Author: Scott Long - *Scott Long is director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Program for Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization based in New York. He has researched and written reports on human rights abuses based on sexuality and gender in Egypt, Romania, South Africa, and the USA.

Published in: Contemporary Politics, Volume 15, Issue 1 March 2009 , pages 119 - 136.

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Abstract
This contribution proposes a critical analysis of responses in Western gay and lesbian politics to state-defined crimes relating to same-sex sexual behaviour in Iran. It focuses on the Iranian state's execution of Makwan Mouloudzadeh in 2007, for alleged involvement in a rape committed almost a decade before, as well as on other recent images and allegations about rights abuses inside Iran. Using empirical sources, including news and non-governmental organizations' statements, the article examines how gay and lesbian activists in the West misinterpreted the context and reduced the scope of rights violations in a search for 'gay' identity and for 'homophobia'. The article questions how the terms of Western gay politics can erase voices and political agency in describing other cultural situations, through a pursuit of sameness and a strategic misrecognition of otherness that enables domestic political action but posits misleading universals.