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The love you have for your parents is full of so many complicated emotions — you understand their failings, but you still love them. Was that love always there, or were you only able to return to it when you understood their flaws?
I did love them in early childhood. Before sexuality got in the way, there was a really pure love. But in that quite teenage way, I was binary about the whole thing; the complexity of loving people that you hate, or hating people that you love, wasn’t something I wanted to entertain. So I loved them when I was young, hated them when I was a teenager, and thought I would feel that way forever. It’s odd, because I wouldn’t put up with homophobia or that kind of behaviour from friends, or from anyone who wasn’t my family. But there’s an inexplicable love there that is so primal, especially with my mum. In a way, I don’t know if I’m powerful enough to decide if I love her or not, because it’s so overwhelming.
Only as an adult, after therapy, after talking to my parents and understanding that they had their own story, did I realise how flawed they were. And then I was able to forgive them.
You wrote about a period when you didn’t want them to contact you unless it was with an apology. Did you then eventually decide it would be more painful to not have them in your life at all, than to embrace the complexity of the relationship?
That enforced separation was about self-preservation and knowing what my boundaries were. I often think it would’ve been easier if [my parents] were more abusive, or more horrible, because then I could demarcate a clear distinction of, “they’re terrible, I don’t want anything to do with them.” But although they did a lot of hurtful things, they are also wonderful in other ways — and that’s a much harder place to inhabit. I think we want an easy way to emotionally process stuff; unfortunately that isn’t possible. And so the complexity of learning to love my parents as they are, and learning that they love me even though they might not come to a drag show, or support me...it’s a harder place to get to. It requires a realism about what you expect from a relationship.
Once I established boundaries - after the enforced separation - I got what I needed, and I felt safer going back into the relationship, because they no longer said the kind of things they used to say to me. When we speak now, it’s always nice, and there’s an understanding of what’s tolerated. Like with any kind of relationship, there is compromise, there are rules. We’ve learnt to love each other.
That forgiveness sounds like an act of love, because part of love is trying to see another person’s perspective, but it must have been very difficult to find in that context.
I do think, especially if you’re queer and you’ve got a narrative in your head of “my parents don’t accept me, therefore I’m the complete victim here,” it can be easier to see family as pure villains. I did that for a long part of my life. But everyone has their own story. And the end of my book is really about understanding what my mum went through in her life, and actually why she feels threatened by my queerness, because of her own misgivings about how she was treated growing up. That is not to condone or endorse that behaviour from her - because it is inexcusable - but it’s about understanding where it came from, as an act of empathy.
I try to come from a place of thinking, everyone is trying to act with the best intention, but that intention might be completely fucked for various reasons. And I want to give that empathy to my family as well. I’m also a person who doesn’t believe in holding much hate, just because it’s not good for the soul. It kind of rots you. So I definitely felt happier being less hateful towards my parents. What’s happened has happened, and I can’t change that, but I can change the future, I suppose.
Was therapy a turning point for you?
The thing that changed for me was realising that some of [my parents] behaviour had nothing to do with me, and more to do with their own problems. Being a child and a teenager is an inherently narcissistic experience; we understand the world through an adolescent lens, and everything seems like it’s about us, even if it’s not. It’s a basic point, but going, ‘oh, you have your own story here, that has informed the way that you’ve treated me’ ...that was helpful. It stopped me from believing that everything was my fault. And it was also a shift to humanising [my parents] a little bit.
One of the forms of love I’ve come across exists between strangers, in the kindness they can give to each other. There seemed to be lots of those small interactions in your book with people that changed the course of your life. Did you feel love in those moments?
I think it’s also part of queer politics, actually. Non-heteronormative experiences are about non-traditional family love. So I think what’s been really hard about this pandemic is being stuck at home. I’ve always believed in the magic of the city, or the magic of space and queer venues, and the fact that there might be someone round the corner who could change your life at any moment.
