Gay Muslims: Now is the time to speak out
The Orlando shooting has once again shone a spotlight on the LGBT community as the target of a terrible act of violence. It’s also prompted intense debate over whether the attack was influenced by gunman Omar Mateen’s Muslim faith.
In the aftermath of the shootings, some close to Mateen, including his ex-wife, have suggested that he may have questioned his own sexuality in the months and years before the attack.
In general, mainstream Muslim teachings forbid homosexuality, although how this is interpreted varies. According to the Human Rights Campaign, “Depending on nationality, generation, family upbringing and cultural influences, Islamic individuals and institutions fall along a wide spectrum, from welcoming and inclusive to a level of rejection that can be marked by a range of actions ranging from social sequestration to physical violence.”
Yahoo News spoke to three members of this small, relatively unseen community about the often painful paradox of being an LGBT Muslim in the United States.
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MALIK K.
Malik K. (not his real name) was born and raised in Jordan by Palestinian parents. He says he started having feelings for men at a young age, but it wasn’t until he was about 12, and gained access to the Internet, that he first learned the word “gay.”
It would take another four years for Malik to accept that he was homosexual, but even then, coming out to his Muslim family wasn’t really an option. So Malik kept his sexuality a secret until 2013, when, at 24, he was exposed.
Someone found pictures of him on the gay dating app Grindr and posted them to Facebook. “My life just stopped,” Malik says, describing the response from his father and brothers as “very aggressive.”
“I had no family, no job,” he says. “I couldn’t stay.”
So Malik contacted a friend who knew people in the United States and asked him where he should go. His friend put him in touch with someone who had an open room in San Francisco, and he left Jordan on a six-month visitor’s visa. He hasn’t been back since. His family still doesn’t even know where he is.
Once in San Francisco, Malik learned that the United States offers asylum to gay people who face persecution in their home country. After a couple of months, he decided to apply for asylum and was approved. He’s now in the process of getting his green card.
Malik identifies more as “culturally Muslim” than practicing. He doesn’t always fast during Ramadan, but when he’s around other Muslims who are fasting, he won’t eat or drink water in front of them.
“Islam is not the most tolerant religion, but I still find it’s not a bad religion,” he says. “It’s not what people think.”
Ever since the shooting in Orlando on Sunday, however, Malik says he’s become very hesitant to say anything in defense of Islam, for fear of being associated with the gunman because of his religion.
As a result, he says, he hasn’t gone out all week, has avoided discussing the shooting with friends, and refrained from weighing in on Facebook debates, where, he says, he’s read hateful comments about Islam from people who know him personally.
“It’s not cool to be called ‘faggot’ and ‘terrorist’ at the same time,” he said, referring to the deluge of hateful comments he has encountered on Facebook. “It’s very confusing. I can’t get it out of my head.”
Malik also can’t help but think about the fact that it was pure chance that landed him in one of the most liberal areas of the country.
“If, three years ago, my friend had found me a room in Orlando instead of San Francisco, I could’ve been there that night,” he says. “I could’ve been killed at Pulse.”
The night of the shooting, Malik says, “I was out with my friends. We were drinking and having fun and dancing all night. This could happen anywhere.”
Malik still plans to go out and celebrate Pride in San Francisco this weekend, but “now I’m terrified.”
“It’s not going to be the same anymore,” he says. “People will be going out to support each other, but they will still be worried and keeping an eye open. It could happen anywhere, anytime.”
While as a gay man, Malik feels like a victim of the attack, he’s also starting to feel alienated from the rest of the LGBT community because of his religion.
In Jordan, “I felt guilty for being gay,” he says. “Now I feel guilty for being Muslim — and I didn’t choose any of those.”
Even before the shooting in Orlando, Malik says the political rhetoric of the presidential election over the last year has made him feel increasingly anxious.
“Last year, I was so happy to be gay in a country that legalized gay marriage.” But now, almost a year after the landmark Supreme Court decision that made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, Malik says, “I feel this country doesn’t want me anymore.”
