The Only Gay Citizen in Qatar Says Seeking Asylum in US is Rough and Intrusive
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| Dr. Nasir Mohamed |
Dr. Nasser Mohamed is the first person from Qatar to publicly come out as gay, after being granted asylum in the U.S. based on the likely prospect he’d be persecuted for his sexual orientation at home. He’s currently a physician in San Francisco serving a primarily LGBTQ+ clientele.
Mohamed, 38, went public in 2022 at the start of the World Cup in Qatar, to highlight LGBTQ+ rights abuses in the wealthy Gulf State.
Many of those have been documented by the Alwan Foundation, an advocacy group founded by Mohamed to collect evidence-based data that “accurately reflects the circumstances and living conditions of the LGBT community in different Gulf countries,” where little to no data existed before.
Now his findings are being used in asylum cases in the U.S., similar to his own.
Mohamed spoke with LGBTQ Nation from his office in Lower Pacific Heights about how he was granted asylum, the prospects for others seeking it now, and frightening similarities between the “authoritarian control” he fled in Qatar and the regime he’s living under today. LGBTQ Nation: I’ve read that you’re officially Qatar’s only LGBTQ+ citizen. Please explain.
Dr. Nasser Mohamed: (Laughing) I am not their only LGBTQ+ person, but I’m the only one willing to speak up publicly, and willing to take risks. And this is, unfortunately, a symptom of other authoritarian dictatorships, which I think is what we’re getting a little bit of a taste of here in the United States now.
I grew up under totalitarian, authoritarian control, and dissent against the government for any reason, including disagreeing with them on your civil rights as an LGBT person, is not acceptable. I’m in more trouble for just speaking against the regime than actually for coming out as gay.
Is it legal to be gay in Qatar?
It’s not.
Religion and law are mixed in Qatar, so it’s ruled under the Sharia law. But then in real life, you get the people that the law applies to and the people that get away with whatever they want, right?
So you have issues of class and wealth and gender, and all of these issues manifest into who is going to suffer the most consequences. And right now, the poor suffer most of the consequences, and Arab nationals, Eastern Asians that come in, foreign workers, and migrant workers, they suffer most of the consequences.
But then Western expats, from Europe, London, and the United States, do not, because it wouldn’t favor the country’s diplomatic relationships to enforce anything on those individuals. And it creates this weird dynamic where they say to those governments, we won’t touch your people. And then those governments wouldn’t want to advocate for gay people, because it would be expensive, right? It would cost them oil and diplomatic relationships, and Qatar has money everywhere. It creates a trap that’s really hard to escape.
Let’s talk about your experience with asylum. What is your legal status in the U.S. now?
I’m an American citizen. I came here for my residency in 2011, and then I lived on the East Coast, and then moved to San Francisco in 2015. When I finished my residency training, I was supposed to go and report for the mandatory military service in Qatar. And during my time in the United States, I had come out as gay and been living as an out gay person. I truly did not feel safe going back home.
I came out to my parents over the phone, and that did not go well, and I just didn’t have good options available. Then an attorney I consulted recommended that I file for asylum. I didn’t know that was an option for me, but she said to take that route to be safe, and I did. I cut my ties back home completely, and then filed for asylum. It all happened very quickly.
What did that process involve?
When you file for asylum, there’s just so many steps. They include going in to have your biometric data collected. You get fingerprinted and have photos taken, and then you go in and turn in some documents some other day, and so on — it was all a blur. And then one of the steps was my interview, which was like three years later. I had to wait three years for them to even process my case.
What was the interview like?
Yeah, it was rough. It was really rough. It was long, and it was rough. And it was very intrusive, because it was based on my sexuality. And I’m pretty okay engaging in difficult conversations. But that one was like really trying to prove I’m gay. But it was also kind of funny, because I’m pretty sure my asylum officer was gay.
Oh!
