Desiree Akhavan

Being Iranian in the diaspora means gossip as your love language.

We dig into the messiest details of everyone's lives, not because we're assholes, but because we care.

It's bringing the drama, like when I overheard my father planning a party, screaming, they want kebab, we want filet, this is war, and I do not intend to lose.

It's being obsessed with status, it's suffocating your ugliest memories, and it's built into my bones.

How could I have the audacity to break free from the one rule we all silently agreed to follow blindly?

The rule that you don't get to make the rules, your parents do.

There was no precedent to being gay and Iranian.

So claiming it for myself felt ridiculous, like I was coming out as a leprechaun.

In fact, the president of Iran at that time, Ahmadinejad, had publicly announced, in my country, we don't have homosexuals.

He just failed to mention that that might have something to do with the fact that homosexuality is punishable by death.

But the moment that I brought the worst shame imaginable onto my family, something incredible happened.

Do you know what is scary after destroying the hopes and dreams of the people that you love the most, the people that created you?

Literally nothing.

In the wake of losing my family, I lost my fear.

I had no idea that fear had been driving my life up until that point.

Fear of being strange, wrong, ugly, bad.

I was always so afraid I was embarrassing myself.

But from the moment I came out, none of that really mattered anymore.

There was no way to out-shame myself.

So as we stopped talking, I started writing.