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Ess' story

I’m a woman in my early thirties. I live with my partner and we’ve been together for nearly six years. I came out to my mother when I was 25ish. It was a really daunting thing to do. It had been on my mind for a quite a while, actually since I had met my partner and knew that we were going to spend our lives together. I didn’t want to lie to my family and live my life feeling like I had something to be ashamed of and therefore be scared to tell people.

I left home to go and study when I was eighteen and I had never really gone back to live with my parents. Of course this was not really a respectable way for a woman to live her life but I managed to do it and resist being married off anyway. After all I knew I couldn’t live under my parent’s rule and live subject to what seemed to me their authoritarian and hypocritical values. Nevertheless, I was still very worried about telling my parents that I was a lesbian and that actually the person I live with is not just a really good friend but my partner. I didn’t fear any physically threatening behaviour but I guess I did fear rejection. I didn’t recognise that at the time because I had had a far from perfect relationship with them and was probably always bordering on the edge of being rejected and in fact there were long periods of time where we hardly spoke. Despite all that they still knew which buttons too push to make me feel incredibly guilty and be the one who was responsible for making them miserable especially being the eldest of four children.

My mother’s initial reaction was of shock but not at the fact that I was a lesbian, because I suspected that everyone already knew that, but at the audacity I obviously had in admitting it to her. Anyway, she soon came out of her shock in order to tell me two things; firstly that I had to reconcile this ‘thing’ myself with God and secondly not to tell my father or grandmother. Basically she wanted me to keep it all under wraps so that my coming out to her would actually have no effect what so ever because I still had to carry on lying about my sexuality anyway. Of course, at the time I was just so relieved to get it out the way, that I didn’t say anything else. I was too desperate to just get away. It was not till much later when I began to realise that coming out is a lifelong process and not something you do in one go, that I become angry at what my mother had said.

I was angry at her firstly for insinuating that somehow my sexuality and relationship was morally wrong. It seemed to me that her need to keep up appearances and ensure that no one knew who I really am was morally wrong. It just echoed all the hypocrisies that I had hated whilst growing up in a close nit Muslim community in the south east of England. As for my sexuality, the only thing I regretted was that I didn’t fully understand it and come out properly to myself earlier in my life. I guess I had been too busy trying to understand how and why the majority of Muslims’ understandings of Islam were so backward and repressive towards women. But this time was well spent because it enabled me to understand that my sexuality was not wrong in God’s eyes as my mother saw it. That actually Islam as a religion or source of spirituality could be very liberating and empowering. I realised that actually it was human beings (usually men’s) interpretations of Quran and hadith that gave rise to traditions and norms that were so suffocating. I discovered that there were lots of Muslim thinkers, both men and women, today and in the past that did not think like that but were actually very progressive about issues including sexuality.

This confirmed my instinctive unproblematic response to discovering my sexuality and happiness at the fact that I was fortunate enough to find someone that I could share my life with. The unhappy part of course is how others see you, judge you and sometimes harass you. Although I had managed to present my mother with some of the information on a more progressive Islam than she was used to dishing out, I could see that she did understand and accept some of it, but nothing but her self could change the other obstacles to her and my family’s acceptance as a ‘respectable’ member of the family. But at least now I live my life knowing that I’m not hiding myself and my life from my father or my grandmother. My father even managed to admit one day that he didn’t understand ‘how it works’! For me that’s a step in the right direction, if only a minuscule one because it gives my life recognition, if only momentarily. Ironically my grandmother, who had a horrible marriage herself, has no problem in recognising my life with my partner because over time she has come to see us for what we are: two people who love and take care of each other just like in any other relationship and she understands the value and importance of that above ‘what people are going to say’. She even bought us a double duvet!

As for outside my immediate family my life and how I live it will always be hushed up when uncles and aunts ask where I am or what I’m doing these days. That’s why it has been important for me to meet and connect with other women from a Muslim background who also feel proud of their sexuality and want to share that and be able to celebrate it as well as discuss and share the difficulties that we all experience because of it. Of course nothing can replace the ideal of having our own family (and society for that matter) accept us for who we are but in the meantime for those of us for whom that’s unlikely to be a reality anytime soon, there is hope and love in the friendships and families that we can and do form with each other.

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