March 1, 2024 • 47 mins
In this heartening episode, join Mike as he engages with Mohsin Zaidi, a passionate lawyer, LGBTQ activist, and best-selling author of "A Dutiful Boy". Learn about Mohsin's remarkable journey from a poor London neighborhood to his rise as a celebrated lawyer amidst the challenges and triumphs of growing up as a gay Muslim. Gain deeper insights into the complexities of societal norms, cultural identities, and Mohsin's truth-seeking voyage towards authenticity.
Dive into Mohsin's childhood where he fearlessly recounts his struggles and alienation, his diligent balancing act between becoming 'too Western' and maintaining his cultural identity, and the role of cultural traditions and religion in shaping deeply ingrained stigmas, particularly around homosexuality within the Islamic community. His balanced exploration makes space for the aspects of love, hope, and faith that guided his path, rendering an honest portrayal of life within a religious, immigrant family.
Mosin's conversation spans across societal class structures in the UK and US, highlighting the hurdles faced by individuals from lower-income backgrounds attempting to scale societal ladders. Get a candid look into his educational voyage from public education to Oxford, inspired by mentors and supporters that believed in him, teaching the immense importance of determination and hard work.
In this explosive episode, Mohsin switches gears to discuss his professional life, his shift from a corporate lawyer to a criminal barrister, and his subsequent plunge into the sphere of LGBTQ activism. Recognized as one of UK's top 20 future LGBT leaders, he reflects on his struggle for race representation within the gay community and offers valuable insights into negotiating with religiously conservative families.
Embark with us on this enlightening journey filled with profound reflections urging for acceptance and diversity, beautifully narrated by Mohsin himself. Produced by Mike Balaban and Tom Walker, with audio editing by Henry Ley.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Music.
(00:19):
This is Mike Balaban for Bammer and me with another podcast interview my guest today is Mosin Zaidi lawyer,
lgtbq activist and author of the penguin press bestseller a dutiful boy the
memoir mosin first of all i forgot to ask you beforehand in the book you go
by mos do you still use that or are you mosin now no i mean i don't mind but
(00:43):
usually mosin okay thanks Thanks for agreeing to let me interview.
Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to have the opportunity to meet.
You know, this week has kind of been crazy for me. I developed COVID.
I'm now coming out of quarantine and we still managed to salvage this thing. We did.
You know, I've read and was incredibly moved by your memoir, A Dutiful Boy, a son.
(01:04):
Dutiful Boy. Sorry, Dutiful Boy. Yeah, you got it right the first time.
You know, it's been advertised as a book that will save lives.
And I have to admit that I was brought to tears numerous times.
As I know how much we have to cover in a short period of time,
we're going to get right into it. Sure.
You beautifully convey the cultural alienation you ineluctably experienced growing
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up both Muslim and secretly gay in London in the 90s.
Can you describe some of the strict demands of Shia Islam that made growing
up in a secular society like the UK so difficult?
Hold well i suppose the first thing to say is that
when we talk about faith
it's very easy for people who don't understand or
don't come from that background to assume that religious rules or religiosity
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is somehow the same as an absence of love or for things to be cold or when you
grow up in an environment where there are strict rules around what you can and
cannot do like for example for example, we don't drink.
We have to be thoughtful about the clothes that we wear, the food that we eat,
the times that we pray, the ways that we pray, the way that we interact with the world spiritually.
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There are lots of ways in which those rules have an impact on the lives that we lead.
But I do think it's important to start answering your question by emphasizing that religion can be,
a source of great love and it can
be a source of great hope and particularly in circumstances where you don't
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have very much else faith is the thing that people hold on to and it's certainly
what I held on to so yes there were lots of strict rules around what I could
and couldn't eat or drink and and the ways in which I was supposed to behave.
But I would say that they, for the most part, were a guiding,
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welcomed force that I needed to anchor me in a situation where we had very little.
Well, particularly in today's world, where so few people have a sense of rootedness and belonging.
Absolutely. And my family were Pakistani immigrants, and we lived in a very poor part of London.
And as I write, we didn't feel as though the riches of London were available
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to us, because they weren't.
And one of the things that the book is about is also about class,
because I grew up in public housing.
And if anything that for me is
the most important aspect of the book is the journey
that one takes as an interloper between different
worlds one of those journeys being a world from being desperately poor to being
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relatively well off and what that can feel like and how complicated that can
be well I'll get to it later but I'm going to want to ask how you made that
journey because so many people are not able to do that.
What was it like for you and your family growing up in London under those conditions?
You know, it's interesting because when you're writing something like a memoir,
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you have to be careful to write from the perspective of that seven-year-old
boy and not the 30-something-year-old that is writing upon reflection.
And I think that the same is true when I answer these questions.
So in answer to your question, what was it like to grow up at that time?
It was joyful. joyful the mosque was the center
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of our lives we had family around us on
eid because we lived in a predominantly pakistani neighborhood
people were knocking on each other's doors and bringing food to each other's
houses and it didn't matter that we didn't have very much because we didn't
really appreciate it i would say the extent to which we were poor or at least
i didn't but it didn't it didn't actually have a bearing on the experiences
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of being in that environment now don't get me me wrong.
It was a place that had some serious crime issues, but feeling unsafe when you
left the house was not abnormal for me.
And so I almost felt safe anyway, if that makes sense.
The danger that comes from being in a neighborhood where there is crime was
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a ordinary part of walking down the street.
And so growing up at that time, it felt like.
