For LGBTQ soccer fans looking to attend the 2022 World Cup, the host nation of Qatar has a message for you:

Gay fans are welcome. As long as you’re not... you know... too gay.

To understate the matter, Qatar and “gay friendly” traditionally go together about as well as the 2022 World Cup and “workplace safety.” Qatar’s national law criminalizes homosexuality with a penalty of one to three years imprisonment and in 2013, the World Cup host joined a number of Persian Gulf nations — the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC — in introducing immigration tests that included “stricter measures to find out homosexuals and transgenders so that they are banned from entering... any GCC state.”

Knowing the country’s reputation, FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Chief Executive Nasser al-Khater recently tried to reassure LGBTQ fans, looking to attend that tournament, that they would have nothing to worry about.

According to the AFP’s Gregory Walton, al-Khater proclaimed that “any fan of any gender, [sexual] orientation, religion, race [should] rest assured that Qatar is one of the most safe countries in the world — and they’ll all be welcome here.”

If he’d have stopped there, that would have been exactly what we wanted to hear. But — and it seems like there’s always a but — al-Khater asserted that “public displays of affection are frowned upon, it’s not part of our culture — but that goes across the board to everybody.” Read more via OutSports