Queer Muslims find comfort and safety by ‘coming in’

The bell rings and Omer Othman, a seven-year-old Syrian boy, runs toward the soccer field. Lunch break has officially started. The weather is humid but that’s no surprise. Here in Dubai, the temperature can reach up to 45 degrees Celsius, sometimes more. The scorching heat doesn’t stop Othman from being one of the first people on the field. Although he doesn’t consider himself competitive or even athletic, he still plays soccer with his friends every day. As the group of boys make their way toward the field, Othman’s eyes are glued to the school doors anxiously waiting for someone else—someone special. After a few minutes, the doors swing open and out comes Ali, captain of the soccer team.

Ali is one of the popular kids at school, the stereotypical athletic friend everyone fights to have on their sports team. (Xtra has changed his name to protect his identity.) Othman couldn’t care less about winning the game. What he looked forward to the most was spending as much time with Ali as possible. His big brown eyes and curly brown hair had Othman smitten. He would spend his one-hour lunch breaks playing soccer with Ali but he never told him how he felt—Othman never told anyone how he felt. 

A few years later, Othman immigrated to Canada with his family. As a Grade 6 student at a Vancouver elementary school, he didn’t spend his lunch breaks playing soccer with the boys but instead with one person—his best friend, Joe. (Joe’s name has also been changed.) Throughout the school year, Othman started to develop strong feelings for him. Joe wasn’t just an ordinary, lighthearted crush like Ali was. He was more than that. Othman had a hunch that Joe liked him too but was too afraid to admit it. Not wanting to hide his feelings anymore, Othman decides to kiss Joe. Soon after, their close friendship began to fall apart.

Today, Othman is 22 and living in Montreal. He looks back at those two experiences as a beginning. The feelings he had toward Ali and Joe were real. This realization both liberated and scared him. His fear of not being part of what he calls “the standard” was one of the reasons he had a falling out with ex-best friend Joe. “It might have been too much for him or too much for me—both, I guess,” Othman says. “It was a crisis moment—we both like guys and realized it wasn’t the standard.” 

Othman identifies as a gay Muslim man, but it’s an identity he has struggled with in the past. He’s constantly had to choose between his faith or his sexuality. In his mind, he couldn’t be both Muslim and gay—it was contradictory. Coming out is not easy for many people, but for queer Muslims, it’s especially challenging. Being queer can be a source of immense shame. In most countries in the Muslim world, homosexuality is criminalized. In Syria, where Othman’s family is from, a gay man can be sentenced up to 14 years in prison simply for being queer. In some extreme cases, like in Saudi Arabia, gay men can be sentenced to death. Naturally, many Muslims conceal their sexual identities from the world in fear of serious social and physical consequences. 

Living in the West, queer Muslims find governments and people more accepting. And yet, many still find it difficult to come out to their families and communities. Now, some are rewriting their narratives by “coming in” instead. 

Coming out versus coming in

In the last decade, coming in, or “letting in,” has gained traction within some LGBTQ2S+ communities. The term first appeared in a HuffPost article by Robert Espinoza back in 2013. In the piece, Espinoza challenges the concept of coming out because it hinders the dialogue on fluidity, life circumstance and gender variance. The typical coming-out narrative is often centred around a confession, letting everyone know who you are. Espinoza describes it as a psychotherapeutic exercise for affirmation. But “if coming out is a confession, then letting in is a communion,” he suggests. Letting in gives people the power to disclose whatever they wish to whomever they wish without assuming a fixed identity or risking someone’s public life with their private one. 

The concept of coming in is ultimately a power shift in which queer people are choosing who they let in instead of feeling an obligation to tell others about their sexuality. A popular queer Muslim therapist who goes by the name Gigi understands the risks associated with coming out as a queer Muslim. Gigi, who lives in California and has asked Xtra not to publish her last name for privacy reasons, says that coming out is a Western construct that relies heavily on external acknowledgement of queerness. “Coming in,” she says, “is all about letting people into your life who you trust with your sacred process with sexuality and gender.” 

Using TikTok, Gigi posts short videos of herself discussing queerness and Islam. She has more than 30,000 followers and more than 400,000 likes combined on her videos. In her post about coming in on TikTok, she explains that the idea of coming out focuses on visibility over safety; it can pressure queer people to adopt the idea that in order to live an authentic life, one must come out to the world even if it endangers them. Gigi points to her own experiences as an example: in many circumstances she plays a part in making sure she doesn’t come off as visibly or readably queer when she navigates Muslim spaces. “If I go to the mosque,” she says, “I’m not gonna dress how I would If I was going to a gay club.”

“Coming in unlocked a new way I could accept myself.”