Wonderfully communal in a way that i no
longer feel and i think that that is one of the things that
i do miss about growing up
at that time in that neighborhood in that culture i felt
such a sense of rootedness and
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a sense that there were a group of people
blood relatives and otherwise who i could turn
to and i'm not sure that modern day
living in places like new york and london really accommodates
that you have to wonder even in a very religious let's
say pakistani family in london in an equivalent neighborhood
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are they successfully able to
recreate that sense of security absolutely and
it's something that i think about a lot at the moment as
i talk as i think about children myself
because i'd want them to grow up with
the same sense of community that I had there are definitely parts
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of my upbringing some of the rules that aren't necessarily
for me but those rules that
sense of there being a structure that
you respect it isn't all bad despite feeling secure and loved and surrounded
there were things about you like all of us who who grew up LGBTQ that quickly
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became apparent to us that we're different.
And like many LGBTQ youth, your childhood school experiences were marked by incessant bullying.
Why did they pick on you and how did you deal with those experiences?
They picked on me because I was vulnerable. I sounded like this,
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and for those that are not British people.
People who come from my part of London do not sound like me.
They have a different type of accent.
And I sounded much more, what's the word? Refined?
Refined. I mean, I don't want to put it that way. I sounded much more middle class.
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And so that was one reason. The other reason was that I really wanted to work hard at school.
I was timid. I wasn't very confident.
Well you wanted that as much for
your parents and for the grades and
the recognition so that you would please them right
yeah absolutely and when i reflect on it now i mean for a long time i was very
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angry and upset about the way that i was treated at school but when i reflect
on the fact that all of those kids were in some way lost or wanting for something
because Because we all were.
Because although we lived in one of the richest cities in the world,
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we were almost invisible.
And when people feel invisible, they act up.
And so I don't hold any resentment towards those people anymore.
But I think that one of the reasons I was bullied was because I was an easy
target. You know, I have friends in the U.S.
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Who maybe grew up in lower-class neighborhoods with peers who spoke differently,
and they, too, found a way to learn good English and to be out of place.
What do you think it is that spurs a young 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-year-old boy to find that way? Yeah. Yeah.
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In my circumstance, and I write about this, what actually happened was that
my mum came to the UK when she was six years old, and she moved to a part of
the UK, just outside of London,
where everybody sounded the way that I do.
And so my mum has this accent, and I'm the oldest child, so I ended up learning
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English predominantly from her.
Whereas my brothers, if you speak to them, they sound very different from me and my mum.
They sound way more East London than I did. So that's my reason.
But I think you're right.
You know, there's this whole joke around the gay voice, right?
And I'm sure that plays a part in it too somewhere.
I was surprised by the relentless antipathy towards homosexuality embedded in the Islamic religion.
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Considering that modern historians feel the Prophet Muhammad never explicitly
forbade homosexual relations outright.
He opposed it, but there was no prohibition in the Quran. How did this ferocious
loathing emerge, do you think?
And as an example, kind of related, would you explain how and why your brother
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Abbas planned marriage to his fiance could easily have been derailed once it
became known you were gay?
I think the very first thing to say is that it is easy to hone in on religion
as being the source of homophobia.
There is a long history around why we have arrived at this point.
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But in my circumstance, I grew
up in a 90s Britain where it was illegal to marry the person you love,
the AIDS crisis was ongoing and gay men were getting the blame,
and the Tory government,
the conservative government of the day, implemented something called Section
28, which was a piece of legislation,
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you'll know this I'm sure, which prevented the promotion of homosexuality in schools. rules.
Incidentally, it's the same legislation that Vladimir Putin is using today to
criminalize. And we had our own version in 1977 in the US going on.
Right. I didn't actually know that.
So I always like to emphasize that the homophobia that I experienced growing
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up, yes, part of it was to do with my culture and my faith and the absence of
understanding there. And we'll come onto that in a moment.
But so much of it was to do with the society I grew up in. The cultural markers
around you. Absolutely.
You know, when the British colonized India, they brought homophobia with them,
as they did in so many other parts of the world.
To Africa and plenty of places. Actually, there is plenty of evidence that same-sex
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love and the transgender community was a kind of accepted part of cultural identity in South Asia.
Well, the interesting thing is the attitudes towards homosexuality are mutable over the centuries.
There is a book that John Boswell wrote about Christianity, whereby the Catholic
Church sanctioned weddings between men in the cathedrals in the 15th century.
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Yeah, I can refer it to you later. Oh, yeah, I'd love to read that.
But but to turn for a moment then to to
faith and culture i do think part of it is to do with an absence of stories
an absence of the ability to discuss the issue and a fear of what will happen
if you do in the case of culture in particular when you are an immigrant community and you are.
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Transplanted elsewhere you hold on to the things that you know to be true and
you fend off things things that feel alien and i think that part of my parents
reaction to my sexuality was a sense that.
The ship was filling up with water you know the sense that my dead one of their
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children was being taken away was becoming western the irony is so many immigrant
families want their children to immerse themselves and make the transition because
it's so hard for them to be different but there's always so far you want them to go.
Yeah. And that was one of the conversations that I had with my parents that
they, they, they came here for a better life for their children,
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but wanted to pick and choose those aspects that.
The child got to take advantage of and the other thing about
it is that actually there are articles and
studies that suggest that homophobia has actually
diminished in places like pakistan and that
communities in places like
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england are more likely are holding on
to their homophobia with more fervor than the
countries that they're from because they have taken the
attitudes of of the 70s and 80s Pakistan
that they moved from and whilst Pakistan has evolved and developed
I mean I'm not saying entirely but it has moved on in its
thinking that has not been so true of communities in
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in the UK I mean it's a really complicated picture and and
I should say that I try to focus on my own
experience because I think it's very difficult to speak for a billion
people how about Abbas's marriage yeah it's
interesting you asked that question the the The reason it was complicated for
my brother to get married without telling his prospective Muslim wife about
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me is that there was a lot of cultural stigma and religious stigma around someone being gay.
And by marrying into our family, anybody who marries into our family would have to take on that stigma.
But also, their family would have done.
