Coming out but still underground

A photographer captures the lives of LGBTQ+ people in Azerbaijan

After returning to Azerbaijan for the first time in many years, photographer Tim Korostashevsky embarked on a new project, shooting portraits of LGBTQ+ people. Among the subjects he photographed are outspoken activists trying to move the needle on queer rights. The strength of their voices took Tim by surprise, partly because the authorities in Russia, his home country, have been crushing LGBTQ+ rights and advocacy for years. The crackdown reached a peak in 2022–2023, when they banned “gay propaganda,” gender transitions, and the so-called “international LGBT movement” (an organization that doesn’t exist). Azerbaijan, meanwhile, has no such restrictions on paper but has the worst queer rights ranking in Europe nonetheless. To untangle this apparent contradiction, journalist Arzu Geybulla reports for The Beet on the myriad of challenges facing LGBTQ+ people in Azerbaijan today.

This story first appeared in The Beet, a weekly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Sign up here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox.

In February 2022, 24-year-old queer rights activist and journalist Avaz Hafizli was brutally murdered by his cousin. Avaz was not the first or the last LGBTQ+ person whose life ended abruptly as a result of ingrained prejudices and widespread homophobia in Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, there was little public outcry. Only LGBTQ+ and feminist activists demanded justice; the silence among mainstream opposition activists was deafening.

Since then, the pervasive violence against LGBTQ+ people in Azerbaijan has continued unabated. But this reality is often invisible, especially to many international guests, for whom life seems comfortable in the glitzy capital Baku — perhaps even better than in their home countries.

This was certainly the case for photographer Tim Korostashevsky, who arrived in Azerbaijan from Russia shortly after Avaz’s murder. Tim had spent his summer breaks in Azerbaijan as a child because of family ties but hadn’t visited since 2011. He began traveling around the country, photographing events and documenting everyday life in Azerbaijan.

Meanwhile, back in Russia, life was getting harder for LGBTQ+ people. The Russian authorities were shutting down public spaces and rights organizations, arrests were abundant, and anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda was becoming more widespread. When Russia banned legal and surgical gender transitions in July 2023, Tim thought it was “a tragedy” for transgender people.

Tim decided he wanted to try to capture the lives of LGBTQ+ people in Azerbaijan. After all, this was a majority Muslim country, and yet, there were no restrictive laws; some queer people even appeared to live freely, and the activist community seemed strong.

This is how Tim met Azerbaijani LGBTQ+ activist Ali Malikov and the other subjects he would go on to photograph during his time in Baku.

Ali, who is 18 years old and uses they/them pronouns, has been involved in LGBTQ+ community building and organizing for two years. They left home at 16 after refusing to abide by their conservative parents’ rules. “I wanted to be independent and shape my life myself,” Ali told The Beet. “Moving out of my family home also brought me closer to the [LGBTQ+] community. This collective lifestyle also made me feel good because we all cared for each other and learned to survive.”

Together with another queer and feminist activist friend, Ayla, Ali and Tim met for coffee at a high-end cafe in the heart of Baku. “We told him that although life in Azerbaijan may seem more liberal than in Russia, it’s simply a different kind of violence,” Ayla said, recalling that first meeting with Tim. “We are [only] as free as the freedom they give us.”

“Sure, things in Russia are worse, but that doesn’t mean Azerbaijan is any better,” Ali said.

Squeezed out

Seymur Babayev, a drag queen from Baku who goes by the stage name Lady Slim, described trying to build a career in Azerbaijan as “a struggle from start to finish.” “And this struggle is not just for yourself and your art; it’s much bigger than that. It’s for a group of people, for the future,” he explained.

It started with television. After getting accepted to a televised talent show in 2009, Lady Slim’s popularity started to grow. But the performances also met with immediate backlash. “I was eventually censored because producers complained about receiving calls from state institutions and from the people with the same last name, demanding that I stop using my last name on television as it was disgraceful even though we were not related,” Seymur told The Beet.

“Drag shows may be just for fun in the West, but in Azerbaijan it’s a struggle to get yourself accepted, to find spaces to perform. It is hard,” he continued.

That struggle continued until 2015, when Seymur decided he’d had enough. Through acquaintances, he was able to book shows abroad, where he could perform freely. In Baku, Seymur was only performing at private events, but these opportunities, too, are gradually decreasing. “If there was hope 10 years ago, now, there is none because the LGBTQ+ community is being squeezed out. Just look at the ranking of Azerbaijan on ILGA Europe’s Rainbow Index,” added Seymur.

Azerbaijan has ranked last on the ILGA Europe annual Rainbow Index for years now, earning the title of the “worst country to be gay in Europe” back in 2016. Two years earlier, 20-year-old Isa Shahmarli, a gay rights activist and the chairman of the Free LGBT organization, was found hanged in his apartment with a rainbow flag draped over his shoulders.

In 2017, Azerbaijani police detained at least 83 gay and transgender people in what is still considered their most notorious LGBTQ+ crackdown. Many of those arrested later shared their testimonies of torture and blackmail at the hands of the police. (The Azerbaijani authorities, meanwhile, alternately claimed to be fighting prostitution and/or HIV.) A year later, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz uncovered evidence of Azerbaijan’s government using Israeli spyware to identify citizens’ sexual orientation via Facebook.

