Paradoxically, Long was also criticized from the opposite perspective. Other campaigners, especially the British activist Peter Tatchell, attacked him for questioning the universal validity of "gay" identity. Long's work produced controversy in 2005 and 2006 after photographs of the hanging of two teenagers in the city of Mashhad, Iran went viral on the web. Tatchell, gay writer Doug Ireland, and U.S. activist Michael Petrelis insisted that the youths were hanged not for the rape of a 13-year-old (as initially reported in the Iranian press) but for being gay. Long and Human Rights Watch, while conducting intensive research on the situation for LGBT people in Iran, maintained the evidence in the Mashhad case was inconclusive, and also questioned assigning the youths a Western "gay" identity in a culturally complex situation where neither they nor others around them were able to speak for themselves. Long urged that the executions should be condemned, but that it was not necessary to believe the youths were either "gay" or completely innocent to do so. "Rights aren't for saints, and if we only defend them for people onto whom we can project our own qualities, our own identities, we aren't activists but narcissists with attitude," he said. "If these kids aren't 'gay,' or 'innocent,' but are 'straight' or 'guilty,' does it make their fear less horrible, their suffering less real? Does it make them less dead?" Long was attacked for a social constructionist approach to LGBT activism. Some, including Tatchell, questioned whether his work reflected covertly pro-Islamic sympathies.