AHMAD MAKIA         🛒   📖   🔭   📺   📚    HYPERHOUSE
WHAT
ABOUT THE 

OF HØRMüZZ?


by Ahmad Makia
self-published
05/2026  
On 28 March 2026, at a No Kings Rally in New York City, comedian and social media personality, Lionel Leede, asks a protester,

“Isn’t it a little homo-phobic that we’re so focused on the straights of Örmu$ — and not the 💅🏾 of Orرmus?” 

Leede satirizes the ‘Strait of Hørرmúžž’ from a strategic geographic waterway for the dispersal of energy, food, and goods, to a symbol of heterodominance.
The protester at the rally responds to Leede:

“I think it’s just, historically, 💅🏾 have always been very discriminated against, which is wrong on so many levels… even in war … It just takes more reform in government — obviously — and educating society.”  (1) 

Most interactions with this now-viral video meme, infamously circulating as “Free the 💅🏾of H_rm_s,” have become a real-life illustration of the corruption of global solidarity struggles by ‘woke’, ‘nepo’, and ‘lefty’ groups, who do not know the context or the reality of the causes they are standing for. 

Yet, the dialogue reveals broader assumptions and nuances: it treats the idea of advocating for, or humanizing,  Hørرmúžž as simple-minded, since the landscape is not a living entity but a point of passage; a dry, linear, transactional backdrop for the movement of extracted goods. For Leede, Hørرmúžž is a geographic name; thus, his remark centers on its imagined anthropomorphization and treats identity and belonging within this maritime site as fiction rather than fact.



Hørرmúžž  can be flattened into a militaristic, humanless economic zone, given its geopolitical importance, but the region is not simply an overlapping maritime area for the movement of vessels governed by modern states; it is an active identity and human geography. 

In historical documents, the Kingdom of Ormus, the region's archaic Latin spelling, was described as a formidable thalassocratic society flourishing between the 10th and 16th centuries – a political power derived from its position at sea and favorable maritime routes. Like Ancient Athina, Phoenicia, and Minoa, chronicles describe  Hørرmúžž as a maritime hybrid society and a site-specific commune of scattered possessions—coastal cities, islands, and strategic ports—rather than a single landmass.


Petrus Bertius: Ormus Regnum(1681) via Robert Frew
Citizens of Hørرmúžž were historically called of the Monsoon and belonged to no nation: Persians, Arabs, Turks, and merchants from China, Java, and East Africa, all deeply involved in the global trade of pearls, horses, precious stones, and spices, who were, for Europeans, ‘sacarens’ and maintained an outward adherence to the creed of Muhammad. (2)

Because of its location and environment, the people of Hørرmúžž were defined by situated citizenship, living with the monsoon winds and seasons, adapting to the extreme summer climate (described in Persian as Jahim, or hell) and the impossibility of settled permanence. Belonging to this “black” region, as described in the diaries of Venetian traveler Marco Polo, meant collective immersion in  Hørرmúžž’s environment and natural cosmologies. (3)


In more recent scholarship,  Hørرmúžž has been identified as part of the broader Indian Ocean medieval free-port archetype, akin to an anarchic ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ (TAZ). Describing socio-political marginal spatial formations that elude traditional structures of control, a TAZ usually dissolves once a powerful authority takes notice of its habits and activities. (4)
While maritime societies and geographies, such as historic Hørرmúžž, can be easily romanticized as liminal, collective spaces where forms of belonging are fluid and porous, even intersectional, an important question arises: who moved to and resided in Hørرmúžž? Communities severed from the logics of nationalism, sanguine, and terra: sailors, minorities, exiles, refugees, orphans, widows, fugitives, and 💅🏾. 



Collage of territorial influences on Hormoz throughout time (Kingdom, Emirate of the Qawasim, Portuguese possession, and then Iran) 

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When medieval travelers, diplomats, and colonels from Asia, Africa, Europe, and even mainland Persia encountered the region of Hrرmúž, they were stupefied by its environment and inhabitants. One of the main qualities that united the observations of all these outsiders was the men's appearance and manner. Along his cross-continental travels, Ibn Battuta spoke of  Hørرmúžž as a 

