Here is an interesting article I found. Excerpt:
Trans[ition]in Iran
From the Spring Issue "Sex and Sexuality"
By Rochelle Terman
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CULTURAL SICKNESS
Contrary to popular belief, homosexuality is not criminalized in Iran. That is, same-sex attractions, desires, even identities are not illegal. What is criminalized is a particular set of sexual acts that occur outside of a sanctioned heterosexual marriage, including sodomy and adultery. Under certain circumstances, a man convicted of sodomy, or lavat, can be put to death. The method of execution is left to the judge’s discretion, but it is usually hanging. If the accused are underage, or if no penetration has occurred, the sentence will be converted to lashing. Lesbianism, or mosahegheh, is punished more leniently than same-sex relations among men—an unusual feature in a legislative code that so regularly discriminates against women. Here the punishment is also lashing, but anyone convicted of homosexual acts for a fourth time, regardless of gender, will be sentenced to death.
It is often said that Iran’s penal code is based on shariah, or Islamic Law—the unchanging and immutable totality of God’s commands as revealed through the Prophet Mohammad. It is more correct to say that punishment is based on fiqh, or the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence. Fiqh literally means “understanding”—that is, the human understanding and interpretation of divine shariah. The distinction between shariah and fiqh is crucial, according to Islamic scholar Ziba Mir Hosseini, because “some specialists and politicians today—often with ideological intent—mistakenly equate shariah with fiqh and present fiqh rulings as shariah, hence as divine and not open to challenge.” All of which suggests just how contradictory modern day interpretations of Islamic law can be. In fact, early Muslims’ relationship to homosexuality was paradoxical. Superficial intolerance of sodomy was derived from the Quranic story of Lut (equivalent to the biblical Lot), even as pederasty and love between men was celebrated in poetry, art, and literature. Persian poetry, in particular, featured a significant amount of homoeroticism, with references to sexual love in addition to spiritual or religious love present in these relationships. Moreover, in most parts of the Islamic world, including Iran, as long as men (whose sex lives we know much more about) performed their “procreative obligations,” the larger community was generally not much concerned with the rest of their sex lives, according to Najmabadi.
Attitudes toward homosexual relationships began to change, however, during the Pahlavi era (1925 through 1979), when a range of policies was implemented that aimed to transform Iran from a dependent, traditional society to a modern, independent nation-state with Europe as its model. Iran criminalized sodomy as an effort to encourage a European-style nuclear family and sexual sensibilities. The 1979 Iranian Revolution suggested that infiltration of the family unit constituted one of the most potent modes of cultural imperialism conducted by Western forces to control Iran. Thus, one of the very first tasks after the Revolution was the repeal of the Shah’s personal status and family laws, substituting new penal codes as part of an overall “anti-corruption” campaign to cleanse the post-revolutionary society of any infiltration of “Western” gender relations, especially sexual transgressions such as adultery, fornication, prostitution, and homosexuality. Sex outside of marriage became punishable by stoning. In fact, the crime of adultery still warrants greater punishment than the crime of murder in the Islamic Penal Code (created in 1983), since it’s considered a crime against the foundations of the new Islamic state.
These days, however, the official discourse on sexuality has increasingly gone medical. “In the last 10 years, whenever the government or media talks about sexuality, they talk about a kind of health or psychological problem—gender identity disorder,” Amin says. “Everything is about gender identity disorder. And if you have it, there’s one solution—go and change your sex.”
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Rochelle Terman is an Iranian-American Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and sits on the advisory council for Women Living Under Muslim Law’s International Solidarity Network.
http://www.worldpolicy.org/transition-iran 
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