A Homophobe's Guide to Pride

I read a piece in The Spectator titled "Bombing Iran is the perfect way to celebrate Pride." I read it twice, because I wanted to be sure the author was saying what I thought he was saying. He was.

The argument runs like this: the Islamic Republic executes gay men, therefore the missiles falling on Iran restore the lost meaning of Pride. But before reaching that conclusion, the same author spends his opening paragraphs telling us how much he despises Pride itself.

He calls it a tiresome, hollow spectacle. He calls it a circus. He closes by sneering at its vulgarity and at queers who defend Palestine.

I kept going back to that. A man who is disgusted by living queers in London and Tel Aviv, holding up the corpse of the Iranian queer as a war banner. This is homophobia, the real thing, and his own text is the evidence.

His hatred and the hatred of Tehran's hangmen are the same species: both can only tolerate the queer as a dead body. One hangs that body from a crane. The other frames its photograph and glues it to a bomb. They disagree about the flag, not about the human being.

And the human being is the actual subject here. In his world, a person counts as a person only if they think like him. Anyone who claims a different choice, anyone who refuses to live under apartheid and occupation, anyone who stands against both the gallows in Tehran and the bombs over Gaza, is expelled from humanity itself.

His criterion is not sexuality, not rights, not even opposition to the Islamic Republic. His criterion is obedience. The obedient queer is admitted; the disobedient queer is thrown to the enemy camp.

Fascism has always performed exactly this operation: sorting people into those who deserve life and those who deserve removal.

Not a single living Iranian appears in his text. Iranians exist there as executioners or as corpses. The society that filled the streets during the Jina uprising, against the very execution machine he cites, is missing, because if it appeared, his whole argument would collapse. The warmonger needs a silent victim the way the homophobe needs a dead queer. He needs both at once.

The repression he lists is real. Iranian activists and survivors documented it, at the price of prison and exile, and he strip-mines their work for ammunition. But the missile he celebrates tightens the noose: after the June 2025 strikes came a wave of executions on espionage charges, and a war climate that brands every dissenting voice as treason.

He and the regime he claims to oppose want the same thing in practice: an Iranian society that stays quiet, one through hangings, the other through bombs.

Pride has not lost its meaning. Its meaning is held by people who fight the crane and the warplane at the same time, which is precisely why they have no place in his fascist text.