by Abdi Nazemian
Many years ago, after my first book – an adult gay novel called The Walk-In Closet was published – a wonderful and open-minded Iranian therapist hosted a book club at her home. The attendees were largely Iranians of my parents’ generation. They all dressed for the event like it was an awards show. It was very formal. And I was very afraid. Because up until then, I had largely been hiding my queerness from my cultural community. Or maybe the right way to put it is that they had been choosing not to see it. And now I had written a novel that featured an Iranian gay man as a lead character, and I was sitting in front of the community that had made me feel so marginalized as a kid. I was making them see my queerness, because it was right there on the page. One of the first questions was asked by a man about my dad’s age. “Why do you need parades?” he asked. “Why can’t you just be gay in private?”
Let me rewind the story a little bit now. If you’ve read my most recent novel, Like a Love Story, you know a little about the shame and fear I carried in my early life. If you haven’t, I’ll fill in some key details. I was born in Iran, a country where being gay is currently punishable by death. And the Iranian diaspora who left Iran took some of that homophobia with them. Growing up, I spoke a language with no word for being gay that wasn’t a slur. And I heard a constant stream of homophobia from members of my cultural community. Add to that the fact that AIDS was ravaging the gay community for my childhood and teen years. I knew I was gay from a very early age, but I always felt that coming out would both shame my family and be a death sentence. Not a great recipe for coming out.
By high school and college, I was living in the United States and was lucky enough to find teachers and mentors who exposed me to queer films and books. One of the most impactful was a documentary called The Times of Harvey Milk. His most famous quote has always stuck with me: “Gay brothers and sisters,…You must come out. Come out… to your parents… I know that it is hard and will hurt them but think about how they will hurt you in the voting booth. Come out to your relatives… come out to your friends… if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors… to your fellow workers… to the people who work where you eat and shop… come out only to the people you know, and who know you. Not to anyone else. But once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions.”
But coming out when I was young wasn’t easy, because what I discovered – as the quote implies- is that I had to come out again and again and again. I had to come out to multiple people, and sometimes to the same people more than once because they refused to accept and see my queerness.
Let’s fast forward again. After graduating college, I decided to move to Los Angeles with my best friend. I got a job as an assistant to a producer and other than answering phones all day, my biggest responsibility was reading all the scripts she was sent. Dozens a week. After about a year of this, I convinced a friend that we could write a script together. We did, and we stumbled into a career writing movies that felt like a miracle. But I had one big frustration. When I tried to put personal things into these scripts, they never got made. I was told to cut every gay character from one script. I was asked if I would consider making an Iranian family white to make the roles more castable.
That’s when I had an a-ha moment. If I wrote a book, then nobody could tell me they needed it to be castable, or that they needed millions of dollars to finance it. It was out of this need to tell my story that The Walk-In Closet was born. But the story had a lot more roadblocks than I imagined. The book was rejected by every major publisher. The feedback was generally positive, but publishers seemed confused by what the book was. They all told me the book wasn’t enough of something. Not gay enough. Not literary enough. I gave up on it, and the book sat on a shelf for a very long time.
When I had my kids, my writing career was at its lowest point. The one-two punch of the Hollywood writers’ strike and the recession had largely put an end to the kind of script deals I was getting. My writing partner and I parted ways professionally. My book had been rejected everywhere. And I had two kids to take care of. I chose to do what I once thought unthinkable: I made my Iranian dad’s dreams come true by going to business school. Every other weekend for two years, I studied statistics and finance and accounting. I was fully prepared to stop writing and find another path to survival. But a funny thing happened in those two years of business school. In classes about marketing and branding, I started to see a new path forward for myself as a writer in which I took control, instead of waiting for publishers and studio executives to validate me. I started to rewrite The Walk-In Closet, and I plotted a way to self-publish.
When I called my book agent and told him I had put the wheels in motion to self-publish The Walk-In Closet, he surprised me by saying that the agency could help with this. They had started an imprint to help authors put books out. They wouldn’t be able to pay me, or to market the book, but they could guide me, handle distribution, support the process of designing a cover and copy editing. By taking control of my own narrative, I had started a process that resulted in the book being published at last.
When the book came out, I felt like I could stop finally stop coming out. Because once my queerness was on the page, it couldn’t be ignored.
Now let’s get back to where this story began. With the man who asked me, “Why do you need parades? Why can’t you just be gay in private?” Every queer person will have their own answer to this question. For me, existing in a closet is a toxic experience. The reason I celebrate gay pride is because for so long, I felt no one was proud of me. To voice your pride publicly, and to be surrounded by a community that shares and supports that pride, is a deeply healing experience. And my way of stating that pride has been writing.
The Walk-In Closet, which wasn’t gay enough or literary enough for publishers, found an audience. It won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Debut. It inspired me to write my first YA novel The Authentics. And then another, Like a Love Story, by far my most personal book and my favorite of all my books. Three books in, I’m still learning how to peel off the walls that once kept me safe from feeling vulnerable and seen.
I often get asked for writing advice by young people, and my first advice is always a version of Harvey Milk’s. Come out on the page, whatever that means to you. Write honestly about all those things people have told you to keep in a closet. Because that’s what makes you special. Because when you celebrate your own pride, you’re inviting a whole community of people to celebrate that pride with you.
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Abdi Nazemian is the author of three novels. His first, The Walk-In Closet, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Debut Fiction. His most recent, Like a Love Story, an Indie Next Pick, Walden Finalist, and Junior Library Guild selection, was awarded a Stonewall Honor, and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible, Buzzfeed, the New York Public Library and more. His screenwriting credits include the films The Artist’s Wife, The Quiet, and Menendez: Blood Brothers, and the television series The Village and Almost Family. He has been an executive producer and associate producer on numerous films, including Call Me By Your Name, Little Woods, and Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband and two children.
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