And my brother rightly
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felt that he had an obligation to tell the
person he was going to marry that this was the case
now you know you could say well what you
know isn't that amounting to apologizing for homosexuality
or having to to be to treat something that should not be embarrassing in a way
that is embarrassing but that was the fact of our cultural setup that was the
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way that things worked and i i do understand why he why he had well the alternative
would have been to lie and have it come out later and ruin everything.
Absolutely. Yeah. And it was pretty remarkable. They said, if she won't accept
it, then I guess I'll have to find another wife.
That's love and overcomings, cultural stigma of centuries.
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How much do you think the rigid interpretation of male and female roles and
responsibilities in traditional Islam contributes to the alienation and isolation
the young Western raised Islamic youth experience,
especially those that don't fit in the usual mold?
I mean look I have to pick apart your question a
bit there because if you think about what you
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said you said the traditional role that Islam feels that
men and women should play but actually that isn't limited to
Islam like the the sense of patriarchy that
exists across the world I mean we're in America where women are
being told how they can and cannot use their their bodies so it's
really important to acknowledge that the
insidious sexism that that exists in the world is
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not limited to one faith or culture i'm only thinking
of the really extreme situation for example
where you talked about how you offered
to help your mother make some of the food in the kitchen yeah
and your father said no son of mine is going to do that yeah and you thought
wow i'm lucky i don't have a sister yeah because she'd have to work in a job
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and then come i'm gonna do all the cooking like my mother does absolutely there's
that yeah excess yeah and look that that That is not to say that it doesn't exist,
but it's interesting because,
I mean, I read something recently that said that women, and this is not non-Muslim
women, women in relationships where both partners work still end up doing the
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vast majority of the housework. Raising kids. Exactly.
Absolutely. So despite all the best intentions and sayings of their house.
And all of the kind of, exactly.
Despite all the best intentions, despite all the dialogue around us all being
feminists, who ends up- We let them do it. Exactly. Exactly.
Who ends up holding the baby? Literally.
It's still women. And sending the Christmas cards and calling on birthdays and it's mothers.
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And I probably sound quite defensive about Islam when I respond to questions
in that way. And that's because I am.
I think it's very easy for people to take what I have written and use it to
say, well, look, look at the ways in which Islam is oppressive or treats people
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poorly if they are gay or women.
And for me, that is not the case. For me, there is a lot of beauty and there
is a lot of love in my faith and in my culture, but there is also a lot of other
stuff. And there's also a lot of complexity and stuff that is not ideal.
And I think that we should be able to celebrate the good and try and improve the bad.
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I certainly don't mean to let other religions off the hook. No,
no, no. I know we're talking about Islam. I just think.
What I have always been mindful of when writing about something as complicated
as sexuality and faith is not for there to be any villains,
because I do not believe in the idea that things are as simple as that person
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is bad and this person is good or that religion is bad and this.
Well, there's nothing worse than black and white. Absolutely.
And to illustrate the point, when I was publishing the book,
I must confess that this is my own Islamophobia coming out.
I expected to receive horrible
messages from muslims i expected it to
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the extent anyone read it i expected muslims who read it to be really discouraging
and the vast majority of the messages i have received from the muslim community
have been loving and kind that's great yeah you know family and religious expectations
were critical in shaping your character one was the idea that that your family
was sacrificing everything so that you could become a success.
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And once you did, you'd leverage that success to lift up the other members.
Yeah. How was that expectation a spur and an impediment in your own development?
And how did you balance those expectations with the even more entrenched one
that you'd embrace a traditional Islamic family life?
The spur was to try and get us out.
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It was to try and find a way the way
i describe it is poverty is some something like this really deep ditch
and the more that you clamber to try and
get out of the ditch the more mud that seems to fall and further
in you get because of the societal structures that basically allow rich people
to stay rich and poor people to stay poor and i felt the same and so i just
felt like i had to clamber and clamber and clamber as hard as i could to get
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out of the ditch and then start building and you know when we when we talk about
class we we forget that you know when you are born born into the middle class or more,
you are not even starting from the ground and building up. You're starting from
a skyscraper and then you're building more.
Whereas for poor people, you're not starting at the ground and building up.
You're starting in that ditch. We have a saying that, you know,
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in baseball, do you know what a home run is?
Yes. They say that somebody thinks they hit a home run, but they started on
third base. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Also, incidentally, I don't think there's a problem with saying so.
And I don't think that there is a problem with people acknowledging that.
You can still be really successful, really creative, really good at what you
do and acknowledge that you started at third base. And own your privilege.
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Absolutely. And do something with it. Absolutely.
Do you think, this is a hard question to answer and we don't have time to go
into depth, do you think the class
structures in the UK are appreciably different or not than in the US?
To me, it feels like there's more opportunity for people to climb out here,
but there are just as many entrenched barriers that they face to do so.
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It's interesting, I think that.
Americans are better at talking about race and British people are better at
talking about class, but neither is very good at doing anything about it.
I would say I would hazard a guess and I'd have to check the numbers.
And because of the lawyer in me, I like to do that, but I won't right now.
I think I would imagine that the gap between rich and poor in America is even
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greater than that in Britain.
I think only in the last 40 years, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, mean that's partly to do with the immense wealth in the u.s.
I would imagine that
actually the economic obstacles to
succeed in america if you are poor are probably actually
greater but the societal and structural
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obstacles to succeed if you
are poor in britain are greater what i mean by that is
the class structures are
more entrenched in britain we are so tiny tiny
but as soon as somebody opens their mouth other than
me you know you can you know exactly where they are on the
class spectrum when they tell you what school they went to where they
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tell you what university they went to when they tell you what supermarket they
shop at all of those things will help somebody to place someone
on this pyramid that we've invented and then try to
keep them in that box yes and it's not even
i don't think it's entirely not intentional on
the part of the individual i think that it is intentional part of the the
system and the structure that is created to keep poor people down well i
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should say it's it's intended it's created to keep rich people rich you
know i don't think it's intended that i think poor people are
the byproduct but yeah so i do i i think that
america and britain have different challenges
and different problems when it comes to class and how they address them would
i guess also have to be approached it's a complicated topic absolutely yeah
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you spent years fervently praying to allah and doing doing everything you could
to deny and erase your same-sex attractions, like most of us. Yeah.
