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“With his arm around me I would melt into him and carefully link my fingers through his, neither of us speaking or looking at each other, leaving things superficially ambiguous. It would be years before we finally kissed but those late-night journeys in the savaris left us breathless and elated.”

That quote may read like a dog-eared, grocery store romance novel, but is actually emerging Iranian author Kamin Mohammadi recounting her story of risky, long-distance passion under multiple repressive Sharia-Law touting regimes in the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. Throughout the essay, Mohammadi paints a vivid picture of “the interplay of repression, sexual experimentation, and the presence of technology,” especially in the lives of the Iranian youth. Her narrative is masterfully interwoven with modern techno-social history of Iran, including this shocking passage:

“[My lover] also started to accompany me to the local internet café where I joined all those lined up at the banks of computers to connect with the outside world. That was the beginning of another revolution that has changed so much in Iran; the ever-watched youth of Iran—a colossus in number—suddenly found in the internet two things they did not have in their everyday lives: an instant connection with the o... >>>