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During my sophomore year of high school, I experienced my first, full-blown queer crush. Her name was Nora. She had long brown hair and the kind of strong, butch body I would later come to recognize as my type. I felt confused; more than anything, I wanted to desire the sweaty, taut teenage boys around me. At the same time, I wondered: If this desire was emerging from my body, wasn’t it human? As the performance artist and sex educator Wazina Zondon wrote about her coming-out process, mirroring my own: “I can’t help this, so it must be natural.”
For over two decades, Zondon has gathered seemingly disparate personal stories about queerness and placed them into the collective, proving that none of us are alone. The 42-year-old educator is best known for the collaborative project Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love, which uplifts stories at the intersection of Islam and queerness. Founded in 2011 with the artist Terna Tilley-Gyado, the performance has served as a site of catharsis and reflection on stages and college campuses across the United States.
In one piece, “Dear Boo,” Zondon writes to her former lovers. It is a crescendo to the performance and an insistence that there is no singular, white-washed coming-out process. “Every person I’ve ever dated has often given me advice on how to come out to my family and this was a way of talking back to them,” she says. “My family is not your struggle.” The reclamation of rituals, selves, and stories runs throughout her projects. Her most recent work “Burial Project,” explores what a dignified death looks like if someone was not offered integrity while they were alive.
In addition to her creative practice, Wazina Zondon has been a sexual health educator since college. During that time, she has worked with incarcerated people, high school students, and sex workers to understand the relationship between pleasure and safety. Although these may seem like disparate themes, Zondon shows how they share a single source: how all bodies are worthy of care through every stage of their lives. Below, we discuss teenage crushes, the importance of “nonchalant” sex education, and how faith practices can deepen and expand our relationship to queerness.
I’d love to start by hearing about how Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love came to be.
Terna and I were educators in New York City and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 was approaching. There was this sense that people didn’t know how to talk about it. We were asking ourselves: “What could help?” We decided to host a study group called Interrupting Islamophobia, where we met the theater-maker Laura Marie Thompson. She offered us the opportunity to make a theater project about our experiences. It was salient because we both felt hyper-visible and invisible for different reasons. Terna, as a Nigerian Liberian raised as a Black woman, is often invisible because Islam has such a racialization to it in the United States. We also both shared feeling invisible as queer people in different ways, so we asked ourselves, “What if we did a three-day event that not only interrupted Islamophobia but interrupted some of these other layers?”
We didn’t want to center this sad deficit conversation of “Oh, it must be so hard to be queer and Muslim” which is the thing that we’ve always answered at events. Even queer people who have glitter on their forehead because they went to a queer Ash Wednesday event or a radical Purim party will turn around and say “Oh, it must be so hard.” I’m like, “You’re doing the same thing right now!”
How has the performance evolved over the past ten years?
We’ve added the soundscape. Every piece ends with a clip of a song that was important to us. There’s a soundtrack from my high school years and Terna’s. There’s Ani DeFranco, Depeche Mode, and Boy George. We were also able to collaborate with Alsarah of Alsarah and the Nubatones. She’s a Sudanese musician who grew up in the States. She is remarkable in every language, but in Arabic, she creates a cellular shift. She saw the performance and wanted to contribute. There’s a story that Terna tells about the first prayers that she learned, and then we’ll pause, and Alsarah will sing the prayer either recorded or live. It’s powerful because you’re hearing it from a woman. Different schools of thought will say, “Oh, the call to prayer shouldn’t be done by women, or is not usually done by women.” You get to hear it in this artistic way, and then you’re like, “Oh my God, it’s a woman singing it!”
I love the story you tell about the first person who recognized you as queer.
It was the first couple of days of ninth grade. Lydia Deetz and Wednesday Adams were — and still are — my fashion icons and influences. I was wearing my Doc Martens, and that was what we overlapped on. Her name was Elaine and she was this beautiful pasty-face goth queen who floated up the top of the stairs and asked me something about my boots. And then, out of nowhere, she asked “Are you gay or bisexual?”
I had never been asked that. And I was like, “Yes, yes I am.” No one ever asked me if I was straight, but just assumed I was. The language of it matters, too. I had inherited negative connotations around the word “dyke” and “gay.” But in this case, I knew that her question was promising. I was like, “Oh, I can feel the heartbeat in my crotch.”