You know, we experienced the same
challenge, but most of us were from more forgiving religious cultures.
What were some of the efforts you made to accommodate the tenets of Islam?
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I mean, you talk about them ad infinitum in your book.
Yeah. But just can you give the audience a couple of examples?
So interestingly, the working title of the book for quite a while was 11,000 Prayers.
And that's because I calculated that between around the age of 13 and the age
of 19, maybe 11 and 19, when I was in my teenage years, I was praying five times a day.
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And every day and every time I prayed, I just prayed for the same thing, which is not to be gay.
And I calculated that was about 11,000 prayers.
So prayer was a really important part of keeping me on track.
And actually, I miss it now. You know, we talk about transcendental meditation
or even just meditation for five minutes to take time out of your day to be restorative.
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And I think that more than anything, that is what prayer is about.
I don't think it's just about ticking a box. I think it is about finding moments in your day for peace.
And I miss that. So prayer was
one. The other was building a really strong relationship with my mosque.
So I would go not just every Friday, but regularly.
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And I would help to paint walls or give out food or to set up events.
And all of it was in service of not just my faith, but also of my community.
But it was also an attempt to hold onto my religion and to ignore my sexuality.
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As an openly gay man in a large metropolitan area, can one find any sort of
substitute for that? And have you?
I think the answer is no. Yeah. I wish it weren't. Yeah. Yeah.
I do think so. I remember when I was a late teenager, whenever I would go abroad,
we'd find local mosques and people would welcome us and we'd eat with them and we'd pray with them.
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And then when I came out and I was in my mid-twenties, when I would go abroad, I'd go to gay bars.
And yeah, okay, part of that was about meeting boys, but it was also about community.
And I would make friends and I would be invited to their homes and
we would eat dinner together and we would bond over
our coming out experiences and how hard our parents were finding it
and and that comparison i think
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there is such beauty in because actually when i
left one community i was able to find
another now the problem is that there as with every community there there is
no such thing as one voice or no homogenous way of looking at things and so
i think that i was probably too idealistic about the sense of community i was
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getting from the lgbt space i I actually have an example.
Oh, yeah. And that's the AA, the gay AA groups.
Oh. When friends of mine who belong to those organizations travel to any city,
they can immediately go to a meeting and be welcomed with open arms and feel part of something.
Whoa. But, of course, you have to have gone through that whole painful process and have that need.
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I wish there was something like that for those of us who didn't go through that.
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because we, well, I say we, I think people that
no longer practice faith or didn't in the first place can sometimes be quick to dismiss it.
And actually, for me, my faith wasn't about God.
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It was about feeling less alone.
And I think it would be wonderful to create that.
I do think that the LGBT community has the opportunity to do it.
And I do think there are pockets of it but it is complicated by
the fact that we also like hooking
up with each other and and it's complicated by the fact that we are lgbtqia
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plus and not everybody feels like they're part of everybody else yeah yeah i
would love to find a way of creating that space for lgbt people if either of
us comes up with any ideas absolutely let's make sure we connect that's That's the deal.
Coming from the public education system as you did, you never dreamed you might
be accepted into Oxbridge, which for Americans, as I understand,
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is the hybrid for Oxford and Cambridge.
Yes. Though your parents always did.
Or at least from the way they talked about Oxford in your book.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, always is probably an overstatement. What happened was,
in my penultimate year of high school, I got top grades.
And it was then that my parents said, okay, well, you've got the grades to apply to Oxford.
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And my view was that would be a wasted application.
Because you're limited to six, or I think it's five now, but when I was applying it was six.
So my parents felt that I should apply. I thought it was a wasted slot.
And ultimately they were the
ones who encouraged me to do it and i'm really glad they did it seems
like england's educational system is pretty sclerotic
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okay in terms of entrenched in
certain you know if you enter that lower form public school
you're probably stuck there and yet
you managed to make an ascent through that system no
doubt by dint of application and ability what do
do you think that was that got you to the point where you would end up at oxford
when people write memoirs it's easy to assume that they are the hero of the
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story and it's really important for me in the telling of this story and in the
answering of this question to emphasize that there were people.
Entirely along my path that helped
get me to this point and that includes getting into
a place like like oxford i had teachers that would stay
behind late and talk to me directly because the
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class was too riotous during the session the lesson to
be able to give me the attention i needed my parents
would make me sit down and do my homework and more than in order to make sure
that i was getting the support that i needed i couldn't have done that without
the guidance of other people my english teacher, Ms.
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Lupton, I remember when I was applying to this fancy school for my final two
years of high school, she helped me write my application form.
I remember we were sat there and as she was helping me with my statement,
she paused and she looked at me and she said, I think that this place will be really good for you.
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And I really didn't understand what she meant. I kind of thought,
oh, she's just like my parents making me, you know, do this thing that I don't
want to do, go to the school that I don't want to go to.
But actually, there was so much emotion in what she was saying.
What she was saying was, you have a chance to succeed, and this place will give you that chance.
And I kind of wish I could find her to say thank you.
(29:50):
Perhaps you can. Yeah. Social media. Yeah, I should have a look.
Basically, you had angels and you worked hard. Yeah, I've been very lucky.
It was a long and slow process, and the book details that, for your devout family
to adjust to the fact that you were openly gay and to deal with the impact of
that among their community.
(30:10):
Can you explain what enabled them to make that journey, perhaps painfully at
times, and reach the point of accepting you and loving you for who you are?
