Coming Clean: growing up gay and Arab in the South

What’s gay, Arab, and spent impressionable adolescence in a backwards Kentucky town?

OK, I’m more of a who than a what, but my life, regardless of interrogative pronoun, has been quite the riddle needing solving, or perhaps it’s become an anecdotal joke.

It could be the setup or the punch line, which perhaps it is now when I regale my friends with tales of stunted high school homosexuality, secret moonlit trysts at the now defunct Snake Pit (you’re great, too, Beauty Bar) and heterosexual role play that played out far too long, but it certainly wasn’t always funny.

In fact, it was the quite the opposite, starting even as a pre-tween.

Being me was mind-bendingly confusing. I was fiercely secretive, desperate (hard to admit), and had the kind of hackneyed teen angst that manifests in dyeing already black hair blacker, sneaking swills of scotch, drowning all my energy in the Gemma Ward diet and listening to Nirvana on headphones all night.

Denial often doesn’t have a starting point. It just is, and then it just is the most powerful force.

Basically, I went through what so many closeted gay guys and gals go through – stuffing it all down one way or another.

Sure, we all have different paths, different environments, different outlets and different thresholds for pain, but we all share one thing: being a cog in a hot-button issue and a minority in a turbulent world.

A fabulous, progressive, and, let me just say, good-looking minority! But a minority, nonetheless.
Minority: It might as well have been my middle name, if my middle name wasn’t my father’s first name (a tradition I now proudly carry).

But I distinctly remember when being an overall minority really hit me. It was the realization that most, if not all, of my schoolmates thought of me as the Arab girl or the Muslim girl, not just as a girl or just as a person, if I’m being particularly ambitious. That’s what defined me in so many of their eyes, and they couldn’t see me as anything more. To many of them, there wasn’t much less.

And as the comparisons to a former Iraqi dictator became all too common, I began to believe them.
Did I mention the Bibles that were left anonymously in front of my locker monthly – a not-so-subtle indication that I was firmly entrenched in the arrogantly pitying Bible Belt?

So, to be gay, GAY, under these circumstances – I couldn’t fathom it. While I did finally identify as bi (to everyone but my family) starting my senior year of high school – by then, it was abundantly clear I was queer, and I couldn’t bring myself to use a word like “straight” to describe myself – it still never fit quite right.

Saying “bi” was bad enough in those parts. I got more than enough taunts, sneers and not-so-quiet whispers for it. The gossip mill had been churning for years as it was. But for me to say “gay” at that fragile point was to accept being an outcast on top of being an outcast, a freak on top of a freak.

I couldn’t handle it.

I couldn’t handle it for many years afterward, either. I have the wedding ring to prove it. A marriage that I had annulled after two months, and a low point that sent me on a no-U-turns-allowed ride to self-acknowledgment.

Now, much further down the road, I can more than handle it; I can embrace it.

After much soul-searching and, let’s be honest, much therapy, I have come clean.

I feel that those of us from less-than-openly loving backgrounds have to consciously scrub off the thick layer of damaging opinions, beliefs, typecasting, judgment and ridicule that has caked onto our spirit over the years before we can acknowledge the truth about who we are. I know so many LGBT individuals who were able to do this work and come clean in the midst of their own shitstorm, and I find it very admirable, indeed.

I wish I was able to at that point, as well, but I wasn’t, and I am OK with that now.
Now that I am out, it’s dynamic what I can draw from the past and the isolation of being several degrees of minority growing up.

I am so accustomed to being defined by the unchangeable things about myself that it no longer fazes me. If someone now meets me and sees me as nothing but a big ‘mo, I don’t waver. I know the feeling, and it’s not my problem. I can look them right in the eye and smile.

My rough past has resulted in an ability to bubble up to the surface for air regardless of who wants to weigh me down with what they thought I was or want me to be.

Being a minority, being a freak, being a queer are welcome additions to my character. They are quirky badges of courage I no longer hide under my bed.