“Now what?” he wonders. “Where should I go? It’s very confusing.”
NAMIR NASSIR
As a kid in Pakistan, Namir Nassir “was kind of flamboyant.” He loved music and dancing, and whether he was at home with his family in Karachi, or with his Muslim relatives in Los Angeles, where he moved at age 15 to attend high school, Nassir says, “I was always the odd one out.”
“I spent the first 19 years of my life being in the closet, feeling ashamed of who I was,” says Nassir, now 35 and an actor.
Then, during the summer after his sophomore year at University of California at Santa Barbara, he finally decided to come out.
Nassir was visiting his family in Karachi, and his father was making fun of his newly dyed red hair. “He said, ‘Only fags do that. Are you a fag?’” Nassir recalls. On the spur of the moment, he decided to tell the truth.
Nassir says his family disowned him for three months — until his older sister’s wedding.
But although they agreed to make amends for the occasion, for the next 12 or 13 years, his relationship with his family remained strained. Every couple of years, under pressure from his sisters, Nassir says he would “take it back” to his father, insisting his homosexuality was just a phase.
His father suggested electroshock therapy, sex with prostitutes, anything he could think of, Nassir says.
Meanwhile, back in California after coming out, Nassir dropped out of college and moved to L.A.
“I wanted to experience what it was like to be gay,” he says. After 19 years of repression, diving into gay life in Los Angeles was a shock to his senses — and to his Muslim sensibilities.
“Do you know how hard it was for me to go to clubs and see white, gay culture? Men with their shirts off, beautiful bodies, drinking, smoking, doing drugs.”
Nassir says he was compelled to assimilate in order to be accepted by the community, but at the same time felt fetishized by other gay men because he was different.
“You don’t understand the self-loathing,” that comes with being gay and Muslim, he said. Or, he added, “how deeply, deeply affected a Muslim man is by his religion from the day we are born. And how wrong it is to be gay, how completely and totally against the code of God it is to be gay.
“It messes with your mind,” he says. “It’s really, really hard.”
It was a painful journey toward finding his identity as a Muslim gay man, one that he says he would not have been able to endure without his faith.
“Even though I’ve been alone and lost friends and made friends and have family members I barely talk to anymore, throughout it all I have my faith,” he says. “I pray to God every day.”
Nassir believes that even though he’s gay and has had sex — sins in the eyes of Islam — the fact that he’s never drank alcohol or tried drugs, prays five times a day and fasts during Ramadan, has “kept my soul pure.”
Nassir also credits his religion with allowing him to escape the fate of so many gay Muslim men who spend their lives in the closet, often with a wife and children.
“I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones,” he says. “You live your life as a straight man, but all you want to do is be gay and be held by a man, and you see men holding hands and kissing and going to clubs and being happy.”
“It’s a terrible thing, because it eats away at your soul,” he added. “And the biggest problem is there is no one to talk to.”
In the wake of the recent tragedy in Orlando, Nassir says, “now is the time for people who are gay and Muslims to speak up.”
“I like that Anderson Cooper is getting teared up on TV,” he says, but “I want people to see that you can be someone like me and be gay and go to clubs and have sex and have fun, but I also don’t drink or do drugs.”
There were a few years where Nassir and his sisters did not speak. Now, he says, “We have an amazing relationship.”
As for his father, “He acknowledges I am the way I am, but he’s still really religious. He’s not going to be joining the Pride Parade anytime soon.”
RAFIQ
Rafiq (not his real name) is a 35-year-old gay man who works in finance in New York. He’s also a practicing Muslim.
Though most of his family and friends know he’s gay, Rafiq asked that his real name be withheld, because he is not “out” at work.
Rafiq was born and raised in the United States, the third of six children born to a Pakistani father and an American mother who converted to Islam.