And do you think that's something that is clearly not universally possible,
but do you you think it is perhaps more broadly possible if handled right over a long period of time?
(30:30):
To answer your second question first, I think it's very difficult to generalize
about what is and isn't possible for people.
And I always hesitate to do so because everybody is different and every family is different.
My sincere hope is that by talking about these issues and telling these stories,
we come closer to that reality, that more parents and more families can can
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be accepting of their children for who they are.
In my case, the way I put it is that my parents instill in each of me and my
two brothers a superpower.
And that superpower was the ability to love.
And what I did was I used that superpower against them.
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Every moment that they hated my sexuality and
every moment that they wanted me to leave the
country or go leave the room or go
away or hide the parts of myself including the parts that they didn't like every
moment that they slapped me away I held on but the reason I held on that the
(31:38):
That the fuel was that superpower, was that love.
And so I think that although it did take many years, ultimately,
I was using what they had taught me against them.
Wow. That's powerful. Your professional path has involved you moving through
(31:58):
several different careers.
First, as a solicitor, because you felt the need to lift your family up with
the economic and financial benefits that that provides.
Then as a barrister because that was more true to your passion now you're a
consultant and so i'm kind of curious if you can just tell us briefly about
that path and your motivations.
(32:21):
The law is all about justice and fairness and i have an innate sense of what
i believe to be just and fair and so i think that it was always a natural path
that i would become a lawyer,
and for 13 years I loved being a lawyer and sometimes I do miss it.
(32:41):
As you say I started off life at a big corporate law firm because I was going
to be paid more than my parents combined and there was no way I could say no
to that but my passion was to work.
In the criminal law for lots of reasons, not least because as a kid,
that's what, when you think about a lawyer, you imagine that,
you imagine the litigation in court.
(33:01):
Well, that's closer to justice and fairness than corporate law.
Well, I don't know about that, actually. I mean, I think it's closer to what
we believe is just and fair.
Actually, corporate lawyers are having to uphold the rule of law as well in
their own way, but it was just not the way that I wanted to do it.
I like storytelling. telling I like people I wanted to learn more about people
(33:25):
and I wanted to work with people so part of becoming a barrister was about that
and part of it was releasing myself somewhat from the.
Expectations of somebody who was poor but who
no longer is and what I mean by that is that
as a corporate lawyer I earned a lot of money and I
and if I'd stayed there I'd be on I'd have a lot more money
(33:48):
today but there was a moment when I realized that
that was the only reason I was there and for me that wasn't
a good enough reason but I loved the law because I
believe so much of what lawyers do
and the role they play in society to be extremely important I know they get
about a hard time and so the criminal law felt like a natural calling and for
six years I loved being criminal lawyer ultimately the reason that I have moved
(34:12):
away from it at least for now is because what I do here at Hacklett is very interesting because.
Allows me to learn a lot more about the world outside of the law.
And that was an important part of my kind of evolution as a professional.
It was trying to figure out how I can be something other than the one thing
I have done for the last 13 years.
(34:34):
And as wonderful and amazing as the law is, I've always felt like there's a
certain straitjacket to the Socratic method, at least in this country.
That makes you look at every problem through that lens.
Absolutely. And not be able to be creative about other possible ways to solve
it. Yeah, and I think the best lawyers are able to do that.
(34:54):
The way that I put it is, if I could lead nine lives, one of mine would be as a criminal barrister.
Definitely, because I'm sure that I would have a wonderful life and I would
enjoy it very much. But because I only get to lead one, I have to see what else is out there.
You've had numerous awards and honors, both in the legal profession and as an LGBTQ activist.
(35:18):
The Financial Times, I believe, listed you as one of the top 20 future LGBT leaders in the UK.
How do you manage to balance your professional and your activist responsibilities?
I think to suggest balance is to suggest that they are somehow different.
I mean, I suppose they are different, but I try to lead one life.
And focus on the things i care about professionally
(35:42):
they yet professionally sometimes they're
different to the things that are personal but i think at
the core of everything that i do is a sense of a value system of the things
i care about and the person i'd like to be in the world i'd like to live in
on a on a kind of more practical practical basis it's a question of time management
(36:03):
which which I try to be quite good at.
It does mean that I probably work most weekends, most evenings.
Actually, that's not quite true. I try to have some downtime as well.
The things I'm doing, both personally and professionally, I'm doing because
I love and care about them.
And I think the most important thing is being discerning about the things that
(36:23):
you're doing for the right reasons and the wrong reasons.
And I think that, as I said a moment ago, I realized that I was a corporate
lawyer because of the money and that that wasn't a good enough reason.
In your memoir, you discuss the challenges of being South Asian in the gay male
community, where conscious and unconscious racism is fairly widespread.
I mean, it's widespread everywhere, we're not just there. How do you deal with
(36:45):
that feeling of being different even within a community of other outsiders?
Sometimes not very well is the answer.
There are times when you are rendered invisible in those spaces and there are
times when you're rendered hyper
visible in those spaces And both can be dehumanizing and uncomfortable.
(37:13):
My reaction when I was first out was to aspire to whiteness,
was to only run after white men,
and to dumb down as much as possible my difference.
Don't you think society kind of impels people
(37:33):
in that position it does to do that yeah it
does and but i think that's magnified in the
in the gay in the gay male community in particular i think
that there are forces that create such
a strong sense of what it means to
be gay and what it doesn't and what it means to be attractive in
the gay community and what it doesn't so one so as when i was younger i my my
(37:56):
solution was to aspire to whiteness and as you can probably see that didn't
go very well but then when i got older i sought out spaces where there were
other lgbt people who were people of color.
And there is a wonder and a fullness of life that I feel in those spaces that
(38:18):
I don't really feel anywhere else.
And the more time I spent in those spaces and the more time I spent around black
and brown people, handsome and beautiful black and brown people,
the more I was able to look in a mirror and feel that same beauty for myself.
