For National Coming Out Day 2020, them. is highlighting the many different ways there are to come out, navigate queer visibility, and come into one’s own. Check out more of our Coming Out Day stories here.
There’s a moment that Fawzia Mirza sometimes returns to on Coming Out Day. She was watching Milk, the 2008 biopic about civil rights leader Harvey Milk, which stresses the immense political power of LGBTQ+ people living their truths. But although Mirza thought its message was beautiful and moving, it felt like a threat to her precarious existence as a Muslim, Pakistani woman who was trying to figure out how to be queer.
“It's about the necessity for coming out, and yet I was totally in the closet when I was watching it, even though I was with a girlfriend at the time,” Mirza told them. “I was terrified because I thought, ‘I don't think I can do this thing that I'm celebrating.’”
Mirza is out, in her own way. Although she had a “secret girlfriend” for close to a year, she came out to her mother over the instant messaging service Gchat in 2010 while sitting in the Atlanta airport waiting for a flight. She recalled that was a “momentous day” for her: She had just broken up with her girlfriend and had just gotten her first writing job in Los Angeles. She needed to talk to her mother about what was happening in her life but knew that as a conservative, deeply religious woman, she could never fully be a part of it.
When Mirza told her mother that the woman she thought was her daughter’s “roommate” wasn’t, she responded, “How could you be so selfish?”
To fill that space in her life, Mirza started unpacking the trauma of the closet in her work. Her one-woman show, Me, My Mom & Sharmila, explores her personal attempt to reconcile the seemingly clashing aspects of her multifaceted identity, and the OutFest Award-winning feature Signature Move, which Mirza starred in and co-wrote, finds hope and reconciliation at the end of that story.
If her fictional self was able to find the space to be out in a brown family, Mirza recognizes that the real-world equivalent is still working on it. Below, Mirza discusses why it’s okay to navigate the coming process in your own way, even if you can’t come out immediately.
Every year the LGBTQ+ community celebrates National Coming Out Day on October 11. When that date comes around, how do you react to it? How do you take it in?
Whenever any sort of event comes around again, I often reflect on, “What did I write last year?” Because we're always doing posts now in this social media world commemorating or remembering the importance of a moment or what it means to you. With National Coming Out Day, I'm always reminding people that it's essential for us to recognize who we are and be proud of who we are — and also it's OK if you can't come out. Sometimes people get caught up in the idea of: "It's 2020. It's such a different world, and we can all be exactly who we want to be." If this year has proven anything to us, it's that nothing is really what you think it to be. Everyone's situation — their life, their reality — is completely different. I think that's the same thing for coming out. No one's situation is the same. Just because I'm out and can talk about it doesn't mean 10 years ago, I could. There's plenty of people who can't. It's not safe for them to.
When you talk about those who can't come out or just don't have that privilege, how does that intersect with your own story?
I was the person who had a secret girlfriend that I wasn't able to tell myself was actually my girlfriend. I wasn't able to come out to myself about having a girlfriend, much less come out to the people around me. This was not at the age of 15 or 20. I was, like, 29 doing this. I ended up meeting someone who I had a connection with and became my girlfriend for three years. I even moved in with her, and I still wasn't out. My family didn't know, and I still couldn't say those words of identifiers — gay, lesbian, queer — or talk about my sexual orientation in any way, yet I was living as a gay person. One of the best things that ever happened for me was that we broke up, and it forced me to reconcile what being gay meant to me. That's why I became a filmmaker: I was trying to assess if I could be gay and Muslim and South Asian and love Bollywood at the same time. Did I have to sacrifice one or all of those things in order to be a gay person?
One of the things that people said to me at that time was: “Why don't you write your mama a letter and just tell her you're gay?” And my reaction was: “My mother will rip up that letter and slap me across the face with it. Do you even understand what you're saying?” I didn't have the language at the time to understand why that felt problematic to me, but I just knew that it didn't make sense. It felt insane to me to do that. The idea of “just come out, just do it, just tell your mother, it's fine” is a very white, Western way of thinking of queerness. Even that phrase “coming out” is so one-dimensional, very Western, because like to me, I'm like, “What am I coming out about?” Growing up, I wasn't allowed to drink. I wasn't allowed to eat pork. I wasn't allowed to date boys or go to prom. I was not allowed to even hang out with boys. So suddenly, I'm supposed to go up to my mother and say, “Mom, I'm having sex with a woman?” That is really not the smartest way to get your Muslim, South Asian mother on your side.
