As a gay man, let me tell you what I didn’t do when I read the news that U.S. intelligence has reportedly briefed Donald Trump that Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is probably gay.
I didn’t laugh.
Apparently, a lot of people in that room did. According to reports, a senior intelligence official “hasn’t stopped laughing about it for days.” Trump himself found it amusing. The whole scene, powerful white men, sitting around and chuckling over the idea that the next ruler of the Islamic Republic might be gay. It played out like a punchline to a joke where being gay is the thing that makes a man less than a man.
Because if this story is true, it is one of the most revealing, tragic, and dangerous pieces of intelligence to surface in years, and almost nobody is saying what it actually means.
Let’s start with what's obvious to most of us — that Iran brutally executes gay people. The Islamic Republic has, for decades, hanged gay men from cranes, imprisoned them, and subjected them to forced surgery under the grotesque pretense of “correction.”
Being gay in Iran isn’t some misdemeanor. It’s a capital offense. It’s deadly. And now we’re being told that the man who stands to inherit this system, who would be charged with upholding Iran’s religious law and moral authority, may himself be the very thing his regime has spent years trying to eradicate.
That is a sick joke. Not a funny one. Mojtaba Khamenei is despicable and evil, perhaps more so than his father, some have said.
If you want to understand the psychology of political homophobia, the kind that destroys and kills, look at what it produces at the top. We have seen this pattern before: in the American religious right, where men thundered from pulpits about the sin of homosexuality, only to be exposed as being with a male escort. Hypocrisy isn’t incidental to this system; it is baked into it.
In the Catholic Church, an institution that punished gay seminarians while sheltering powerful men living double lives. In Chechnya, where Ramzan Kadyrov presided over concentration camps for gay men.
The closet doesn’t just destroy individuals. In the hands of a dictatorial theocracy, it becomes an instrument of ruthless power. Because when a man cannot be what he is, and rises within a hierarchy that despises what he is, he has two choices: either run for the hills or double down.
In authoritarian regimes, they double down. And, they overcompensate. They become the most ferocious enforcers of the very laws that condemn them. Every act of state-sponsored torture, mutilation, and murder against gay Iranians may be, in some perverse and devastating way, tied to a system that cannot tolerate the truth of its own leaders.
But here’s where it gets more complicated, and perhaps more dangerous. Because the question isn’t just who Mojtaba Khamenei is in private. The question is what Washington does with this intelligence. Because intelligence like this cuts in multiple directions, and none of them lead to clean outcomes.
On one hand, you could leak it into Iranian internal channels and let it detonate inside the clerical establishment that rules the country. If the men around him believe he is living in violation of the very laws he is sworn to enforce, they are unlikely to look the other way.
But that’s questionable because, if American intelligence has this information on Khamenei, surely others in positions of power in Iran know it too.
If so, then as a leader cornered by that kind of exposure, Khamenei may lash out. And in regimes like this, lashing out often means lots of blood.
But here is the other edge of that sword. If the United States outs the Supreme Leader of Iran as gay in order to destroy him, then we have just told the entire world that being gay is a weapon, and a tool of humiliation to be deployed against your enemies.
And that sends a message that would also result in lots of blood.
We will have confirmed, in the most official way possible, that being gay is something so shameful, so delegitimizing, that it can bring down a government. And that message will not stay contained within Iran. It will echo in every authoritarian state where queer people are already living on the edge of survival.
The men around Trump making that calculation are the same men who have spent years dismantling protections for LGBTQ Americans, banning trans kids from sports, rolling back federal nondiscrimination rules, and treating queer identity as something suspect or expendable.
They would be weaponizing queer identity abroad while devaluing it at home. The laughter isn’t surprising when you consider the worldview behind it, and the assumption that being gay is inherently lesser, inherently ridiculous.
And what about gay Iranians? They are the ones actually living under this system. They are the ones at risk.
A campaign built on exposing Khamenei’s sexuality does not liberate Iranians. It endangers them. A regime under siege doesn’t become more humane — it becomes more brutal. It tightens its grip. It looks for enemies within.
Somewhere in Tehran, there are gay men and women who wake up every morning in fear of their government. They are human beings with families, with love, with lives they are trying to hold together. They are not intelligence assets. They are people living inside one of the most suffocating closets in the world.
And that’s why the laughter matters.
Because what was treated as an immature joke in that room is, for millions of people, a matter of life and death. The same fact that made powerful men laugh could, in the wrong hands, become the justification for more executions, more imprisonments, more hangings, more mutilation and more lives erased.
This is not a punchline. It is a precarious moment, one that demands seriousness, restraint, and an understanding of the human cost.
I didn’t laugh. And neither should anyone who understands what is really at stake here.