And so ultimately, I had to escape the white male, the gay white male gaze.
(38:40):
Gaze is in sight, not just the gaze is in gaze.
But I had to escape that in order to rid myself of it.
I got taken to task for the monochromatic nature of some of my photos from the past.
When in fact, we were not thrown together with people of different color.
But it made me look at today and the photos I take, and it made me take the
(39:05):
invitation of a black friend and go to an all-black LGBTQ cultural affairs weekend
where I was one of two whites and 322 people.
But it's an experience to put oneself in the shoes of a minority,
of a different minority.
We're already in one for the very first time. And what I learned,
above all else, is that people in that community look at color before they look
(39:30):
at sexual orientation because color is immutable. You can't hide it.
Sexual orientation, you can. I think that's one reason, actually.
I think there are others as well.
Some of them are economic. Generally
speaking, people of color are disproportionately more likely to be poor.
Your economic experience has a direct impact on who you are and the life that
you lead and the values that you have and the way that you look at the world.
(39:51):
Well, so what you end up with is a community of people of color in the LGBT
space who are different in not just the skin tones, but in their life experiences.
They can't afford to go to Provincetown.
I've been facetious, but I'm not. Well, yeah, I mean, I think...
(40:11):
There is more to it than that in the sense of, as somebody who is a person of
color, you are othered in a white majority society in plenty of ways.
People of color have been told for centuries that they are not good enough,
they are not attractive enough, they're not intelligent enough,
they don't meet the white standards.
White standards of beauty are hyper-sexualized in the gay space.
(40:35):
I'm going to speak specifically about gay men here. and so it's
very easy to look at those spaces
and to feel inferior even if nobody in
those spaces feels that way about you right right i feel
a sense of safety in queer spaces in queer spaces of color and a sense in fact
(40:56):
the best way to put it is that i don't feel anything in those spaces i'm not
feeling insecure i'm not worried about what i'm wearing i'm not worried about my skin tone.
I'm not worried about the job that I do or the way that I speak. Exactly.
What I am doing is just being. If anything, I mean, I'm excited because I've
just hit upon this, right?
(41:16):
But if anything, it's an absence of emotion because you just get to exist in that space.
But that's amazing because it's so few places where you don't have these inputs.
Absolutely. So when I talked about the wonder, what I actually was probably
feeling was free. Right.
In your book, you talk about when you first began to date and accept yourself
(41:37):
and was your boyfriend Matthew?
Matthew. And I just found out today, not knowing that in fact,
you and Matthew got married.
We did. So tell us a little bit about your life and how you got here.
We met in a gay bar in London called The Two Brewers, which is nicknamed The
Two Sewers because of how terrible people say it is, although I think it's a
(41:57):
fantastic place to go out.
And seven and a half years later, we are now married. We were supposed to get
married in Ireland on the 4th of April 2020, and then COVID scuppered that.
But we did get married last year, and then we moved to New York also last year,
where we are enjoying our lives.
What is Matthew doing here? He's the creative director of a brand called Roadbook,
which is a travel, online travel brand. Oh, wonderful. Yeah,
(42:20):
he's a graphic designer by training.
Final question. Do you have any advice for others facing the same journey you
did of self-acceptance and of being accepted as queer by their conservative
religious families? I mean, we've touched on it.
Yeah. So I get asked this, and I have an answer that means something to me,
and so I give it whenever I'm asked it.
(42:42):
I go to the gym and I try and lift weights I'm
not very good at it as you can see but I do try and it
does make me feel better which is the main thing and I go
in and one of my trainers is a guy called Alex and he used to say lift that
and he'd point at this bar with some heavy weights on it and I'd be like no
no I can't I can't and he would say Mohsin you can't yet and I think that the
(43:03):
same thing is true of our identities of things that can feel too heavy to lift
but that doesn't mean that they always will be.
When I was an 18, 19-year-old having to deal with class and race and sexuality
and faith, all of those issues were too heavy for me to lift.
As I built my strength, I would and was able one day to lift them.
(43:27):
Relatedly, I was watching this TV program once and there was a story about a
woman and her son in a park and the little boy was pointing to a boulder and
he said to his mum, I want to be able to lift that.
And she said, if you lift with all of your strength, you will be able to do it.
So he goes over, he tries to pick it up, he can't move it. And he says to his
mum, mum, you said if I lifted with all of my strength, I'd be able to do this.
(43:49):
And she says, wait a second. She gets up, she goes over to the boulder,
she takes the other side and they lift it together.
And she says to him, now you are lifting with all of your strength.
For people like us, it might not be our mothers that can lift with us,
but you have to find those people
that will help you with those really difficult
(44:11):
things in in your life so i guess that my advice in
summary is just because
something feels too heavy to lift now doesn't mean that
it always will be and second you should
never have to lift alone so the first thing is to believe that it will be possible
yes and the second is to find allies and tools that will enable you to yes so
(44:35):
you don't remain stuck wherever you are yeah this has been wonderful I appreciate
you taking the time out of a crazy career.
Thank you for having me. My pleasure. If you don't mind, I know how busy you
are, but I might on the side. I'm writing a memoir.
Yeah. And I'm having a hard time putting myself into the seven-year-old me.
Oh, okay. And not writing into the voice of today.
(44:57):
Yeah, that's challenging. So some advice at some point. Very happy to.
This has been wonderful. Thank you so much again. Thank you for having me. My pleasure.
Music.
The podcast you've been listening to is produced by Mike Balaban and Tom Walker,
recorded and researched by Mike Balaban, with editing and music from Henry Lay.
Music.
(00:19):
This is Mike Balaban for Bammer and me with another podcast interview my guest today is Mosin Zaidi lawyer,
lgtbq activist and author of the penguin press bestseller a dutiful boy the
memoir mosin first of all i forgot to ask you beforehand in the book you go
by mos do you still use that or are you mosin now no i mean i don't mind but
(00:43):
usually mosin okay thanks Thanks for agreeing to let me interview.
Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to have the opportunity to meet.
You know, this week has kind of been crazy for me. I developed COVID.
I'm now coming out of quarantine and we still managed to salvage this thing. We did.
You know, I've read and was incredibly moved by your memoir, A Dutiful Boy, a son.
(01:04):
Dutiful Boy. Sorry, Dutiful Boy. Yeah, you got it right the first time.
You know, it's been advertised as a book that will save lives.
And I have to admit that I was brought to tears numerous times.
As I know how much we have to cover in a short period of time,
we're going to get right into it. Sure.
You beautifully convey the cultural alienation you ineluctably experienced growing
(01:27):
up both Muslim and secretly gay in London in the 90s.
Can you describe some of the strict demands of Shia Islam that made growing
up in a secular society like the UK so difficult?
Hold well i suppose the first thing to say is that
when we talk about faith
it's very easy for people who don't understand or
don't come from that background to assume that religious rules or religiosity
(01:55):
is somehow the same as an absence of love or for things to be cold or when you
grow up in an environment where there are strict rules around what you can and
cannot do like for example for example, we don't drink.
We have to be thoughtful about the clothes that we wear, the food that we eat,
the times that we pray, the ways that we pray, the way that we interact with the world spiritually.
(02:21):
There are lots of ways in which those rules have an impact on the lives that we lead.
But I do think it's important to start answering your question by emphasizing that religion can be,
a source of great love and it can
be a source of great hope and particularly in circumstances where you don't
(02:43):
have very much else faith is the thing that people hold on to and it's certainly
what I held on to so yes there were lots of strict rules around what I could
and couldn't eat or drink and and the ways in which I was supposed to behave.
But I would say that they, for the most part, were a guiding,
(03:04):
welcomed force that I needed to anchor me in a situation where we had very little.
Well, particularly in today's world, where so few people have a sense of rootedness and belonging.
Absolutely. And my family were Pakistani immigrants, and we lived in a very poor part of London.
And as I write, we didn't feel as though the riches of London were available
(03:30):
to us, because they weren't.
And one of the things that the book is about is also about class,
because I grew up in public housing.
And if anything that for me is
the most important aspect of the book is the journey
that one takes as an interloper between different
worlds one of those journeys being a world from being desperately poor to being
(03:55):
relatively well off and what that can feel like and how complicated that can
be well I'll get to it later but I'm going to want to ask how you made that
journey because so many people are not able to do that.
What was it like for you and your family growing up in London under those conditions?
You know, it's interesting because when you're writing something like a memoir,
(04:15):
you have to be careful to write from the perspective of that seven-year-old
boy and not the 30-something-year-old that is writing upon reflection.
And I think that the same is true when I answer these questions.
So in answer to your question, what was it like to grow up at that time?
It was joyful. joyful the mosque was the center
(04:37):
of our lives we had family around us on
eid because we lived in a predominantly pakistani neighborhood
people were knocking on each other's doors and bringing food to each other's
houses and it didn't matter that we didn't have very much because we didn't
really appreciate it i would say the extent to which we were poor or at least
i didn't but it didn't it didn't actually have a bearing on the experiences
(05:01):
of being in that environment now don't get me me wrong.
It was a place that had some serious crime issues, but feeling unsafe when you
left the house was not abnormal for me.
And so I almost felt safe anyway, if that makes sense.
The danger that comes from being in a neighborhood where there is crime was
(05:22):
a ordinary part of walking down the street.
And so growing up at that time, it felt like.
Wonderfully communal in a way that i no
longer feel and i think that that is one of the things that
i do miss about growing up
at that time in that neighborhood in that culture i felt
such a sense of rootedness and
(05:45):
a sense that there were a group of people
blood relatives and otherwise who i could turn
to and i'm not sure that modern day
living in places like new york and london really accommodates
that you have to wonder even in a very religious let's
say pakistani family in london in an equivalent neighborhood
(06:07):
are they successfully able to
recreate that sense of security absolutely and
it's something that i think about a lot at the moment as
i talk as i think about children myself
because i'd want them to grow up with
the same sense of community that I had there are definitely parts
(06:27):
of my upbringing some of the rules that aren't necessarily
for me but those rules that
sense of there being a structure that
you respect it isn't all bad despite feeling secure and loved and surrounded
there were things about you like all of us who who grew up LGBTQ that quickly
(06:51):
became apparent to us that we're different.
And like many LGBTQ youth, your childhood school experiences were marked by incessant bullying.
Why did they pick on you and how did you deal with those experiences?
They picked on me because I was vulnerable. I sounded like this,
(07:17):
and for those that are not British people.
People who come from my part of London do not sound like me.
They have a different type of accent.
And I sounded much more, what's the word? Refined?
Refined. I mean, I don't want to put it that way. I sounded much more middle class.
(07:38):
And so that was one reason. The other reason was that I really wanted to work hard at school.
I was timid. I wasn't very confident.
Well you wanted that as much for
your parents and for the grades and
the recognition so that you would please them right
yeah absolutely and when i reflect on it now i mean for a long time i was very
(08:01):
angry and upset about the way that i was treated at school but when i reflect
on the fact that all of those kids were in some way lost or wanting for something
because Because we all were.
Because although we lived in one of the richest cities in the world,
(08:21):
we were almost invisible.
And when people feel invisible, they act up.
And so I don't hold any resentment towards those people anymore.
But I think that one of the reasons I was bullied was because I was an easy
target. You know, I have friends in the U.S.
(08:44):
Who maybe grew up in lower-class neighborhoods with peers who spoke differently,
and they, too, found a way to learn good English and to be out of place.
What do you think it is that spurs a young 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-year-old boy to find that way? Yeah. Yeah.