Rafiq said that marrying an American woman made his father seem rebellious by comparison to the rest of his family, but he still sought to impart Pakistani traditions and religious beliefs to his American children.
Rafiq and his siblings were raised Muslim; they were taught to pray, learned Arabic, read the Quran, and went to the mosque. As a family, they didn’t eat pork or drink alcohol, and they fasted during Ramadan. When his older brother and sister started dating in high school, Rafiq says, it caused a “huge drama” with his father, who did not believe in dating before marriage.
His dad’s attitude toward homosexuality was just as traditional.
“I was closeted for a very long time, and didn’t come out to my father for a very long time for fear of being kicked out of the house,” he says.
Rafiq made the deliberate decision to move out on his own as soon as he graduated from college, but knows how much harder things could have been if he had continued to live with his parents, as most Muslim kids are encouraged to do until they’re married.
“I’ve met gay Muslim men who are married and have kids, and I totally get it it, because of the culture,” Rafiq says. “If everyone in your circle is strict Muslim, they’ll never approve of it. They see it as a lifestyle.”
Based on the information that continues to emerge about Mateen — including reports that the gunman had used gay dating apps, regularly visited Pulse nightclub and, according to his father, had recently become enraged at the sight of two men kissing in Miami — Rafiq says, he wouldn’t be surprised if the Orlando gunman was struggling with something similar.
“He may have had an inkling, he may have been questioning his sexuality, he may have been curious. You don’t really know,” Rafiq says. “He may have actually been gay and just afraid of himself.”
“When I first was curious, experimenting with being gay, the last thing I wanted was for someone to find out,” he continued. “When you are so close with your family and live with them, you lead these dual, secretive lives.”
In the case of Mateen, Rafiq says, “I could totally see if he was living a double life and hiding this from them, if his family was superreligious and if they found out, they might have shunned him or made him feel like a bad person.”
Whatever Mateen’s sexuality, Rafiq said this tragedy highlights the need for “more support for LGBT people who are having this conflict of religion.”
Rafiq has accumulated a number of gay Muslim friends over the years, but for most people, “who are struggling with being Muslim and being gay, there aren’t a lot of outlets for you. You can’t talk about it in the mosque. It’s hard to find each other.”
If Mateen was in fact gay, Rafiq says, “had he maybe had other gay Muslim friends to talk to about what he was going through, or if he had those resources, maybe that could’ve helped him. That’s one thing I wonder, how that would’ve changed things if he had those outlets.”
Now Rafiq says his mother is “totally cool with me being gay,” and his siblings are fine with it, too — though he still gets pressure from his older brother, who has recently become more devout, to conform and marry a woman.
Before his father’s death from cancer this year, Rafiq said their relationship came a long way, but he never reached complete acceptance. “He always accepted me as his son, but he wasn’t going to accept the gay thing,” he said.
One of the most common misconceptions Rafiq encounters from non-Muslims is that he can’t possibly be both gay and Muslim. In fact, Rafiq says he has many gay friends who were raised Muslim but no longer practice because, “there are so many things in the religion that are contradictory to who we are — especially if you’re gay.”
He struggles with it himself, he says, “Like, why am I bothering fasting right now for a religion that believes my people should be killed?”
Even today, he says, “I would never go into a mosque and profess my sexuality, because it’s not something they would accept. I would not feel safe.”
But for Rafiq, being a Muslim is as much a part of his identity as being a gay man. So he’s found a way to balance the two.
“We’re taught that Allah is all-giving and all-merciful,” and on the Day of Judgment, “all sins can be forgiven,” he says.
Like Nassir, Rafiq figures that if “I don’t drink, I don’t commit other sins, I don’t kill others, I pray, I fast during Ramadan. … If I follow everything right and do things properly, the only sin left would be the fact that I’m gay.”
He realizes this rationale may not be accepted by other Muslims, but says, “I don’t know how I could embrace my religion any other way.
“That’s the only way that I’ve been able to really justify it.”
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