Whether it’s love, I don’t know. But I do think that, although the world can be horrible, there is also kindness hiding in lots of places and you have to stay open to it as much as you can. How I go into an environment often affects what I receive from it. If I go in looking for kindness, I probably will find it.
Another place you found love was with other drag performers. How did they feel like family?
With biological family, the thing that brings you together is DNA and having lived together for a long time. With a drag family, or a queer family, what brings you together is the fact that you’re queer, and that feels like something shared that other people might not get. It’s an alternative system of care.
My biological family was like, we’ll protect you - maybe financially - but we won’t accept the intrinsic elements of your identity, which are so important to you. Whereas a queer family celebrates parts of you that, in your biological family, were violated, or not allowed, or not understood. So you feel loved for the person you actually are. I think that’s beautiful; the fact that queer people can make a family as they go along.
You said that, in dating, you let yourself be treated as you felt you deserved to be. Where do you think that feeling of not deserving love came from: the early experiences you wrote about religion or school, or your parents' reaction?
Probably a combination. The school stuff and the Islam stuff weren’t as much about love, that was more about existential fears, feeling sinful and disgusting. But my mum would say, “you’re impossible to love.” So I had the feeling that being who I was ..yes that would send me to hell in the afterlife, but in the present life, it would lead me to being disowned by my parents, or to be the root of so much of their unhappiness.
Bear in mind that we were really close, and I had a lot of their love until it went away. I’d had direct experience of losing love because of becoming who I was. So a lot of it was mistrust.
I can see why that mistrust made dating complicated, because at some point you have to believe a person when they say they love you, which can be hard if you don’t believe you deserve to be loved.
Totally. A big problem I had was acting a lot; I was always lying about one side of myself. And that’s not conducive to opening yourself up to love, because you are intentionally erasing parts of yourself and, eventually, the bit that you’re hiding will come out.
So trying to occupy all the disparate sides together, living out that contradiction and not having a neat narrative...I think that is more honest. It also makes you open up more to love, because when someone meets you they see the complexity, there’s less chance it’s a lie. And whatever love does happen might have more of a chance.
In my most recent dating life, even if something has not been successful, it has been more honest. I used to hide photos of my drag. Or with more masculine guys who liked being dominant, I would pretend to be dumber than I was, or pretend to make less money than I actually did, because I knew it would make them more comfortable. Then on date three or four they would realise I’m not that way at all, and they would hate it. I don’t hide any of that stuff now when I go on dates. I have faith that, if [someone] does like me, they will like me for who I am. And sometimes they won’t, but I can’t control that. The truth will come out anyway.
A few years ago I would have hidden it all and believed I could convince a person to love me despite who I am. That was a recycling of a relationship with my family, I suppose. Sort of like, if I can get this really masculine gay man to find me attractive, despite who I am, then I am ultimately loveable because I will have convinced someone who shouldn’t love me to love me. And if I can do that, maybe I can convince my parents too. But that’s not how it should be, and [understanding that] that was a turning point.
Is faith a source of love in your life today, now that you have a different relationship to it than the one you were taught about growing up?
Different muslims have different ideas about what Allah represents. For me, Allah is about your innate relationship with yourself. And what started as a very self-hating relationship has turned into a more self-loving one. I have a pragmatic approach to religion; I was raised religious so it’s in my DNA, a bit like family. And I can either believe all the bad stuff I was told about it, or I can rethink it, and find the good stuff. So for me, it’s [about asking], what do I do with this thing that I’ve been lumped with? Which is not the most magical response! But it’s about asking what I wanted from God, rather than what God needed from me. I don’t pray five times a day or anything, but it is like an innate sense of self-love.
What do you think it means to love now?
To embrace complexity. I think relationships fail when you expect one person to do everything, or be everything. And just sitting in the odd complexity and contradictions in people would probably make us feel more comfortable in love.
What do you wish you’d known about love?
I feel like I still don’t know it. Maybe I hope I learn to believe it and to accept it, if it does arrive.
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