The Azerbaijani authorities carried out another wave of arrests in 2019, primarily targeting transgender sex workers, and little has changed in the years since. Anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment has become more brazen, spreading across social media platforms where queer people face open calls for violence against them.

Anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech is also pervasive among public figures, including both government officials and opposition politicians. Religious figures are no exception. In January 2022, an Azerbaijani cleric described queer people as “filth” and said that people who engage in gay sex should be sentenced to death.

‘I just want us to feel safe’

The stigma LGBTQ+ people face in Azerbaijani society has deprived them of access to public spaces, forcing this community underground. Sakhara, a 27-year-old chef working and living in Baku, told The Beet that he wouldn’t dare visit certain neighborhoods with his dyed hair and facial piercings. “I get stared down when I go shopping. I was verbally attacked on a bus by some bros because of the way I look,” Sakhara told The Beet.

Sakhara also recounted how, while he was out at a nightclub celebrating the New Year with friends, a security guard instructed him to “tone it down” and “cover” himself. “I didn’t want to ruin the vibe, so I put on my jacket, sat down, and did not leave my seat,” Sakhara said. “When I came home that night, I thought of what happened and why. I just want to be comfortable and live a life free from [societal] prejudice,” he continued. “I just want us to feel safe.”

When Ali Malikov was trying to organize a trans awareness week last year, they struggled to find a venue and were afraid to advertise the event widely for safety reasons. But had Ali been living outside of Baku, even the idea of organizing a trans awareness week would have been unimaginable.

Life is harder for queer people living in rural Azerbaijan, which is why so many have moved to the capital. But even then, some of them remain closeted, fearing adverse or even violent reactions from homophobic family members.

In the run-up to Azerbaijan hosting the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012, Azerbaijani artist Babi Badalov made headlines when he received political asylum in France. A previous asylum campaign had outed Babi to his relatives, who still lived in a remote region of Azerbaijan, and his own brother had threatened to kill him over his sexual orientation.

“Homosexuality here is seen as worse than prostitution,” local human rights activist Yadigyar Sadykov told the BBC at the time. “If a family decided to kill a gay relative, most people would approve. I have heard of many suicides of suspected homosexuals — I have never met an openly gay person around here.”

In the case of Avaz Hafizli, the cousin found guilty of his murder admitted in court that he killed the 24-year-old due to his sexual orientation. He received six months more than the minimum sentence for murder: 9.5 years in prison.

No prospects

LGBTQ+ activists say that, although Azerbaijan does not have the same restrictive laws as Russia on paper, they do exist in practice. Ali told The Beet that anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes among government officials and a lack of legal protections leave queer people exposed and without recourse.

Azerbaijan decriminalized homosexuality in 2001 but has failed to adopt any additional LGBTQ+ rights policies or protection mechanisms since. The absence of institutions offering protection from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity causes additional difficulties for LGBTQ+ people in Azerbaijan.

Employment opportunities are also scarce, and trans women are hit the hardest, Sakhara told The Beet. Difficult circumstances often force them into sex work, an industry that suffered during the coronavirus pandemic due to quarantine restrictions.

More recently, Azerbaijan’s suspension of cooperation with the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has caused additional concern. The decision came in January, just hours before the legislative body voted against ratifying the Azerbaijani delegation’s credentials, citing “very serious concerns” about the country’s poor human rights record, among other issues. “The state can take all kinds of measures now,” Ali worried.

Other queer rights activists have expressed concerns that Azerbaijan will formally adopt anti-LGBTQ+ policies modeled on Russian legislation, such as the recently strengthened “gay propaganda law.” For many, Russia serves as a cautionary tale. “Life in Azerbaijan for queers has no prospects. We are a small Russia, and it just takes longer for things to happen,” Ali said.

Ayla recalled telling Tim, the photographer, “You have [Vladimir] Putin, and we have [Ilham] Aliyev, and the two are not that different from each other.”

The fears of what’s next for queer life in Azerbaijan are real. “Whenever I check my social media, I ask myself, what’s happened this time? How much longer can I put up with this fear for my friends in this country?” Ayla said. “So long as the circumstances don’t change, the queer community will be asking these questions every day.”

Isa Shahmarli, the young activist who died by suicide in 2014, believed that the only way to break the stigma in the country was through education, media reform, and other awareness-raising measures.

But 10 years on, queer Azerbaijanis told The Beet that progress on LGBTQ+ issues will require a complete change in government — and for the opposition and civil society groups to stop looking the other way when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights and freedoms.

“The system must change,” Ayla explained. “Before, I thought small changes could lead to big changes, but now I see this isn’t possible.” Ali echoed this sentiment, saying that “a more inclusive, better Azerbaijan” would require a sea change. “But that’s a long way from now. So, the struggle continues.”

Story by Arzu Geybulla for The Beet

Photos by Tim Korostashevsky

Edited by Eilish Hart