For many, particularly queer people, women, and girls, living in Afghanistan under Taliban rule is bound up with fear, denial, and silence. It is a place where revealing one’s identity can become a permanent danger, and where concealment becomes part of one’s survival. As a queer person, Kohzad speaks of experience in which pain, discrimination, and erasure are part of daily reality — a story that goes beyond one individual and reflects the condition of a generation caught between structural repression and the desire to live freely.
In this interview, Zan Times speaks with Kohzad, who uses a pseudonym for his safety. He is part of Afghanistan’s LGBTQI+ community, whose members live in fear and with hidden identities to survive under Taliban rule.
Zan Times: To begin this conversation, please introduce yourself to readers who do not know you.
Kohzad: I am Kohzad. Kohzad is a pseudonym. I hope a day will come when I can step out from behind this name, live as my true self, and say that I am a member of the queer community, from Afghanistan, from the heart of this land full of suffering.
I am 25 years old. I went to school until ninth grade and completed the four-and-a-half-month exam as well. But after that, I could no longer continue my schooling. Later, I arranged my studies in a way that allowed me to take exams once a year. In this way, I continued until twelfth grade, but I could not receive my educational documents because the Taliban came to power.
ZT: Tell us about the first signs of recognizing your identity and feeling different. At what point in your life did you experience these signs?
Kohzad: I remember that before I had even started school, I felt that I had a different kind of feeling toward my aunt’s son. Although I had not yet reached puberty, I enjoyed seeing him. To me, this feeling was neither taboo nor abnormal; it was simply part of natural human emotions.
Another stage in the emergence of these feelings goes back to when I would go to congregational prayers at the mosque. I may have been in fourth or fifth grade at the time, and I went to the mosque every day. There was a particular person among the congregation who caught my attention at that stage of my life. Seeing that person, who was perhaps in his twenties, made me happy.
Whenever I entered the mosque, my attention was always drawn to the area where people left their shoes. Each time I saw his shoes there, I felt a strange happiness because I knew I would see him again. When I saw him himself, the congregational prayer took on a beautiful feeling for me.
ZT: To what extent is the life of a queer person in Afghanistan under Taliban rule bound up with fear and anxiety?
Kohzad: Last night, I was thinking: What would happen if I were imprisoned? When I considered all aspects of that situation, many questions occupied my mind: If I am imprisoned, what will happen to the four members of my family? If they check my phone, or question me about my identity and become suspicious of me?
I think the only place where I would be forced to speak would be in a Taliban prison. Although my appearance does not show that I am a queer person, what if I cannot hide my real self from them? If my true identity is revealed, I will undoubtedly be killed. Even if one day I am imprisoned as a feminist, a journalist, a protester, or someone who opposes the Taliban system and speaks against it, my fate will be death.
ZT: What does the image of the life you desire — your ideal life — look like in your mind?
Kohzad: I want to leave Afghanistan. Many times, especially in the early days after the fall, I imagined leaving Afghanistan. I have a deep wish to get out of Afghanistan — not in the sense of forgetting Afghanistan, but because I want to leave so I can work on my awareness, education, studies, and personal growth, and live with my real identity, like an ordinary human being.
At the moment, I do not even have control over the clothes I choose to wear. I wear Pakistani men’s clothing so that I draw less attention and face less danger.
ZT: Why do you emphasize that the suffering and experiences of LGBTQI+ people must be narrated and documented?
Kohzad: Some LGBTQI+ people take their own lives. Others have married, or have been forced to accept marriage, which has destroyed their lives. These sufferings must be narrated so that everyone knows the conditions in which we live. I hope that from among us — from among LGBTQI+ people — voices will emerge to tell the stories of our endless suffering.
ZT: What experience made you feel close to feminism and empathize with it?
Kohzad: I have experienced every dimension of apartheid. Someone who has endured violence similar to what women experience, and who has lived within both feminine and masculine structures, will undoubtedly understand their pain.
All these restrictions go back to larger patriarchal, father-centered, and brother-centered structures. When you have grown up and lived amid all these restrictions, the suffering of women inevitably becomes as meaningful to you as your own suffering. Then you understand more clearly how difficult it is to live in a society that constantly places insulting labels on you.
ZT: In your view, what forms of rejection and denial do queer people in Afghanistan face?
Kohzad: LGBTQI+ people are considered apostates in our society; even killing them is seen as obligatory. At the same time, they are referred to with insulting labels such as mordar and ezak. Many men see queer people as sex workers, or as people who have chosen this path purely out of lust. For this reason, they deny their identity.
LGBTQI+ people are rejected even by their own families and face humiliating attitudes in society. Women’s identity, at least, is not denied, and they have the right to live as they are, even though they experience many forms of discrimination and hardship.
Women’s identity is accepted in Afghanistan, but the identity of queer people is denied and criminalized. They are seen as undesirable people and are constantly addressed with insulting labels.
ZT: What impact has this level of pressure, denial, and discrimination had on your personal life and mental health?
Kohzad: Anyone who has experienced suffering and come through it — especially a generation like ours today, living under Taliban rule — will undoubtedly turn to struggle, so that perhaps one day they can break the chain of suffering and discrimination. At the very least, their children should not have to experience all this pain and should be able to live as their true selves.
My wish is that no other queer person in the future will experience the suffering that I endured as a queer person — suffering that led me several times to attempt to end my life.
ZT: Amid the pressures of life, living in fear, and keeping your identity hidden, what serves as a calm space or refuge for you?
Kohzad: In my free time, I have always liked to read books. I usually read novels that have a philosophical, feminist, and even political and norm-breaking dimension. The last book I read this year was Les Misérables; reading it helped calm my mind. For more than a year, I was occupied with my mother’s illness, and that kept me away from reading for some time.
After my mother died, I completely drifted away from the world of reading. But then I returned to reading. I read different books in the fields of politics, philosophy, and law. I was mostly interested in feminism in its broader sense, women’s rights, women’s narratives, and stories written about women’s lives and experiences. I also read many novels related to women. In general, I spent most of my time reading.
ZT: Finally, if you had the chance to give one message to the people of Afghanistan and another to the international community, what would you say?
Kohzad: As a human being and a citizen, I ask the people of Afghanistan to stand together regardless of gender, ethnicity, or religion, and to remove the ignorance that has taken root deep in our thinking. If they do not want to remain ashamed before history, or be remembered as carriers of misery, they must break the chain of these inherited traumas.
Although I consider the international community, to a large extent, responsible for the suffering and misery of poor countries, we still must not sit idle or remain silent in the face of it. My message to the international community is this: do not spend vast amounts of money to keep terrorism alive, and stop extending a hand of support to terrorists.
ZT: Dear Kohzad, thank you for joining us for this conversation.
Kohzad: Thank you, and thanks to the Zan Times media team.