I had crushes on boys in the past but it was just that: a crush. It was not deeply sexual. But she injected something into me and I could say, “Yes, I’m queer.” I’ve had similar experiences or moments where I’m like, “Yes, I’m Muslim.” It feels like an affirmation.
How did you decide to become a sex educator?
I had questions and wanted to answer them for myself. I never intended to offer the answers to other people. When I went to school as an undergrad, my dream was to do international health work for the UN. In college, I started getting involved with Planned Parenthood and doing sexual health stuff on campus. Then I ran street outreach with high school students, who were peer educators trained to hand out condoms and safer sex packets. I loved it. I loved being able to bring young queer Wazina into it and ask “How can we talk about sex ed in a way that doesn’t tokenize, dismiss, or desexualize? In a way that doesn’t make it over-the-top or super titillating or put too much attention on one or two communities? How do I talk about queerness in an almost nonchalant way?”
Yes. Can you talk about how learning to trust our desires can be a salve to the homophobic and transphobic world that surrounds us?
When I think about the different parts of sexuality, I think about a pizza. There’s anatomy, sexual orientation, all of that. But then pleasure is that little topper. It goes across the entire circle and it straddles everything. Understanding what makes you feel good provides access to your desires. "What is it that I want? What is it I want to be? Who is it that I like?" After that comes the language. As an English language learner, it took me a while to know what word works for different feelings. In Farsi, I sometimes didn’t have words for a lot of things, but I had a feeling. In English, I might learn that word, but it still doesn’t capture that deep feeling inside.
Being able to trust our desires allows us to continue. For me, if my gut says something, then I can follow that. Specifically when it comes to Islam and being Muslim, I again just knew that there was nothing wrong with me. Even as a child, I knew that some of the double standards happening around me were not because of God. They were because of the cultural context in which I lived, like being a teenage girl in New York City.
I resonate with that. From a young age I had this feeling that “I’m made this way, so how can God not love me?”
Yeah. If we didn’t have that, none of us would’ve self-expressed in the ways that we did or survived. How would any of us make it through if we didn’t listen to our desires? That is where we get our fire.
How do you approach sex education for people coming out of religious or spiritual contexts that have created shame or "scar tissue" around pleasure?
First, I hope to notice where my perspective and relationship with faith inform my approach and notice how I share that in big or small ways. I share [my own experiences] because there’s no “correct” destination or moment of completion: there’s noticing, undoing, and building on and around the scar tissue. I also emphasize that growing within and exploring our sexual identities can be done within our faith.
As an educator, I know it's deeply harmful when faith, spirituality, and the traditions of others are judged or placed in a good-or-bad dichotomy, even when there are painful experiences. My role is to hold space for all — including those who do not identify with a faith or religious practice but have experienced harmful messages about their identities because of another’s interpretations. There are people of faith, faith leaders, cultural contexts, and people in our lives who cause harm to us in our name but we know our religion is the site for our joy, pleasure, comfort, identity, and community.
Are there other projects you’re working on now?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the end of my life. How will being a queer Muslim pan out? When I die, depending on who I’m with or who my lover is at the time, they may or may not be able to be part of my final rite. They may not be able to wash my body or be a part of the funeral or prayer, whatever the case may be. Similarly, for non-cis people, will they get the proper burial or the proper pronouns being used? So I’ve been working on this to practice the choreography of death and dying.
For Muslims, specifically, it’s a skill share. How do you wrap the body? What is the final prayer? I share that because to me it’s like puberty, sex ed, and all of the different milestones we touch on in our development. This is the final change your body will go through and the final way that your body will interact. And God willing, it’s in a respectful, loving, and cared-for way.
It feels like it’s all pouring from the same stream of how we ensure bodies are cared for throughout every phase of life.
Yeah, and also cared for, for me, within the faith. For me, being a sex educator is informed by being Muslim because I know that Islam does affirm my body. I’m down to cherry-pick my interpretations of things, but as a Muslim, abortions are permissible. Being a sexually satisfied woman or partner is a thing there.
Yes. I feel like your work is about saying yes to the possibilities that unfurl when we feel whole.
That’s my hope. That’s my hope.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.