EDGE Boston

To judge from media and blogger response, Iran’s president has earned a place in America’s annals of foolish remarks.

President Ahmadinejad declared during an appearance earlier this week at new York’s Colombia University that there are no gays in Iran--a claim that was greeted with boos and hoots of derision from the audience.

There was some debate about whether Ahmadinejad has actually meant to suggest that there are no gays in Iran, with some bloggers speculating that Iran’s president was making a distinction between practicing and non-practicing gays, and others saying that the president’s translator had gotten his remarks wrong in rendering them into English.

However, at a United Nations press conference later on, Ahmadinejad seemed to reiterate the claim that no gays are present in Iran when he was asked about his comment by a journalist, who told the president, "I know a few myself."

Responded Ahmadinejad, "Seriously, I don’t know of any."

Continued the Iranian president, "As for homosexuality, I don’t know where it is. Give me an address so that we are also aware of what happens in Iran."

CNN’s Jeanne Moos filed a story on the response to Ahmadinejad’s sweeping remarks, in which she presented the views of an expert in reading facial expressions. Said the face-reading expert, "He tried to paste a smile on [as the crowd at Colombia jeered him for his remark], but actually, an anger expression came up under that... actually, he got rattled by it."

Moos also referred to the Web site Queerty, and to aol.com blogger Mo Rocca, who posted a comic checklist of fake gay hot spots in Tehran, including "Fatwa" (which was explained to be part of the "bear scene"), "Great Satan’s," and "Guyatollah’s."

Gawker.com posted a rundown of online links and sites to Iranian gay life, including a park in downtown Tehran, a club called Iranian Gay Doctors, and a site called "Guyslink" that Gawker said "seems to be in Farsi! Hello, fellas!"

And eonline’s Mark Malkin unearthed a fascinating tidbit with the news that, according to International Mr. Gay Competition executive producer Don Spradlin, last year’s crop of 16 entrants included a Mr. Gay Iran who was a Tehran-born man and now resides in Canada.

But a more serious side to the issue has also surfaced in the wake of Ahmadinejad’s claim. Filmmaker Parvez Sharma, who recently completed a documentary titled A jihad for Love, filmed in secret over the course of six years in countries including Iran and other oppressive religious regimes, as well as in the UK, France, and America, suggested to the press today that Ahmadinejad might want to screen the film for himself in order to see and hear the stories of gay Iranians for himself.

The CNN report included a clip of Ryan Davis’ You Tube video, in which Davis, explaining how gay Iranians are executed by hanging, a punishment prescribed by Muslim Sharia law for homosexuality, commented, "If you hang gay people, you’re going to have less of them."

Gawker.com’s lightly mocking article also included a clip from a Canadian Broadcasting Company report from last February on gay life in Iran. The report detailed how a 25-year-old Iranian named Arshan--now living in Canada for fear of persecution in Iran--started a group, the Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization, site for LGBT Iranians. The group was organized online, and had attracted 5,000 members before the Iranian government sought to shut it down.

Instead, the PGLO went underground, but not too deeply: the organization is now headed up by a 24-year-old named Mani Zanlar, who agreed to be filmed and interviewed by the CBC.

Asked, "How hard it is it to be gay in Iran?" Zanlar replied, "It’s extremely hard. I can’t find a word to describe how hard it is."

Though he was risking his life in doing so, Zanlar shwoed the CBC film crew around Tehran’s gay circles, including taking them into a club where gays met to flirt, smoke, and laugh: behaviors proscribed under harsh Sharia law.

But Zanlar accepted the risk of speaking out, telling the CBC, "People like me must speak to the cameras. We must stand in front of the bullets."

Sweeping statements that fly in the face of common sense tend to invite scorn and ridicule, but Ahmadinejad’s claim that there are no gays in Iran seems to represent some sort of party line for the country’s Muslim fundamentalists. When the CBC interviewed an influential Imam named Ali Falihani, the Tehran Imam prefigured Ahmadinejad’s words with the claim, "There is no homosexuality in Iran at all. Absolutely none."