LOVE JIHAD: ORLANDO AND GAY MUSLIMS
By Robin Wright
When he was twenty-five, Naveed Merchant, tormented by the
tension between his Islamic faith and his homosexuality, swallowed almost three
hundred Tylenol pills. His mother and brother found him and rushed him to an
emergency room in Southern California. “But the struggle was not over just
because I told them I was gay,” he recalled, two decades later. “I believed
that I brought enormous shame on my family and that I’d never amount to
anything—and so I should just die. Every time I tried to be straight, to fake
being straight, I would get more depressed and it would lead me to a suicidal
ideation.”
For fifteen years, the New York filmmaker Parvez Sharma
attributed the death of his mother, a devout Muslim, to her discovery of his
homosexuality. She died shortly after he came out to her, when he was
twenty-one. She was livid; he was ashamed. “I always felt the pain I brought
her was responsible,” Parvez, who is now forty-one, told me this week. “I carried
a lot of guilt around for a long time.” The fact that his mother had cancer
seemed beside the point. Reconciling his Muslim and gay identities has consumed
him ever since.
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