November 4, 2024

Photo-Illustration: by the Cut; Photos: Getty Images

This week’s caller is a gay, devout Muslim man who feels as if he’s “sitting on a fault line and staying atop it means that there is the threat of it crumbling at any given moment.” He wants to find a relationship with someone who shares his same traditional values and emphasizes chastity until marriage. “The polar opposites of extreme secularism in the U.S. — in the gay community specifically — and extreme homophobia within the Muslim American community have been exhausting to exist in.” His family, who tried sending him to conversion programs after he first came out, think that “being gay is not a sin, but having a gay life would be.”

In this wide-ranging and moving conversation with Esther Perel, she refocuses his question. It is less about wanting to find an impossibly perfect partner and more about the dilemma between living religiously and living authentically as a gay man. “Either I have my family, but I feel lifeless inside,” she explains, “or I allow myself to experience intimacy with a man and I lose my roots, my family.”

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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

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A biweekly newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.