Attending Catholic School as a Queer Iranian American Brought Me Closer to My Cultural Roots

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Believers is a series running through April, examining different facets of faith and religion among young people. In this essay, author Parisa Akhbari explores growing up as a queer Iranian American who attended Catholic school.

“Look.” My eight-year-old big sister sharpened her eyes on me as I set the table for dinner. This was my age-appropriate chore at five years old: I put out the glasses, while she carried the heavy plates. We had just started Catholic school, and my kindergarten teacher taught us to set cups upside-down on the tables for lunch. I liked the way the upside-down cups looked, so as I set the table at home, I flipped each of our glasses on its head. My sister watched me upturn the glasses and sighed.

“Next thing you know, she’s going to want to get baptized!” She griped, loud enough so my parents could hear her from the kitchen.

Up until that year, my sister had gone to a nonreligious private school in Seattle. Our parents couldn’t afford the tuition to send us both, so when I started kindergarten, they enrolled us in our neighborhood Catholic school together. I knew I was to blame for my sister being ripped from the secular haven where she spent her days doing science projects and making quirky, like-minded friends. I knew it was my fault she got stuck attending Catholic mass in a Marymount plaid jumper. What I didn’t know – what neither of us had the words for at the time – was that we were both queer.

Even without consciously identifying as queer, it was already weird enough that we ended up in Catholic school. Our dad, now agnostic, was raised Muslim in Iran, while our mom was the default kind of Methodist bred in the Midwest – the kind who grew up with Dixie cups of grape juice and cubes of sandwich bread serving as the “blood” and “body” of Christ at church.

You might ask, Why did they put you in Catholic school? We certainly asked that a lot. Our parents offered up a variety of answers: “Catholics value education,” my dad would say. “You’ll learn a lot. Plus, Jesus was a nice guy.” My mom had heard good things about the school from a friend, and “the other school in our neighborhood had a lot of viruses circulating,” she’d remind me. “We didn’t want you getting croup!”

Our parents didn’t foist religion upon us as kids. “We want you to make up your own minds,” they’d say whenever I asked about our faith background. But we got plenty of foisting elsewhere. My paternal grandmother informed me that we were all Muslim: my dad, my sister, myself, and even our longhaired tabby cat, Tiger. “See?” She pointed to the dark fur stripes above Tiger’s eyes. “She even has an M on her forehead for Muslim.” It seemed legit to me.

And then there was Catholic school, which was definitively stricter than the grape-juice-and-bread-squares variety of Christianity of my mom’s upbringing. Catholic school had cookie-cutter uniforms and gruesome crucifixion tableaus. It had concepts like Hell and sin and rising from the dead, which shook me more than any PG-rated zombie movie I’d seen.

It also served up a clear delineation of right and wrong. Good and pure students were baptized, and had First Communions in lacy, white dresses. They belonged. They cupped their hands in front of themselves to receive the host wafer at each mass, while I was instructed to cross my arms over my chest like the “Wakanda Forever” gesture from Black Panther. It seemed like a big screw you to Jesus back then, like I was being asked to snub Catholicism’s MVP. But because I wasn’t Catholic and couldn’t receive Communion, this was the way the priest would know not to give me the Eucharist, instead patting me on the head in blessing. Now, I can see how the gesture communicated my otherness.

Junior high chipped away at the glossy promise of Catholic school, one event after another. I heard the first whispers of my own queerness; my sister came out; and two planes struck the Twin Towers. Overnight on 9/11, friends who had eaten khoresht and tahdig at my family’s table described to me in detail how they wanted to bomb the entire Middle East until it was leveled to dust. A teacher told our class that he thought anyone suspected of terrorism should be tortured with garden shears. From our experiences being searched at airport security and border crossings, I knew my dad was often perceived as a terrorist suspect.

I was 12, and I started putting the pieces together. My family would be going to Hell because we were Iranian American, Muslim-adjacent. My sister would be going to Hell because the girl she brought home from her public high school was, in her words, not just a friend. And I’d be following them, because as hard as I tried to share my friends’ enthusiasm for Elijah Wood in The Lord of the Rings, it was Cate Blanchett’s character that had my heart.

Contrary to my sister’s fears, I didn’t elect to get baptized. Instead of turning to Catholicism for a sense of belonging, I turned to the other outsiders around me. The other kids of immigrants, whose homes warmed with the scents of cumin, turmeric, and black pepper, just like mine. I turned to spirituality, but it was the mysticism of my own cultural upbringing – reading the ancient Persian poets on holidays, and setting a Haft Seen altar of intentions at the Persian New Year –that brought me closer to feeling whole and connected to something larger than myself. It’s taken years, but I’ve smudged away that delineation between right and wrong instilled in me through Catholic education. This task of unlearning is like my own form of communion. The self-acceptance, liberation, and connection are worth it.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue