A gay soldier in Assad’s army
When I asked Hassan, a twenty-four-year-old reporter for a local TV channel in Damascus, if he could introduce me to members of Syria’s gay community, he took me to an anonymous-looking bar in the heart of the capital’s Old City. I’d met him two years earlier, in September 2013, while marooned in Damascus on a journalist visa from the Syrian regime. We’d hung out over the course of a week, mostly in that very bar, and I’d gotten to know some of his friends and family. So it took me by surprise when, shortly after we entered the dim, cavernous…
