Peace activist
James Loney knew he would be killed if his Iraqi captors
found out he is gay. So did his partner, Dan, back in
Canada, who had to go back into the closet.
The night before
Canadian peace activist James Loney was due to leave
Toronto for Baghdad, his longtime partner, Dan Hunt, held
him close in the darkness of their bedroom.
“James
turned to me and said, ‘What would you do if this was
going to be our last night together? How would we
spend it?’ ” Hunt remembers.
Earlier that
evening they’d played “500 Miles” by
the Proclaimers and danced together. They thought of
it as their song, and the next day they played it in
the car on the way to the airport. “I realized that
the present was all we ever have,” Hunt says,
“and that it was beautiful.”
Loney was making
his third trip to Iraq as a member of the Christian
Peacemaker Teams—an ecumenical Christian organization
opposed to violence and dedicated to spreading peace.
The couple had talked about the possibility that Loney
could die over there. “But, I said, ‘My worst
nightmare would be if you got kidnapped and I saw videos of
you on television,’ ” Hunt recalls.
On November 26,
2005, Loney was ambushed near the Umm al-Qura mosque in
western Baghdad and kidnapped along with three colleagues.
Their kidnappers, a previously unknown insurgent group
calling themselves the Swords of Righteousness
Brigade, demanded the release of all Iraqi prisoners
being held by coalition forces. Otherwise, they said, they
would kill the hostages.
Back home Hunt
was forced into a kind of captivity all his own. Should
Loney’s sexual orientation become known by his
captors, he would almost certainly be killed. It had
to be hidden. Officials handling the kidnapping,
including Canada’s external affairs department, asked
Hunt to stay out of the story. A widely reproduced
photograph of a handsome, smiling Loney appeared in
print with Hunt cropped out. Hunt couldn’t talk
about the pain he was feeling. Outside a small circle of
close friends, he couldn’t tap in to the kind
of public sympathy and support that the spouses and
families of the other captives were getting. “I
called Dan right away,” says Loney’s
brother Matt, a meteorologist in Vancouver who was
traveling in Ecuador when he first heard the news. “I
knew Dan would be affected very deeply by what was
going on.”
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Rowe is an award-winning Toronto-based journalist and the
author of the essay collection Looking for
Brothers.