My mother is no longer trying to hook me up with a man. She knows that we are at odds, and she still doesn't accept me being queer and will not meet the person I'm in a relationship with. I'm a very out, very comfortable, very confident person. Yet I get that relationship that white people hope that brown people can have, it’s probably never going to happen. Part of my journey has been to reconcile the fact that that's okay, too. I have to be okay with that or else I will never be OK with myself and with my life choices. That's my space in life.
Was there ever a moment in which it was made clear to you that being queer wasn't an option? Or was it something that was implied?
There were more implications that queerness wasn't an option. In my family, we didn't use words like “gay” or “sex.” We didn't even say the word "period." There's just a lot of shame associated around having a body, much less talking about gay culture or gay people. When you're Muslim, you study the Quran. Just like in Christianity, the Sodom and Gomorrah verse exists in Quran as well, and that verse is used to condemn homosexuality. I don't remember talking about the word homosexuality, but I remember just that verse. As Asians, we have such a rich culture of queerness and transness that's built into the cultural fabric of our people, and through colonization, queer and trans people were stripped of their power, status, and money and reduced to being the lowest caste in our society.
I have this moment that I've actually written into the screenplay of my one-woman play, and it's a moment I remember of me and my mom, shopping in Pakistan, and a trans woman was walking by. My mother pokes me and laughs, and that moment is so clear to me. Before I told her, “Mom, I have a girlfriend,” the reference I had is that. If you're raised to think that groups of people — gay people, trans people, queer people, non-binary people — are funny or people to laugh at, when you enter into the space of recognition of “Oh, I think I am also queer,” then you feel less than as well. For me to feel the confidence I do now, having this conversation with you now, it's taken years and years of deconstructing why I am so afraid of being gay. It has its roots in my mother, it has its roots in culture, and it has its roots in shame.
Sometimes when there are people in our lives and we have these things about us that we don't tell them, it can create a distance there. It removes us from other people. When it comes to your mother, how did you reckon with that space there?
That's why I write, because I end up getting to have those conversations on the page. I don't know if I would have gotten to this place where I do have a lot of compassion and love for my mother and for folks who don't get it. It's through writing about it, thinking, and processing. It's about trying to imagine: What did that person go through to make them who they are? That's a question that comes up in my work a lot: How do we become who we are? I am who I am because my mother was who she was and because my father, my parents, and my family were who they were, and they were impacted by so much else. At least in South Asia, we don't talk about the trauma of the land, the partition of the subcontinent and the impact that had on our families. Millions of people died during that time. In some ways, it feels maybe removed, but I feel like living through this global pandemic is a point of revelation or reckoning. We came from somewhere. We are impacted by those other generations, and it's essential and important to try to understand that history because it does explain what came before us and how we got to be here. It doesn't mean you have to forgive anyone; it doesn't mean you have to have them in your life. But I think it can create more space for you yourself, to have grace for yourself, and space for maybe the relationship that will never be.
I recently got married, and I am now in a place where I think: “OK, I will never have the wedding that my siblings had, and that will never be thrown for me.” That wasn't going to get thrown for me, and we kept it a secret for a long time. I realized that if I was living a life always waiting for this thing to happen — or my mother to say the thing that I was waiting to hear — I was actually not living my life. I was living in limbo. I’m still going to cry about the fact that my mother wasn’t at my wedding. I couldn't even tell her about it because I would just have to carry the weight of her sadness instead of her celebrating my joy. And yet, why would I put my joy on hold for a thing I'll never have? I'm going to commit to my positivity, my kindness, my joy, and my love.
It's weird because I write about my mom almost every day in some form or another. And right now, I know she's mad at me. Even when you publish this, she'll probably be mad at me about something, but not being ruled by that not being ruled by that person's feelings is key.
The dominant narrative for queer folks — or so we're told — is the coming out story. That is, in a sense, the story that defines our entire lives, so much so that we have this day where we return to it every year. When you think about the experiences that got you here, what's that narrative instead? If it's not the coming out narrative, what is it?
I've always wanted to write something — maybe it’s a book — I want to call “My Four Wives.” For me, it’s the people who without whom I would be dead, would not have created, or would not be sitting doing the work I'm doing. I would not be where I am without all of the people who have populated my life, who have lifted me up, and who have collaborated to keep me alive. That's definitely the story.
To be fair, I love the coming out story. I know, people are like, “Oh, I'm so tired of watching that movie” or “I'm so tired of reading that book about someone's coming out.” I want to see those stories because we don't have enough of them. We don't have enough of every person in the world, of every different background, every struggle, every journey, and every path, I feel like all of those need to be told. I want to write them and want to help people write them. I want to get those stories into the mainstream because everyone craves being seen, and you want to see someone else who went through something that looked like your experience. The more we tell those stories, then we get to hear about them. It's not just about gay people; it's about seeing all kinds of other people populate our worlds.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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