Oliver Moody
August 17 2018, 12:01am,
The Times
The teenager from Afghanistan did not mince when he walked, had no wardrobe of flamboyant clothes and above all lacked a 24-hour party personality.
He was, in other words, not gay enough to deserve asylum in Austria, according to a judgment that has been widely derided for its Carry On-esque notion of homosexuality.
“Neither your gait, your bearing nor your clothing have even vaguely indicated that you could be homosexual,” a judge in the town of Wiener Neustadt told the 18-year-old applicant as his request for residency was rejected.
He had got into several fights in refugee centres and seemed to have an air of aggression that was “not to be expected in a homosexual”, the verdict continued, according to a report in Falter, a Viennese news magazine.
Nor was he particularly outgoing. “It says here in the report that you didn’t have many friends,” said the judge, who has not been named. “Are homosexuals not rather sociable?”
The young man’s claim to have kissed many straight men for fun was also ridiculed. “Had you really done that to a non-homosexual man, you would have got a fearful beating,” the judge said. “No straight man would let himself be kissed by another man. That is completely unthinkable.”
The teenager arrived alone in Austria two years ago and was sent to a refugee camp for children. He originally applied for asylum on the grounds that he was from the Hazara, a Shia ethnic group that has been persecuted by the Taliban. When that failed he appealed, arguing that he could not return to Afghanistan because homosexuality is illegal there.
He said that he had developed feelings of desire towards other boys at the age of 12.
The judge gave this claim short shrift: “In such a sexually conservative society as Afghanistan, where sexual enticements through fashion or advertising are not permitted in public, it is improbable that you were ‘sexualised’ so early.”
The asylum seeker has lodged another appeal against the decision. Bild mocked the verdict as “Europe’s craziest reason for deportation”.
The Austrian interior ministry would not comment on the details of the case, except to say that it was “not reflective of the [wider] reality” of its asylum system.