“The moment I accepted I was gay was the moment I also accepted that I could be killed at any moment,” says Wajeeh Lion with little hesitation. Born Abdulrahman Alkhiary, Wajeeh was granted asylum in the United States in 2018, but still lives a life of discomfort with daily death threats and a constant fear of being kidnapped by his homeland.
“I know the Saudi government want me dead,” he says. “But this is not just my story. This is the ongoing story of intolerance faced by the entire LGBTQ+ community in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death penalty.”
As a 10-year-old boy Wajeeh, whose name means “honourable” or “noble” in Arabic, witnessed beheadings and tortures on the streets he walked and quickly became numb to the methods used by the Saudi government to control and silence its citizens.
After being forced by his parents to admit he was gay in 2016, Wajeeh was threatened with a return to Saudi Arabia to undertake a course of conversion therapy. He had been living in the US since 2005 while his mother and father were granted the King Abdullah Scholarship Program for higher education, and this exposure to the western world enabled him to better understand his suppressed desires.
With help from LGBTQ+ services at Kansas State University, where he was a student, Wajeeh escaped his family for a safe house and, eventually, unearthed a new community of friends.
“I was suicidal; I felt I had nowhere to turn. But the only thing that kept me alive was that if I died, I would have let the Saudi government and everyone that wanted to dim my light and take my voice away win. I couldn’t do that.”
On Saturday 18 May in the capital of Saudi Arabia, Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk will fight to become the undisputed world heavyweight champion in a contest billed as the “Ring of Fire” as part of the Riyadh Season of sporting events.
The spotlight of such an event casts the plight of oppressed Saudi nationals into darkness but Wajeeh, now 30, strives to shine a light on the ongoing human rights violations inside the kingdom.