IN MY SHOES: I’m Queer. I’m Muslim. Deal With It.
This profile in the Los Angeles Times of a young Muslim Indian woman who came to the U.S. from Guyana as a child describes what it’s like to have to have your faith and your truth at war with one another:
All she has left of the person she used to be is contained in a 5-by-7 photo album with "Aliyah Bacchus" written in blue pen on its cover, each picture inside tucked beneath a slip of clear plastic.
There she is at 17, barely 90 pounds, smiling sourly on her wedding day in Queens, N.Y., dressed in hijab - a pearl-toned princess bridal gown shimmering with beads … The man her father chose for her stands behind Aliyah wearing a black bow tie, his hands resting on her bony shoulders.
That was before. Before she walked out on the marriage. Before her Guyana-born Muslim family discovered she was gay. Before she fled.
Aliyah is 22 now … She has traded her abaya, which she wore throughout middle and high school, for an ankle-length black trench coat and sunglasses with metallic frames. She has one piercing in her left ear, four in her right, a metal rod bridging the cartilage in the ear's upper rim, a ring in her bellybutton, another in her nose.
Aliyah is Muslim. It's a part of her identity she can't shed, like her sexuality, like her last name -- Bacchus, as in the Roman god of wine and merriment -- and like her ink-stained flesh: the angel tattooed between her shoulder blades, the dark dragons on her lower back, the polar bear on her stomach, the dying rose on her right wrist.
She knows that in some Muslim sects, homosexuality is considered a crime punishable by death. …
In America, Aliyah knows, it is acceptable to be gay. But how, she wonders, can she be true to who she is while also adhering to her family's faith? How does she reconcile both sides of her existence?
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