"large and fine, with magnificent bazaars. The inhabitants are men of noble character and refined habits. I saw there a people who combine the gravity of the Persian with the grace of the Islander." (5) 
Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi, who in the 15th century traveled from Timurid Iran, wrote that  Hørرmúžž ’s inhabitants were “clothed in silk and gold” and that they were sahib-i jamal, possessors of beauty and elegance, and that their speech was sweet and manners polished. He also likened them to sanam, the Persian-Arabic word for idols, invoking that they are like beautiful statues and sculptures, and likening them to the performers of the tamashakhaneh, the theater. (6)



Hormuz ‘costumes’ via Wikimedia


The use of sanam and tamashakhaneh perhaps suggests a certain caricaturization and campiness associated with the region’s male inhabitants. It alludes to a dissonance the author experiences from his own immersion with the Persian mainland.  Hørرmúžž technically belonged to Timurid Iran as a vassal state at the time of the author’s observation, yet it stood in stark contrast to the rugged, warrior-like environment of the interior. 

Sanam is also the baroque visual and material culture that existed in the Arab-Persian region prior to the monotheistic, aniconic Islam, generally considered as a purification of the senses and the soul. In both Battuta and Samarqandi, the people’s looks are also aligned with the place itself, which they describe as consumed by the pursuit of excess, wealth, and luxury.



Zheng He's 7th expedition route - via Wikimedia

This commentary on the men's looks and manners, the city's ample fortunes, and sense of exhibitionism is also echoed by Ma Huan, a Muslim interpreter for the Chinese Admiral Zheng He. Zheng He was a Chinese Muslim seafarer who was among the first to establish contacts with the ports of India, Iran, and Arabia in the modern era. 

His trading voyages encompassed many cities and produced some of the earliest cartographies of the Hørرmúžž region and the Indian Ocean from a Sino-Islamic perspective during the same century as Samarqandi’s visit. In the interpreter’s travelogues, Hørرmúžž’s inhabitants are described as stalwart and fine-looking; their limbs and faces are refined and fair; they are wealthy and wear long robes and hats made of silk and cotton; and they are of a comfortable disposition. (7)


All ‘outsider’ or first-time encounters with the region called upon the writer to remark on the mannerisms and specificness of the men of  Hørرmúžž and the city they live in. Only when reading travelogues by Europeans does one encounter how the same polished men were perceived as ‘abominable’, shamed as ‘womanly’, and even outed as ‘💅🏾’. While Ibn Battuta, Samarqandi, and Ma were impressed by the looks and manners of the men of  Hørرmúžž, they praised and were surprised rather than dismissive of their gendered identities. 


Italian explorer Ludovico di Varthema in 1503 writes: 

“The inhabitants are very polite... the men are dissolved in pleasure, and they have a certain kind of ointment with which they anoint themselves, so that they appear to have no hair on their bodies, and they appear to be like women.” (8)  

In his diaries, Gaspar Correia, a chronicler of the Portuguese conquest of Hormuz, during the 1507 expedition, calls the 

“people [of Hörmü$] are so effeminate and given to the vices of the flesh that they have no strength for war. They trust in their riches and their walls, but they are like women in their hearts”.


Not only did the men of  Hørرmúžž epilate and perfume themselves, but they also partook in an “abominable wickedness” or Pecado Nefando, ‘nefarious sin’: sodomy. (9) Varthema claims, 

“They are also greatly addicted to that most filthy vice which is not to be named.” (10)
In both instances, neither writer is able to name the act but instead places a value judgment on something which, in their own domain of sociosexual conditioning, is conceived as irregular or shameful.

What these explorers encountered was the lifestyle of merchants in Hørرmúžž, especially among wealthy subjects. Across the Islamic and Persian world, the sponsorship of beardless amrad, known as polished and beardless boy youth, and mukhanathun was common, and they most probably lined the streets of port cities such as Hørرmúžž. 

In essence, sex workers for pederasts, amrad were trained in music, poetry, and the arts of the bath. They were draped in silk, perfumed with sandalwood, ambergris, and musk, and dilapidated using nora, a quicklime-and-orpiment paste, to create a marble-like effect on the skin. Between childhood and bearded manhood, amrad in the Farsi Islamic imperial hemisphere, were sometimes even more than workers and akin to artists, or really ‘idols’. (11) They are conceived as vessels and portals to the otherworldly, through the Sufi practice of Nazar, beholding, in which the city of  Hørرmúžž, especially, was characterized as a place where the ‘divine’ was visible in the faces of the perfumed youths. (12) 

The Kingdom of  Hørرmúžž, perched at the mouth of the Gulf, served as a liminal space where the rigid orthodoxies of the mainland dissolved into an atmosphere of immense luxury and erotic fluidity.