Some Muslims constantly struggled with an inner dilemma of leading separate lives—one that follows the status quo and another that doesn’t. As a result, some queer Muslims choose to hide some parts of their lives in order to avoid being rejected by their community. “Queer Muslims can relate to the notion of living a double life, constantly being aware, constantly hiding,” Gigi says. Although this constant transformation is exhausting, she has never felt physically unsafe being a queer Muslim in the West. “One hundred percent,” she says, “living in the U.S. versus if I had grown up abroad in the Middle East, the experience would have been very, very different.” 

While Othman’s friends would talk about coming out to their parents and relatives, he couldn’t help but feel jealous. “Usually white friends would tell me about their experiences coming out to their parents, and while they did have their struggles, it was usually positive at the end,” he says. This only added more pressure on Othman to come out. He turned to social media for guidance, and that’s where he found Gigi. “With Gigi’s notion of coming in, it was a way of deconstructing that need and pressure of having to come out in order to live as my ‘true queer self,’” he says. “It just unlocked a new way I could accept myself further, despite not having told my parents yet. It recognizes the limitations of coming out for non-accepting cultures, and in my case, Muslim-Arab families.” 

Co-existing identity

It’s 8 p.m. and Othman is sitting at the dinner table. It’s iftar, which means the sun has gone down and he can break his fast. Ramadan is the holiest month in the Islamic calendar, when Muslims around the world fast from sunrise to sunset. This is Othman’s second year fasting after his “break,” when he temporarily stepped away from Islam. He always breaks his fast by eating his favourite dish: fattoush salad. No matter which day of Ramadan it is, Othman can count on the fact that fattoush salad will always be part of the feast. Although he lives with his parents and his mother is the one that prepares the Ramadan dinners, he is the only one in his family who fasts during the month.  

The Othmans are not your typical religious family. They don’t pray five times a day and you’ll rarely find them inside a mosque. Instead, Othman and his family consider themselves to be culturally Muslim: they don’t strictly follow the religion, but they still believe in Muslim customs and values. Despite this, Omer chooses not to tell his parents about his sexuality for fear of rejection. 

Whether or not their families are religious, some queer Muslims are afraid of coming out to their families because of social—and in some cases physical—repercussions. Some queer Muslims choose never to tell their families the truth about their sexuality, while others leave the religion entirely. At one point, Othman did both, leading to his aforementioned break. “I had a bit of a struggle where I stopped calling myself Muslim for a while,” he says. “I rejected Islam because I wanted to be queer more than I wanted to be Muslim.” 

Many Islamic scholars overwhelmingly believe that homosexuality is considered a major sin, punishable by Sharia Law. According to research undertaken by the Inner Circle, a human rights organization that centres on Islam and sexual diversity, this can lead queer Muslims to turn to alcohol and substance abuse as coping mechanisms for being socially and religiously rejected. Although Othman did not turn to drugs or alcohol, he did face a serious dilemma: “I felt like I had to make a choice between being queer and being Muslim,” he says, “because they seemed contradictory.” 

“I rejected Islam because I wanted to be queer more than I wanted to be Muslim.”

But like many religious scriptures, there are alternative interpretations of texts. Muslims approach the Quran with diverse worldviews and experiences that shape who they are. For Othman, it wasn’t until he met other queer Muslims and started to relearn Islam that he realized being both Muslim and queer can co-exist within his identity. “They helped me realize the true meaning of Islam,” he says. “It’s the mainstream understanding that is homophobic, not the actual religion itself.”

The mainstream Islamic ideology is strongly rejected by El-Farouk Khaki. Khaki, who identifies as gay, is one of the co-founder’s of Toronto’s Unity Mosque, an LGBTQ2S+-affirming mosque founded in 2009. “This notion that you can’t be Muslim and be gay or lesbian or bisexual—even that cannot be substantiated even by the most fundamentalists of doctrines,” Khaki says. 

The argument used against queer Muslim inclusion in the Islamic traditional context is the story of Prophet Lut. In short, the story goes like this: Lut was sent on a mission to the city of Sodom and Gomorrah to convert its people to monotheism. Its inhabitants were considered corrupt and vile due to their violent behaviour. They would engage in rape and sodomize other men. Angels, disguised as attractive men, show up and ask Lut for hospitality. He quickly directs them to leave the city for their own safety. 

Khaki says that the story of Lut is interpreted through the eyes of patriarchy and heterosexuality. “If you changed your position about homosexuality not being a matter of choice then you are forced to look at the text differently,” says Khaki. The story, then, is not anti-gay, but is instead anti-rape and anti-violence. “The story of Lut talks about rape and yet heteronormative cis men will see rape as an act of sexuality and not as an act of violence.” 

Being a gay Imam is not easy, but Khaki says that the religion of Islam is inclusive whether other Muslims agree with him or not. “In terms of my spirituality and where it is housed, in my understanding of Islam, my Islam affirms me.”   

