First openly gay Qatari with global profile counters death threats with visibility
World Cup year finally kicks off, even though he will never return to his homeland.As the wealthy Gulf state’s first openly gay man with a global profile his messaging will be far removed from the fanfare likely to sweep the eight stadiums in six months’ time.Dr Nas believes the 32 nations heading to a tournament regarded as the crown jewels of the sporting world will be playing ‘in a house of abused children’ in terms of his homeland’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people.He went public at the end of May, which resulted in death threats and abusive comments on social media, as well as many supportive messages from Qataris, albeit in private.Now working and living in the US, the physician plans to increase the visibility of LGBTQ+ Qataris before and during the FIFA World Cup 2022, which kicks off at the 60,000-capacity Al-Bayt stadium on November 21.His decision to step out of the shadows has come at great personal cost.
The 35-year-old accepts he will never return to the land of his birth and is now estranged from his family, with the abusive messages coming after his story was covered by an Arabic-language TV channel.Even in the US, where he runs Osra Medical practice in San Francisco, he believes that ‘the threat of death is not zero’ after the news was ill-received by some in the conservative emirate.‘There was a wave of hate messages,’ Dr Nas says.‘I had at least two death threats on my Instagram, several more on my DMs and everything else short of that.
I was threatened that I would be tracked down, beaten and subjected to every form of humiliation you can think of. ‘But there was probably a one to five ratio of hate to love messages.