(Laughing) And he was asking where I hang out, how I hook up, like, just to get a sense if I’m actually gay. Which is bad, because there are just so many ways to be gay, like not just one, but I kind of felt like I was giving more stereotypical answers, because I needed to be a proper gay.
I was asked about how I hook up, where I typically go, who my friends are. It got a little bit deeper, and I don’t remember all the questions off the top of my head, but I just remember, when I left my interview, my attorney was like, “That was a lot.” I was like, “You know me very intimately now.” (Laughing)
Did he actually ask you about your sexual practices, things like that?
He didn’t get to that, no. But he kind of leaned into whether or not I’m in the leather scene, and I guess he was just trying to place me, right? Like, am I really queer? Like, am I really out? Am I really the person I claim to be? I mean, I don’t know how to do that.
Like, how gay are you?
(Laughing) I’m very gay.
Are you into the leather scene?
I mean, I am! I’m all over SoMA. I’m at a lot of events. Mr. San Francisco Leather brought me into that community, and they organized an event to support me and help me. Within the queer community, drag queens and the leather community seem to be more civil rights-oriented, at least in my experience here, and they just seem to be a lot more organized and intentional. And I just found myself in the space with a lot of them.
In the interview, did they lean on what the effects would be if you had to return to Qatar?
Yeah, and that part was really hard, because when I was going through my interview, there was no public data, no reports, nothing to reference on gay men in Qatar. And actually, since I came out in 2022, I opened the Alwan Foundation, which is now the only LGBT nonprofit working on civil rights in the Gulf States and in the Middle East.
I published the first report with Human Rights Watch in 2022 about a pattern of persecution and torture by the state of LGBT Qataris. That “country conditions” reporting was the first of its kind to be published from our region, with evidence-based reporting on patterns of persecution for LGBT people in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and it’s now being used in asylum courts.
But at the time I was coming out, I didn’t have something like that to reference, right? We didn’t have people who had come out and said there is state-sponsored conversion therapy, and a complete lack of legal protections, so if your tribe tries to severely hurt you, the law is not going to protect you. And to say that the state has very organized efforts of going out and hunting down queer people and jailing them. If you’re out like I am, you definitely cannot live in the Gulf region. They would just come after you.
And because I’m speaking to you now — because speaking to journalists about the government and their patterns is a crime in its own right, they call it a “cyber-crime” — that would be reason alone to go to jail.
From your vantage point in advocacy, what are the prospects for gay people from other countries seeking asylum here based on persecution in their home countries because they’re gay? Does it depend on what country you’re from, or your race, or what factors exactly?
I’m not an attorney, but I’ll tell you, they really look at the individual case, and then they try to look at three or four different areas to see what the probability of you getting prosecuted is. And regardless of where you’re from, you need to belong to a minority group, and that minority group needs to be a persecuted group, and their pattern of persecution needs to be well described.
And then you, as a person, also need to have circumstances that would make it likely that you would personally be persecuted if you go back. And then they look at all of these things, and they make a decision if it would make sense to take you in and grant you asylum, because the risk of you losing your life would be high if you don’t get asylum.
Are those criteria the same now as they were a year ago, before Trump came in?
I want to say this applies generally to seeking asylum, and I don’t think that changes with the regime. I think what changes with the government is closing doors from certain countries, or processing times, or how you process the cases. But how you make the decision, I think, remains the same.
As part of the Trump administration’s war on woke overseas, all kinds of protections and just acknowledgement of LGBTQ+ people and identity are being stripped from U.S. foreign policy: changing identification for trans people on passports, and a long list of things targeting the U.N. and other international organizations. Have you seen the effects of any of those changes in your work?
I’m in many different spaces, right? Like in healthcare, I care for LGBT patients as a physician, and I practice HIV prevention, and I do some HIV treatment, and there’s been just so many destabilizing hits, right? So when the whole attack on DEI started happening, it really impacted academic institutions and grants in a substantial way, where they were not able to even use language to describe the population they’re studying. And that was like the first wave.