Here, the figure of the amrad—the beardless youth—transcended its local context to become an idealized locus where commerce, spiritual desire, and sexual ambiguity intersected. (13)

Not only was Hørرmúžž a den for perfumed boy youth, but also something of a babel of courtesans from across the Mediterranean, Asia, Africa, and India. Many of the sex workers were educated, played instruments, sang poetry, and engaged in polyamory and multiple partners, public displays of song and dance, and the use of aphrodisiac foods and oils. 
In addition, the sexual landscape of the broader Shia region it belonged to legitimized Zawaj Mu’tah (temporary marriage union). An arrangement usually popular in port cities and major transit ways, zawaj mu’tah is a religious decree that allows for temporary, and not necessarily reproductive sexual relationships, for widowers, divorcees, migrants, wanderers, and communities who are unable to permanently settle in a place or are outcasts because of conservative sexual norms. 

Temporary, pleasure-based marriages are practiced across the Indian Ocean littoral, such as the Maldives, in Shia nations, namely Iraq and Iran, and is considered a major pathway for income generation for independent and single women until today. In the case of Hørرmúžž, because it was governed by the monsoon winds, thousands of men were stranded for months, waiting for the winds to change, and thus entered into temporary legal marriages with local or migrant women and qiyans, singing girls, for the duration of the sailing season.  (14)
When exploring the narratives about sex, the body, belonging, and citizenship in  Hørرmúžž, these lifestyles and social communes stood in stark contrast to the land-based emporiums and religious guilds of empires and early nations, usually defined by harvesting the land and collecting tax, who divide and identify society based on class and family name, who enforce allegiance to a distant and all-consuming higher force, be it a city capital or spiritual head. 


What these narratives reveal is a dissonance: bodies in  Hørرmúžž were exposed to the whims of winds and chance, to pleasure and laterality; they do not function within biopolitical conquest and institutional control.



The European traveler, and even the ‘native’ mainlander, who encountered the region personifies the bulwark, hairy, timid conqueror who is looking upon this area with disgust and revulsion as well as lust and desire. The  Hørرmúžži is oiled, refined, cultured, bathed, and embodied. By modifying and emphasizing their bodies and looks, the  Hørرmúžžian signaled a departure from a ‘warrior’ state toward a ‘civilized’ and ‘theatrical’ state, and hence why cosmically and spiritually, they needed to be governed and disciplined, or in the words of Gaspar, “[our] Lord delivered them into the hands of the Governor [Albuquerque]”. (15)


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Portugese depiction of the inhabitants of Hormuz - via Wikimedia

 While the Arab and Persian Worlds are part of what is considered the oikoumene (the “habitable world”) of world civilization histories, this is limited to the region’s Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean regions, and river nations. Yemeni and South Arabian tribes' influence within this oikoumene emerged with the missionary exodus of Islam since the 600s and its effectiveness in hybridizing and engaging with very different parts of the world. The spiritual spread was an economic one, supplanting the historic trade and land routes between Europe and Asia with Indian Ocean vessels and carriers linking ports along the Asian and African rims, creating what we today refer to as the Indian Ocean world, from Mombasa to Singapore to Colombo to Hørرmúžž. (16)

It was this particular worlding around the Indian Ocean that the Portuguese disrupted when they colonized  Hørرmúžž and the entire Yemeni and Gulf coasts, the island of Bahrain, Bab El Mandab, Basra, Al Qatif, and eventually the Indian and Chinese islands of Goa and Macau. Alfonso de Albuquerque, the pioneer of the early colonial network, named Hørرmúžž as the “Key to the Orient”. (17)




The Portuguese defending the fort at Hørرmúžž - via Wikimedia




 Under his leadership,  Hørرmúžž was transformed from an aquafied port city into a fortified center of imperial statecraft. Lasting an occupation of nearly 116 years, the entire character of the city was changed from mud and salt architecture to rock masonry, namely garrisons and fortresses, and became centered around the walled city of The Fortress of Our Lady of the Conception.

