The day they met, Sepehr Rajaei, a 32-year-old from the Iranian city of Isfahan, warned his date that they couldn’t see each other often. Just a few people knew that Rajaei was gay, and he hoped to avoid whatever questions might come from regular trips to Tehran, where his now boyfriend, Ata Leysi, lived and they first got together on a cloudless July afternoon.
Over time, Leysi, a tall and pensive construction worker, became more and more drawn to the baby-faced accountant he found on the dating website Manjam. And so a year after their first meeting, he begged Rajaei to move in with him in Tehran.
Rajaie’s move was a dangerous one in Iran, a country where a man convicted of kissing another can be sentenced to flogging, and sodomy is punishable by death. The two men tried to make the arrangement work, concealing their increasingly intertwined private lives behind a thick screen of fabrications—Rajaei, for instance, told his parents he was in Tehran to study and work. But after four years, Leysi snapped from the burden of hiding and self-censoring at the risk of becoming a social pariah or a target for police.
“We can’t live like this,” Leysi said. “We have to get out of the country.”
They both knew they’d have a good shot of escaping along a well-traveled “underground railroad” leading to freedom in the West.
