The Emergence of Queer Iranian Counterpublics: Visibility and Care in Early Persian Queer Magazines, Homan and MAHA (1990s–2000s)

(2004-2006), the digital e-magazine produced inside Iran. Through an archival reading of 49 issues, it traces how these magazines formed distinct yet interconnected queer counterpublic formations under divergent socio-political and technological conditions. Drawing on counterpublic theory, the article argues that Homan and MAHA represent a continuum and an evolving trajectory within the Iranian queer movement: Homan articulated an extroverted, visibility-oriented activism shaped by the affordances and constraints of diaspora, while MAHA developed a care-oriented digital counterpublic grounded in mutual support, everyday resistance, and tactical engagements calibrated to conditions of surveillance inside Iran. By bringing queer diaspora and queer digital activism discourse together, the article positions these magazines as crucial queer archives that document and generate collective identity and political possibilities. In doing so, it contributes to Iranian queer history as well as decolonial queer studies by foregrounding queer subjects in Majority World contexts with agency and beyond Western victimhood narratives, who create their own infrastructures of recognition and resistance.