Mohsin provides an important insight into the experience of being gay and not being “white” - sadly the LGBT+ community is not always good at doing diversity beyond sexuality, and we should be role modelling inclusion!
Mohsin share a heartfelt journey – spoiler alert – which has a happy ending, but there are plenty of hints that is just his good luck and at various points in the journey it was but by the grace of God that suicide or the violence of others did not provide a full stop to the story.
Part Two ending with his coming out to his Dad – and I did weep real tears as he takes us to that moment when you say it out loud despite the consequences – because however bad the consequences of coming out, not coming out is death.
I know how hard it was to come out to my liberal minded parents who had knowingly made a gay man my sister’s godfather – and I just kind of feel silly standing next to what Mohsin faced in his conservative cultural context.
When he talks about that innocent gay child he was before he learnt to be ashamed, the stranger he became to himself, it is so sad, and so relatable – that the ‘real’ you is locked away is a very gay thing, but it is also true across a wide range of experience, shame is not an exclusively queer thing
So I will leave the last words to Mohsin …
“… my eyes fixed on a lone star… I knew that somehow, by living this half-life of mine, I had jettisoned the most important part of me. I had abandoned the little boy I had once been, full of possibility and feeling… Wherever he was now right, it felt like he was looking at that star too… It was painful to reflect on how badly I had treated him, the hatred I had shown him…. Any light in my life came from him. I offered my hand. I would not mistreat him any more. He took it. I told him I was scared too… I guided him out of the dungeon and brought him into the world and set him free. ‘I’m gay’.” (p133)
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