Laws are against certain sexual acts, not against certain categories of persons, in Iran. Such laws must be overturned, as they have been here (though not until 2003: <http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/02-102.ZS.html>). I do not think, however, that one has to subscribe to the idea of sexual orientations to overturn them.
BTW, do you know Khomeini had a hilarious opinion about sodomy?
Ayatollah Khomeini's 1947 manual, Risaleh-yi Towzih
al-masa'il (Explanation of problems), is a case in point.
Article 349 of this book states that "if a person has sex
and [his organ] enters [the other person's body] to the
point where it is circumcised [corona] or more, whether
he enters a woman or a man, from behind or the front,
an adult or pre-adult youngster, and even if no semen
is secreted, both persons will become ritually polluted
(najes)." But ritual impunity can always be cleansed
away through the observance of rules stated in the
same manual. (Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson,
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and
the Seductions of Islamism, University of Chicago Press
p. 159)
Iranian men and women might amend the existing laws against sodomy, which, if successfully prosecuted, entails harsh punishments, by reinterpreting this 1947 Khomeini opinion: you may commit sodomy as long as you clean yourself by ablution after your enjoyment!
> 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).
I disagree with Marx, and agree with Foucault, on this. Sexual happiness is essential to human liberation. Personal rights and freedoms concerning sexuality, however, may be achieved in other ways than one based on the idea of sexual orientations, though certainly the one based on that idea is the hegemonic one, especially in the global North, and I believe our sexual future is still open. -- Yoshie