And then with PEPFAR and HIV medicine, there were just a lot of safety net programs that existed that got defunded, and that was also a hit against the LGBT community.
And then, of course, the trans community is being hit from every single direction, and it’s quite frightening, honestly, to see what’s happening to them. It’s really, really alarming. Now, trans youth are being completely hunted down, and their parents are hunted down. Their data are being subpoenaed by the Department of Justice, hospital systems are threatened with financial retaliation for caring for them, right?
Then on top of that, and separately, we have ICE and the state-sponsored law enforcement that is supposed to be protecting communities, but in reality, we’re seeing them terrorizing a lot of communities. Early on, they were showing up at clinics, safety-net clinics. They were in parking lots. I personally got reports of people that were asylum seekers, that were sent back, that were captured, when they would go in for appointments. They were here legally. They did not commit any crimes. And then ICE would just capture them, and then just take them to detention, and then deport them. And for what reason?
Is it xenophobia or homophobia or just a quota that Stephen Miller is ordering?
With the immigration thing, yeah, it’s a whole other shade of hate. But outside of the immigration thing, there is also a very direct anti-LGBT organized effort. If you’re an LGBT refugee and a person of color, then you’re just like completely f**ked. Excuse my language. In San Francisco, we have a lot of trans people of color that are refugees from other countries, right? So they’re really the most marginalized people that don’t have a lot of people standing for them.
Trump’s so-called Muslim ban on immigration from several countries does not include Qatar. Why not?
Because money. I mean, honestly, right? And that is the thing that is so suffocating about Qatar, okay? They house the Muslim Brotherhood. If you’re gonna ban a country for being extremist and Islamist, Qatar should be the first one. Even Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. had a ban on Qatar, right?
The Wall Street Journal published a story about the Trump family accepting close to $500 million to access AI chips just prior to the inauguration. That also applies to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. There is self-interest, for sure.
You’re an openly gay man. What’s your relationship with the Muslim faith?
I don’t practice. I grew up very religious, and I practiced Islam until my early 20s. But things are different for me now as an American citizen versus as a Qatari citizen. I didn’t have the freedom to not practice religion there. And that was one of the fundamental freedoms that was really valuable to me, the freedom to believe or not believe or practice anything you want, and that’s why I wanted to come here. But I also wanted the freedom to make choices about my own body and who I have sex with.
Is there any room in Islam for homosexuality?
No. I don’t want to piss people off, but I studied this very intimately, and, like, straight up, that’s the official statement. There isn’t. But then in reality, people, whether they have Muslim faith or Christian faith or Judaism or whatever religion they have, people try to find ways to hold different pieces of themselves together that is meaningful to them. I see people here that identify as both Muslim and gay, and they’re finding ways to make that work for them. And that’s great if they are; that’s up to them. But I feel at peace with the way I am, too.
Do you feel safe as a foreign-born gay man living in San Francisco from attacks by the Trump administration and the Qatari government? Or do you worry that your advocacy can put you in a similar situation to, say, students accused by Marco Rubio’s State Department of “un-American” speech or other activities? You’re a U.S. citizen, but does that protect you?
I’m the only Qatari voice speaking against the State of Qatar in the United States, right? There isn’t anybody else, gay or straight. And it worries me a little bit, and especially when my government gave Trump a jet; I was like, that doesn’t seem great. That doesn’t seem reassuring. Like, am I going to be shipped back in a gift box? I don’t know. My community is supportive, but we’ve seen how unpredictable this federal government is and how speech is punished.
You know, Qatar is coming to San Francisco, right? They’re coming here for the World Cup, and I’m definitely not gonna be quiet about it. I can’t share more, but I’m not just gonna let them come here during Pride month of all months to play soccer in the Bay Area and just have that be unnoticed and not talk about all the awful things that are going down. I have already sacrificed a lot for freedom and to be able to use my own voice. And I’m not gonna stop.
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