Today known as the Portuguese walled fort of  Hørرmúžž, ruins like it are found around the coastline of Iran and the Arab Gulf, such as in the historic city of Julfar / Al Hamra in Ras Al Khaimah, Khor Fakkan, Musandam, Dibba, Kalba, Fujairah, and the Omani provinces of Qalhat and Sohar, as well as the islands of Qeshm, Bahrain, Kish, Abu Musa, and the Tunbs. Albuquerque, too, was the first to take over entirely what we call and identify today as the ‘Strait’, and he collected tolls on all passing ships on behalf of the Portuguese crown, overriding existing socioeconomic and political balances. 




Dutch engraving with the Fort - via Capasia


On the island of  Hørرmúžž, historically Jarun, the capital city of the Kingdom of  Hørرmúžž, Albuquerque built a fortress that was originally cut off from the rest of the island by a deep moat. This architectural move castrated the city by separating the site of power, the fort, from the site of leisure and commerce, the bazaar. 

Power was no longer distributed through the market; it was concentrated in a single, unyielding stone point. To create clear lines of fire for Portuguese cannons, Albuquerque cleared the areas surrounding the fort. The ‘babel’ of mixed-use buildings, bathhouses, and temporary shelters was leveled to create something of an active zone of observation and potential killing, replacing the intimacy of the alleyways with the visibility required for colonial surveillance.

Under Portuguese rule, the elite merchants were displaced by military governors. Albuquerque encouraged his soldiers to marry local women, often from the families of defeated elites, to create a class of casados, married settlers. This was a move to root the rather transient population. In a famous 1507 episode, Albuquerque forced his own captains—and local elites—to physically carry stones for the fort. 

For a merchant class that defined itself by polished manners and fair limbs, this act of manual labor was a symbolic stripping of their refined status. Albuquerque’s heteropatriarchy re-engineered the body from a vessel of pleasure to one of hard labor. It instilled a crusader mentality throughout the  Hørرmúžž interregion, viewing the city’s perfumed men, who are given to "abominable wickedness", not as a cultural difference but as a military liability. Reports from the era show a systematic attempt to pathologize homoeroticism, sex work, and non-reproductive-based sexual relationships, framing it as a ‘sin’ that justified brutal colonial methods as a ‘restoration of order’. (18)


By imposing the rigid, patriarchal structure of the Catholic household, the Portuguese sought to kill the seasonal marriages, amrads, and expanded intimacies that had defined the city’s sexual identity. The liminality offered by Hørرmúžž became a governable space and a hardened passageway for extractive capitalist functions. Attributes associated with the male community of  Hørرmúžž became the moralizing and colonizing logic for the alpha Portuguese conqueror: a man with ‘smooth’ skin, drowning in pleasure, is a man to be touched or looked at; 
            the  Hørرmúžžian body was a site of receptive pleasure rather than active conquest. 





 Additionally, the  Hørرmúžž region was a sterile salt dome. In traditional imperial logic, land that cannot reproduce is barren or queer. By building a global trade capital on a non-reproductive landscape,  Hørرmúžž subverted the patriarchal link between fertility, land, and the state. Its wealth didn't come from the ‘womb’ of the motherland, but through commerce and laterality. 

The Empire wants fixed borders;  Hørرmúžž is a shifting port. Manhood wants strength and stoicism;  Hørرmúžž celebrated sex, music, and play. Nationalism wants ethnic purity;  Hørرmúžž was a landscape-driven melting pot, and reveals that imperialism is inherently homophobic/queer-phobic because it fears fluidity and indefiniteness. 

Effeminization or ‘gayification’ of identity practice in  Hørرmúžž was because the traditional empire, even that of Timurid Iran, pointed to a sexual culture that was not centered around demographics and reproduction, or inheritance and property. Instead, there was an interest in the act of intercourse as a means in itself. 

It terrifies polite, conservative culture, as we find in the Portuguese example, and through institutionalized patriarchy and gender discrimination everywhere, where if a man is ‘dissolved in anal pleasure’ with a perfumed youth or a seasonal wife, it means he is not investing in the reproduction and eugenicist logics of the collective ‘human species’. 


Traditional imperialism is very basic and territorial, like the men who author it. They define power through the conquest of soil, the drawing of borders, control of resources, and the protection of a fixed ‘motherland’. It necessitates a specific type of hyper-masculinity—the soldier-settler who is rooted and unyielding.

A man who is perfumed and relational is harder to conscript into a territorial war than a man who is of his people and his land.
Hørرmúžž evaded this and communed a different relational society altogether. It was not ruled by a mammalian logic and a dog-eats-dog cycle; it chose to treat identity as a site of pleasure rather than of inscription and devotion; it had to identify with seasons, environments, and circulations rather than with ideologies and militaries. 


