Gay Travels Through Syria and Iran.

Mark O'Halloran is a screenwriter, travel writer and actor who lives in Dublin, Ireland. For an upcoming book, O'Halloran's been traveling to the 20 most homophobic countries around the world. We asked him to write about his experiences in Syria and Iran.

Aleppo was the first really authentic Middle Eastern city I had been to. I was traveling from Istanbul to Tehran, slowly, by rail, bus and air, and it was my first stop inside the Syrian border. Aleppo claims to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and though it can genuinely claim a connection to the "Grand Tour" literati set of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (Agatha Christie began writing Murder on the Orient Express while staying in the Baron Hotel in Aleppo), it has since lost most of its glamour and all of its celebs. It sits on the edge of the Syrian Desert, the poor neglected sibling to the more sanctimonious Damascus, and from a distance it shines silver, like powdered bone, and stuns you into silence. And in short I was afraid.

I had come to Syria in order to discover more about gay life there, but now, in this medieval environment, I felt a little out of my depth. However, on the cusp of a panic attack I got lucky. I met Mohammad.

Mohammad was 25, tall and splendidly handsome with sallow skin and dark eyes. He was also as gay as Ramadan. I noticed him leaning against a wall in a narrow alleyway near my hotel, and as I passed he spoke.

"Hey! Where you from?"

I felt slightly flustered. "Irish. I'm Ireland." He really was that beautiful.

"OK," he said, pausing before leaning in a little closer and adding, "And do you know the Mr. Oscar Wilde?"

It wasn't really the question I had been expecting to be asked in Syria. "Yes, yes I do," I replied.

He then leaned in even closer and spoke in more hushed tones. "OK. I… I am like the Mr. Oscar Wilde."

What the fuck? I was beginning to find it hard to breathe. "Oh. Really?"

"Yes," he said, and then he leaned in so close that his lips practically touched my ear and he whispered. "Yes. I am a vegetarian."

I gathered from the knowing looks he was giving me that this was code. Not terribly good code but code nonetheless.

"I see. I am a vegetarian also." I said.

Mohammad was pleased with this.

"I think we understand each other," he said.

So that was that. Within an hour of getting there, I'd met my first Syrian gay man, and he gingerly led me through the aromatic laneways of the Aleppo souq to his uncle's shop and the center of gay life there. The shop itself was called The Mr. Oscar Wilde Shop, and it sold silks and pashminas and beautiful embroidered cloths. Rather surprisingly, the store's walls were plastered with pictures of Oscar Wilde. (Aleppo seems to have a fascination with Ireland's favorite homo, and apart from some unsubstantiated reports that Wilde visited once, it was a fascination I could never quite figure out.) The proprietor of the shop, Mohammad's uncle, was as camp as a Bedouin settlement and had a line in double and even single entendres that would put your average drag queen to shame. He and his nephew very kindly set about educating me in the ways of Syrian gay life. My first lesson was the most important and has held me in good stead throughout the Middle East: The joys of Bluetooth.

As we all know, Bluetooth wireless technology is a short-range communications system intended to replace the cables connecting devices. But on the gay scene in the Middle East, it has become an invaluable means of communication and here's why. For a scene that can at best be described as clandestine, the need for discretion is paramount. There have been instances in the past where gay websites have been used to entrap or blackmail gay men. For a picture message to be sent via Bluetooth, the users must be within a 20-meter radius of each other, and a picture received in this manner cannot be traced back to its sender. Thus instant and safe flirting can happen. So just turn on your Bluetooth, give yourself a handle (I use "Irish Gay," which I think is nice and succinct) and then sit in one of the many cafés around Martyr Square in Damascus, say, or Daneshju Park in Tehran and suddenly your phone will start buzzing with incoming pics (I received comedy pictures of Saddam Hussein, love birds, flowers and other more intimate portraits). After receiving a picture, you know that the sender is most probably at a table nearby, and through a process of deduction and a few nods and winks, you find each other and introductions are made. Charming and ingenious, I think, and a portal to another world.

I found my Bluetooth to be particularly busy in Iran, which was my next stop after Syria. There was not a town, a city or a village that I visited there where my phone did not buzz gently in my pocket as some lonely gay attempted to bridge the technological divide and find amity.

I had been looking forward to coming to Iran for a number of reasons. Firstly, because I bear more then a passing resemblance to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and secondly, because he was the reason that I had decided to undertake these journeys in the first place. When he spoke at Columbia University and claimed that there were no gays in Iran, I became so incensed that I decided to go there and find them for myself (not that you actually have to look that hard). Since then, the concept for the book I am writing expanded, and in it I now travel to the 20 most homophobic countries in the world and find out about gay life and history in each. A project of reclamation, you could say. But for me, Iran was the big one, and I had come prepared. With 50 percent of the population under the age of 30, Iran's young, educated and tech savvy residents are also Internet obsessed, and there are numerous, extremely busy Iranian gay websites. This was how I made contact with the three amigos who were meeting me off the plane at Imam Khomeini Airport.

It was the first day of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, when the country shuts down for ten days, and my new friends, I reckoned, were just delighted to have something to do. So I found myself climbing into a taxi with my new homo best-mates en route to a gay party in north Tehran that was being thrown in my honor. Our driver had discovered I was from Europe and insisted on playing me his Mariah Carey CDs. So here we were, four homos in a taxi speeding across North Tehran on the way to a gay party. We were like a joke in search of a punch line and the night was still young. Iran was going to prove a revelation. Up yours, Ahmadinejad.

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