It Gets Better

A minority within a minority... but it gets better. Growing up female, black, an Arab immigrant, an apostate, and queer, is as difficult as you can imagine.

Knowing clearly and at a very young age that I wasn’t “straight” was so confusing to me. Although compulsory-heterosexuality was something that was all around me and managed its way into my life, I remember very distinctly the crush I had at 12 years old on my 6th grade English teacher, Ms. Reem, but I also remember knowing this wasn’t right. It made me sick to my stomach because I was taught to believe that this was sinful and unlawful.

I was born in the United Arab Emirates to a Somali father and a Yemeni mother, so I was a child to immigrant parents in a country that doesn’t give the birth-right citizenship. Growing up I went to segregated government schools and was exposed very early on to queer attraction, and girls in my school “liking” each other and even becoming “girlfriends”. This was still internalized as a “phase” for them, but it still happened.

While being a sexual minority didn’t set me too far apart, being black certainly did. I was the only black student in a school of 700 girls who knew that I was “different” and not in a good way. I was a non-Emirati black kid in a school of mostly Emirati girls, who were living in a racist society and in no way educated on what racism was. Needless to say, I was bullied very badly, and I even convinced myself that they were right to bully me. I developed an inferiority complex and internalized everything I was told about being black and ugly; my hair being gross, my home-cooked food smelling bad, the other language I spoke at home (Somali) being weird and so on. This continued until I found confidence in myself and refused to be the butt of their jokes. During my first year of high school I had my first real girlfriend, Aisha. We were crazy about each other, until she broke up with me four years later to marry her cousin, but I digress.

So, while my [anti] social circle wasn’t entirely homophobic- albeit very racist- the household which I grew up in definitely was, and so was our society at large. I was raised in an extremely religious and conservative household. Growing up, I always had to compartmentalize who I was. Living with my very homophobic mother and a homophobic society, I was forced to lead a double life.

Despite the comp-het baggage that I was dragging around trying to deal with, I knew in my early twenties that I wanted to be with a woman. I dated women, but never allowed myself to imagine a life or a future with one. I always believed that eventually I will somehow be “fixed”, that I’ll meet a guy and just magically become un-queered. But my proverbial Cinderella’s slipper of a man never showed up, and I continued to date women, however did not allow myself to become involved too deeply.

If you’re a fellow sufferer from severe anxiety and PTSD due to inferiority complexes and religious trauma from a very young age, you know that the fear of being found out by family is terrifying. Combine that with the fear of God’s wrath (even though I became an atheist many years before that), the fear of being jailed in a country where being queer is illegal, and the fear of your partner sooner or later realizing that you’re this shaken shell of a human being and leaving you. It all creates this hyper vigilant, ultra-alert, anxious robot who is incapable of vulnerability or even allowing themselves to have wants and desires.

Fast forward to 2019, I was a year and a half into being in a relationship and going through and an incredibly rough patch with my partner at the time because she planned on getting engaged in a year. Sirens went off in my head, and I felt myself sinking into all the terrifying “what-ifs” and all the terrible worst-case-scenarios that my anxious brain created.

That’s when I decided to seek therapy, and it was the best decision I’ve ever made. I found out the effects of the traumas that I had lived and how they stayed with me and made my decisions for me. Therapy made me understand so many things about myself and the way I function. I did not stop therapy even after my relationship ended a year later, and I definitely have no plans of stopping.

Today I want to tell you something I wish I could tell my 16-year-old self, that things get better, just like it got better for me. With rigorous therapy and a lot of self-work, I am proudly and outspokenly (almost obnoxiously so) out of the closet. Even though I still have moments where I fear my family’s reaction when they find out, I don’t hide it. Even though I still live in a country with homophobic laws, I recognize my privilege of being female, because had I been a gay man, my experiences of being shamelessly out simply wouldn’t be the same.

Let’s fast-forward even further to the summer of 2020 and the global outrage over the brutal murder of George Floyd in the US, and the subsequent conversation about race that started around the world. I created a platform called The Black Arabs Collective, and through this platform I was able to connect with so many incredible people with whom I shared many experiences, not only in my blackness but also in my queerness.

As part of my work for The Black Arabs Collective, I conducted many interviews and was interviewed myself by many different organizations and individuals. In August last year, I was contacted by a team member of a very well-known Saudi YouTuber to be a guest on his podcast in November. There was a lot of back and forth in which we discussed the details of the interview and what topics it would cover, and even agreed on the cover-art of the episode which was going to feature my photo. On the day of the rehearsal in November, four days before we were supposed to record the podcast episode live, that same admin who contacted me to do the interview asked me to speak to her on Google Meet instead of the podcast platform. I logged in, completely oblivious to anything being wrong. She informed me that they can no longer have me as a guest on their podcast because they found out that I’m openly queer. She said their legal team got in touch with them 30 minutes before the rehearsal to inform them that they had done a background check on me and found out my sexual orientation. There was nothing to find out. My interview with The Queer Arabs podcast was featured on my Black Arabs Collective page. My queerness was never a secret.

I proceeded to explain to her that my presence on the podcast was as a black rights activist not as a queer rights activist, and while I advocate for queer rights in my own time, the topics of discussion in the episode had been very clearly defined beforehand. She said that due to my queerness, their audience was going to focus on that and completely ignore everything else, that they would get ostracized for even giving me a platform and the chance to have a voice. She apologized to me and wished me the best of luck.

This moment really shocked me. It was almost like someone had taken a pin and burst the bubble of safety that I had so proudly created for myself. I realized that not everyone is progressing at the same speed that my environment is. That my safe space, both physically and virtually, only extended so far, and that the rest of our world might not be ready to give us the floor.

I won’t say that this didn’t hurt me or bring up internalized shame or that I didn’t feel embarrassed and rejected, because I did. But I also remember that when I told this story, far more people were there to support me and uplift me with love and sometimes even rage, more than there were those that told me that “this was to be expected” and to “just accept our society for what it is”. And while the illusion of my direct social physical and virtual circles made me a little too optimistic about the world outside them, they were also my anchor in reminding me that the way the world around us sees us should never, in any way, dictate how we feel about ourselves.

My silver lining has been my community and the work I see us all doing towards shifting the narrative and creating a world that, not only doesn’t demonize queerness, but celebrates it. So, for my final words, I want to promise you, that it does get better.