How I Almost Became a Homophobe
And how meeting one person forced me to question my beliefs
When I was growing up, LGBTQ+ identities were completely invisible. In the Middle East, where I spent some of my childhood and much of my adolescence, the idea that someone could be anything other than cisgender and heterosexual wasn’t just unspoken — it was unthinkable. It just wasn’t part of our world. The silence was so profound that, for the longest time, I didn’t recognize it as silence at all. I thought there was nothing there to find.
The first time I encountered anything related to the LGBTQ+ community was in the 8th grade. A girl I knew told me she had ended a 12-year friendship with her best friend from the States.
Why?
Well, because her friend had confided in her that she likes girls. At that time, it didn’t matter to me one way or another. I thought it was nothing more than middle-school drama. I shared the story with my mom, expecting her to agree that breaking off a 12-year friendship over something like that was extreme.
To my astonishment, my mom firmly supported the girl who ended the friendship. She even told me if someday I met any person who liked people of the same gender or did not identify with the gender they were born with, I must treat them the same way. I never…
