The closet or death: 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 owed to leave Toronto for Baghdad, his longtime partner, Dan pursue held him close in the darkness of their bedroom.

"James make go rounded to me and said, 'What would you do if this was going to be our last night together? in what way would we spend it?'" chase remembers.

Earlier that evening they'd played "500 Miles" by the agency of the Proclaimers and danced together. They cogitation of it as their ditty and the next day they played it in the car upon the way to the airport. "I realized that the near was all we ever have," chase 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 oppos to violence and dedicated to spreading peace. The brace had talked about the possibility that Loney could die above there. "But, I said, 'My worst nightmare would be if you got kidnapped and I saw videos of you upon television,'" Hunt recalls.

upon November 26, 2005, Loney was ambushed near the Umm al-Qura mahometan temple in western Baghdad and kidnapped along with three colleagues. Their kidnappers, a previously unknown insurgent assemblage calling themselves the Swords of Righteousness Brigade, demanded the release of a]] Iraqi prisoners being held by dint of coalition forces. Otherwise, they said, they would kill the hostages.

Back abode Hunt was forced into a kind of captivity all his possess Should Loney's sexual orientation become known by dint of his captors, he would almost certainly be killed. It had to be hidden. Officials handling the kidnapping, including Canada's external affairs department, asked chase to stay out of the story. A widely reproduc photograph of a handsome, smiling Loney appeared in print with chase cropped out. Hunt couldn't talk about the pain he was feeling. Outside a small circle of shut 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 of recent origins "I knew Dan would be affected actual deeply by what was going on"

Loney's lower parts as an activist run of great depth Eschewing any traditional aspiration to wealth or succes Loney has lived a near-monastic life, working with underprivileged children, the poor, the homeles and the sick. "In the Christian life we're called to live according to God's imagination," Loney says. "The bottom line, for the Christian, is a life of be fond of and of self-giving."

chase and Loney met at 16 when they were the pair counselors at Columbus Boys Camp for underprivileged lads in Orillia, Canada. Hunt ruthless in love with Loney when they were in guild together, but Loney was focused upon his life in the house of god and his desire to help others. After nearly joining the priesthood, Loney discovered the Catholic Worker change when his friend William Payne invited him to a "house of hospitality." rested in 1933, the CWM is predicated upon voluntary poverty and communal living. Members organize in houses, where they welcome, fe and shelter nation who are homeless.

Loney had fix what he was looking for all his life. In 1990 he joined chase and Payne in renting a house in Toronto's east extreme point Dovetailing passionate antiwar activism with of frequent occurrence protests against homophobia in the temple Loney spent the next 10 years living in, and co-founding, CWM houses.

on the other hand the communal living arrangement was not without its stresse upon Loney and Hunt. Hunt mov without in 1993 but stayed shut by. By then the sum of two units men were a couple. "Those commitments that we share in for the use of all those values are the foundation of our relationship," Loney says of the Catholic Worker experience. "I would describe it as an anchor for us."

Joining the Christian Peacemaker Teams in 2000 was a logical nearest step for Loney. Like the CWM CPT is a pacifist organization, fixed on the notion that no Christian should, in any manner, participate in acts of war. His 2005 trip to Iraq was to be a 10-day fact-finding visit. at any time suspicious of the media, Loney wanted his hold answers. "The purpose was to examine to understand the conflict from a grassroots point of view and bring that of recent origins home with us," he says.

Four days after his arrival, Loney and three colleagues had just finished a meeting with the Muslim Scholars Association when their vehicle was nearly hit through a white car. Four men with fire-arms got out and climbed into the Peacemakers' vehicle. They flock for 20 minutes to a combine behind a long wall. "We were taken individual by one into the living swing of the house, and we were searched," Loney says. "They took our cameras, my confined apartment phone, notebooks, our money, passports, my belt, all of our belts. They handcuffed us behind our backs."

Although none of the Peacemakers spoke Arabic, they were able to make rudimentary conversation with individual of the captors who spoke a certain quantity of English. They nicknamed the man "Number One" "We have this piece of paper we call 'magic sheet,' and it's an Arabic-English explanation of what we are doing," Loney says. He gave it to Number single who seemed frustrated by what it said. To Loney his reaction indicated they might have abducted the wrongful men. "He told me, 'You are a peaceful man, and I have affection for the peaceful man, but this does not change anything,'" Loney recalls. "'We must fight the Americans who have invaded our country'"