This is why it has to be captured and destroyed.
In Middle Persian – the literary language of the Sassanian Empire (224–651 CE) – aنnal intercourse is described as kun-marz, which literally means ‘buttock-rubbing’. In modern Persian, marz means ‘border’ as in the border of the state or homeland and the Arabic word tajavoz is used to describe both ‘rape’ and the ‘invasion’ of one country by another. Thus, Iranian nationalist discourse sanctifies the protection of the national borders of the ‘motherland’ against foreign invasion as a matter of masculine ‘honour’ (19)




(1) No Kings: Free the Gays of Hormuz / accessed April 27th 2026,  Youtube

(2)  Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo (Translated by Henry Yule, Vol. 1, Chapte, which, 40).

(3) The characterization of the population as "black" in this period likely reflects the diverse ethnic makeup of the maritime port, which attracted a large number of sailors, merchants, and enslaved laborers from across the Indian Ocean, the East African coast, and the Arabian Peninsula.

(4)  See Hakim Bey, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes (, and Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (1993).

(5)  Ibn Battuta, The Rihla (Vol. 2, Chapter on the City of Hormuz), H.A.R. Gibb (Translator), The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325–1354 (Hakluyt Society, 1962)

(6)  The original quote in Persian is “"...و اهل آن بلده به غایت متجمل و با زینت‌اند، چنانکه گویی صنمی در تماشاخانه روزگار پدید آمده‌اند..." in Kamal ad-Din 'Abd ar-Razzaq Samarqandi, Maṭla'-i sa'dain wa maǧma'-i baḥrain, ed. 'Abd al-Husain Nawa'i (Tehran: Mu'assasah-i Mutali'at va Tahqiqat-i Farhangi, 1993).

(7) Ma Huan, Ying-yai Sheng-lan: 'The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores' [1433], trans. and ed. J.V.G. Mills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1970)

(8)  Ludovico di Varthema, The Itinerary of Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna, from 1502 to 1508, trans. John Winter Jones (London: Hakluyt Society, 1863)

(9)  Gaspar Correia, The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama, and His Viceroyalty: From the Lendas da India, trans. Henry E.J. Stanley.

(10) Ibid. 

(11)  See Khaled El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800 (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Dustin, M., Ferreira, N., Matin, K., Rezaei-Toroghi, M., & Soloaga, I. (2026). From the Amrad to ‘the Gay’: The Making of Queer Identity in Iran. In Decolonizing queer migration: Iranian Voices in exile (pp. 34–56). Bristol University Press.

(12)  See Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam (Saqi Books, 1998) for Islamic customs of skin-smoothing and James Atkinson (translator), Customs and Manners of the Women of Persia (Royal Asiatic Society, 1832) for nora applications

(13)  Hakim Bey, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (Autonomedia, 1993, p. 45).

(14)  See Ibn Battuta notes on Zawaj Mutah in the Indian Ocean littoral as well as Barbosa diaries on qiyans and courtesans. Additionally, Hakim Bey works Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (1993) and Weaver of Tales: Persian Picture Rugs (1980), co-authored with Karl Schlamminger, on general sexual attidues prevalent in Hormuz and mystic customs. 

(15) Gaspar Correia, Lendas da Índia, vol. 1 (Lisbon: Typographia da Academia Real das Sciencias, 1858).

(16)  See Chaudhuri, Kirti Narayan. 2008. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge University Press and Tagliacozzo, Eric. 2022. In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama. Princeton University Press.

(17)  Cartas de Affonso de Albuquerque, seguidas de documentos que as elucidam (Letters of Afonso de Albuquerque). // The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, Second Viceroy of India, translated by Walter de Gray Birch (London: Hakluyt Society, 1875–1884).

(18)  Brás de Albuquerque, Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, Second Viceroy of India. Translated and edited by Walter de Gray Birch, The Hakluyt Society, First Series, No. 53, 55, 62, and 69, (London, 1875)

(19) Dustin, M., Ferreira, N., Matin, K., Rezaei-Toroghi, M., & Soloaga, I. (2026). From the Amrad to ‘the Gay’: The Making of Queer Identity in Iran. In Decolonizing queer migration: Iranian Voices in exile (pp. 34–56). Bristol University Press, p 36

by Ahmad Makia

self-published
2026
multi-mediated/desktop publishing by
Lars Oschmann