Two weeks before a Saudi assassination team murdered dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in October 2018, Saudi Arabia’s state security agency summoned Sultan, then a 46-year-old senior official at the Saudi Ministry of Media, to a prison on the outskirts of Riyadh.
Sultan, who asked TIME to use a pseudonym to protect his identity out of fear for his safety, says he was taken to a cell with a CCTV camera angled towards the ceiling, where an interrogator accused him of helping a foreign journalist meet Saudi dissidents, and hinted he would out him as gay should he continue to work with the foreign press.
Sultan was indeed in a relationship with another man, something he had kept secret for over a decade. After he and Nassar (also a pseudonym) began living together a few years ago, the pair moved apartment every six months to avoid attracting attention. Homosexuality is a crime in Saudi Arabia and can carry the death penalty.
A year after Khashoggi’s murder, Sultan once..