The third space

Othman grew up not knowing many queer Muslims, but that changed in March 2020. As a result of pandemic boredom, he, like millions of other young adults, downloaded the TikTok app. He started posting fun videos expressing his individuality and embracing his queerness and found a community of other queer Muslims on the platform. 

@dancingfunnily

saw this somewhere else but i can’t remember who did it, so creds to them #straightpride

♬ The Magic Bomb (Questions I Get Asked) [Extended Mix] – Hoàng Read

“Even if one queer Muslim is able to see the video and be like, ‘Oh wow, that’s somebody like me,’ it makes it all worth it,” he says. 

Summeiya Khamissa is a 22-year-old Muslim who identifies as gender-fluid. They are the creator of Queer Muslim Network Toronto, a grassroots organization that shares the lived experiences and art of queer Muslims in and around Toronto. The organization has more than 1,000 followers on Instagram, but Khamissa believes that there are more queer Muslims in Toronto they haven’t yet reached. They started the network to show queer Muslims who are not out that there is a world out there waiting for them. “There are even more of us who are not ready to let people into their queerness,” they say. “There is an entire community waiting to support you when you are ready.”

Alma Mahmood, an 18-year-old woman from Mississauga, Ontario, found the Queer Muslim Network through a family friend and was immediately drawn to the Instagram posts of queer Muslims sharing their stories. “I thought, ‘Wow there’s a whole community out there that I can connect to,’” she says. Mahmood, who wears a hijab, wanted to share her story with the network and contacted Khamissa. “This is my chance to come out… I want to become more of who I am instead of locking it away even if I’m living in a household that won’t accept me in a way,” she says. After her post went public, she described the experience as a “weight being lifted off her shoulders.” Despite coming out through social media, Mahmood still has not told her parents about her sexual identity but says that she will tell them eventually. “I am pretty close with my mom,” she says, “but I feel like my dad is pretty traditional.”  

Othman, meanwhile, now has more than 7,000 followers on TikTok and more than 800,000 likes on his TikTok videos combined. His lighthearted and humorous approach to serious issues, mostly centred on queer Muslims, is a way to shed light on the community. “There’s so much serious stuff out there that I don’t want people to think queer Muslims are one sort of way,” he says. He describes TikTok as a “third space” that allows him to display his authentic self for his followers to see. In fact, it is through the app that he  was re-introduced to a more accepting version Islam. For him, seeing a growing community of queer Muslims is a sigh of relief. “I just know that I’m not alone,” he says, “and it feels good knowing that.” 

“I just know that I’m not alone, and it feels good knowing that.” 

Despite having a large following on TikTok, Othman’s brother Soumar, 27, is the only family member who knows Othman is gay. Soumar says that at first it was difficult to come to terms with the fact that his brother was different, but it wasn’t a surprise. “It was a matter of just basically, constantly having to say things like ‘man up’ or you gotta do more guy things… things like that made me realize, ‘Oh my god, why am I basically trying to convince him to do things out of his nature?’” Soumar says. One day while Othman was practicing his dance recital, Soumar asked him whether Othman would feel more comfortable if his dance partner was male instead of female. Othman, shocked and relieved at the same time, took this opportunity to be honest with his brother and tell him that he was gay.

Looking back, Soumar says that this pivotal moment in their relationship brought them closer. Now, Othman can be himself around his brother without having to hide. For Soumar, it was also a learning opportunity. He admits that he used to tease his younger brother for being different but that all changed when he realized that Othman was a victim of bullying. “In my mind, I was like, ‘No that’s not cool.’ Omer is the way he is, it doesn’t matter. If you make fun of him for being natural and being comfortable, that’s not cool. And I started to see how I have been doing that and things changed from that point,” he says. Soumar adds that his relationship with his brother is a special one. “Travelling to different places and having to go through different friendships and different schools and even family members and environments totally—the thing that was stable was him and I going through these changes all together,” Soumar says. “I didn’t want him to feel like he was alone in any way.” 

Currently, Othman says that he is waiting to move out before telling his parents that he is queer. “I might tell them one day, but not while I’m living with them,” he says. “I don’t want to risk it.” That “risk” is the tension that may arise from the possibility that his parents will not accept who he is. He says that his friends tell him to come out with a partner—inviting his partner over for family dinner, say, without his parents’ knowledge. This approach, Othman jokingly says, will give his parents a heart attack. “There’s a lot of pressure to come out in Western society,” he says, but he must remain mindful of his culture and his parents’ reaction. Despite the potential challenges of “coming in” to his parents, whenever that may be, he is hopeful that they will accept him for who he is. “I don’t think they will stop loving me. I am their son.”