laughed with him as he described Tehran’s underground gay scene, one
which gives the lie to President Ahmadinejad’s authoritative statement that Nasim and
men like him simply don’t exist.
With the bare minimum of props—a chair, a lipstick, a small chain flogger—Nasim
brought to life his journey through the very different gay cultures of Tehran, and
Isfahan, where he went to university. Exasperated by the policing of themselves by gay
men in Iran—’soft sex’ is OK, but anything deeper might warrant execution—and
getting into trouble with the authorities, he leaves his native country. In Holland he
learns to be free and chances upon an old school acquaintance and fellow exile who is
hitting Amsterdam’s dark rooms hard, traumatised by the realisation that the person
he used to be was based on pretence. Nasim wonders if he will ever be able to visit his
grandfather’s grave in Iran. Will he have to wait until he is in his 80s to visit a grave, as
his grandfather did, before visiting the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz?
When I took my seat in the front row, I glared at the man sitting next to me, who was
taking photos. We had just been instructed, on the way in, to turn off mobile phones
and not to take pictures, under any circumstances. ‘I’m setting a bad example,’ he told
me. ‘But, as the director, I thought it would be OK to make a record of the play before
it begins.’ It was one of those moments when you wish that the ground would open
up and swallow you.
After the play, Sahand Sahebdivani, who overlooked this clumsiness, told me about
how he worked with Nasim to give the story a narrative shape. We talked about how,
since the 1970s and 1980s, when Holland was a reference point for progress and
liberalism with regard to LGBT rights and sexual freedom, it has become a place with
a marked backlash in the national political debate against LGBTQI. And Amsterdam
isn’t what it was. There’s still a gay scene, one that’s large enough to make plausible
that someone, like Nasim’s old school friend, could try to obliterate sorrow over
missing his life by spending five nights a week in dark rooms. As Sahebdivani told me,
what remains of the gay scene may be darker, perhaps seedier, than it once was.
The contraction of public spaces for LGBTQI people, partly as a result of the migration
of social groups to virtual spaces, was something that was not much discussed in the
panel on corporate responsibility at the Human Rights conference (which took place a
few hours before the play began). The panellist from IBM referred to the social
footprint of companies and corporations; the spokesperson from Grindr mentioned
the company’s efforts to support LGBTQI physical spaces and performers during and
after the Covid episode. But nobody formulated as such the impact of information
technology, and of social media, on Real Life spaces for LGBTQI people, where we can
find each other, see each other, talk to each other. The protestors who were parading
outside the cultural centre might get what they want—no gays in public space—not as
a result of authoritarian legislation but because in a not too distant future, the gay
bars, clubs and other spaces that are ours may all be gone. Gentrification, waterfront
developments, and apps could see to that.
In the beginning section of his drama Nasim talked about how his exile in Holland
allowed him to discover his kinks. He invited an audience member at the front of the
performance space to try an introduction to flagellation, gently flicking the chains of
the flogger over the back of her hand. ‘What are your kinks?’, he asked. ‘Are you into
leather?’ ‘No, not leather’, she said. ‘I’m a vegan… But latex could be a thing’.
Four Weddings and an Iranian Funeral was edifying as well as moving, and
entertaining. Nasim shared with the audience that in the build up to the Ashura
festival, one of the few occasions when men can go shirtless in public in Iran (if only to
scarify the flesh), gyms become busy and appointments at barbershops are hard to
get.
Four Weddings and an Iranian Funeral will be controversial, wherever it’s performed.
One cannot look at this play, and at its documentary narrative about the flight from
murderous intolerance, without also thinking about the British author, Salman
Rushdie, currently recovering from an attempt to murder him.
It says something good about EuroPride 2022, and about Belgrade, that the play’s first
performance outside Holland was here. If I talked to the protestors in the march I saw
on the way to the Cultural Centre, I would want to ask them: ‘Is this what you want for
Serbia? An intolerance that terrifies people, that drives them away? Is Iran your model
for a country where gays are gone from public view. Can you see yourselves chuckling
like Mr Ahmadinejad through the statement of a lie that “there are no gays here”?’
With heartfelt thanks to Andrej Nosov at Heartefact for the opportunity to see the play.
Ryan Prout
Volunteer
EuroPride in Belgrade
15-ix-2022