"But a majority of Iranians, apparently including their President, have not adopted the idea of sexual orientations, nor have much of the rest of the Third World."
But Ahmadinejad's government seems sufficiently aware of the existence of Iranian homosexuals to pass stringent laws against them.
Perhaps Michel Foucault (who after all was in on the making of the Islamic Republic of Iran) could explain to us the dynamic between repression and identity formation.
If you are saying, Yoshie, that it would be odd to find Iran thronging with Drucilla Cornell-style Sexual Personae, I think you would be right. But surely one would expect a potent homoerotic brew to be maturing underneath all that sexual policing.
As Karl Marx said, 'the country that is more developed ... only shows to the less developed the image of its own future' (Preface to the first German edition, Capital, Vol 1., Lawrence and Wishart, p 19).