(09:08):
In my circumstance, and I write about this, what actually happened was that
my mum came to the UK when she was six years old, and she moved to a part of
the UK, just outside of London,
where everybody sounded the way that I do.
And so my mum has this accent, and I'm the oldest child, so I ended up learning
(09:29):
English predominantly from her.
Whereas my brothers, if you speak to them, they sound very different from me and my mum.
They sound way more East London than I did. So that's my reason.
But I think you're right.
You know, there's this whole joke around the gay voice, right?
And I'm sure that plays a part in it too somewhere.
I was surprised by the relentless antipathy towards homosexuality embedded in the Islamic religion.
(09:52):
Considering that modern historians feel the Prophet Muhammad never explicitly
forbade homosexual relations outright.
He opposed it, but there was no prohibition in the Quran. How did this ferocious
loathing emerge, do you think?
And as an example, kind of related, would you explain how and why your brother
(10:14):
Abbas planned marriage to his fiance could easily have been derailed once it
became known you were gay?
I think the very first thing to say is that it is easy to hone in on religion
as being the source of homophobia.
There is a long history around why we have arrived at this point.
(10:36):
But in my circumstance, I grew
up in a 90s Britain where it was illegal to marry the person you love,
the AIDS crisis was ongoing and gay men were getting the blame,
and the Tory government,
the conservative government of the day, implemented something called Section
28, which was a piece of legislation,
(10:57):
you'll know this I'm sure, which prevented the promotion of homosexuality in schools. rules.
Incidentally, it's the same legislation that Vladimir Putin is using today to
criminalize. And we had our own version in 1977 in the US going on.
Right. I didn't actually know that.
So I always like to emphasize that the homophobia that I experienced growing
(11:20):
up, yes, part of it was to do with my culture and my faith and the absence of
understanding there. And we'll come onto that in a moment.
But so much of it was to do with the society I grew up in. The cultural markers
around you. Absolutely.
You know, when the British colonized India, they brought homophobia with them,
as they did in so many other parts of the world.
To Africa and plenty of places. Actually, there is plenty of evidence that same-sex
(11:45):
love and the transgender community was a kind of accepted part of cultural identity in South Asia.
Well, the interesting thing is the attitudes towards homosexuality are mutable over the centuries.
There is a book that John Boswell wrote about Christianity, whereby the Catholic
Church sanctioned weddings between men in the cathedrals in the 15th century.
(12:10):
Yeah, I can refer it to you later. Oh, yeah, I'd love to read that.
But but to turn for a moment then to to
faith and culture i do think part of it is to do with an absence of stories
an absence of the ability to discuss the issue and a fear of what will happen
if you do in the case of culture in particular when you are an immigrant community and you are.
(12:35):
Transplanted elsewhere you hold on to the things that you know to be true and
you fend off things things that feel alien and i think that part of my parents
reaction to my sexuality was a sense that.
The ship was filling up with water you know the sense that my dead one of their
(12:55):
children was being taken away was becoming western the irony is so many immigrant
families want their children to immerse themselves and make the transition because
it's so hard for them to be different but there's always so far you want them to go.
Yeah. And that was one of the conversations that I had with my parents that
they, they, they came here for a better life for their children,
(13:17):
but wanted to pick and choose those aspects that.
The child got to take advantage of and the other thing about
it is that actually there are articles and
studies that suggest that homophobia has actually
diminished in places like pakistan and that
communities in places like
(13:37):
england are more likely are holding on
to their homophobia with more fervor than the
countries that they're from because they have taken the
attitudes of of the 70s and 80s Pakistan
that they moved from and whilst Pakistan has evolved and developed
I mean I'm not saying entirely but it has moved on in its
thinking that has not been so true of communities in
(13:59):
in the UK I mean it's a really complicated picture and and
I should say that I try to focus on my own
experience because I think it's very difficult to speak for a billion
people how about Abbas's marriage yeah it's
interesting you asked that question the the The reason it was complicated for
my brother to get married without telling his prospective Muslim wife about
(14:23):
me is that there was a lot of cultural stigma and religious stigma around someone being gay.
And by marrying into our family, anybody who marries into our family would have to take on that stigma.
But also, their family would have done.
And my brother rightly
(14:45):
felt that he had an obligation to tell the
person he was going to marry that this was the case
now you know you could say well what you
know isn't that amounting to apologizing for homosexuality
or having to to be to treat something that should not be embarrassing in a way
that is embarrassing but that was the fact of our cultural setup that was the
(15:05):
way that things worked and i i do understand why he why he had well the alternative
would have been to lie and have it come out later and ruin everything.
Absolutely. Yeah. And it was pretty remarkable. They said, if she won't accept
it, then I guess I'll have to find another wife.
That's love and overcomings, cultural stigma of centuries.
(15:26):
How much do you think the rigid interpretation of male and female roles and
responsibilities in traditional Islam contributes to the alienation and isolation
the young Western raised Islamic youth experience,
especially those that don't fit in the usual mold?
I mean look I have to pick apart your question a
bit there because if you think about what you
(15:49):
said you said the traditional role that Islam feels that
men and women should play but actually that isn't limited to
Islam like the the sense of patriarchy that
exists across the world I mean we're in America where women are
being told how they can and cannot use their their bodies so it's
really important to acknowledge that the
insidious sexism that that exists in the world is
(16:10):
not limited to one faith or culture i'm only thinking
of the really extreme situation for example
where you talked about how you offered
to help your mother make some of the food in the kitchen yeah
and your father said no son of mine is going to do that yeah and you thought
wow i'm lucky i don't have a sister yeah because she'd have to work in a job
(16:31):
and then come i'm gonna do all the cooking like my mother does absolutely there's
that yeah excess yeah and look that that That is not to say that it doesn't exist,
but it's interesting because,
I mean, I read something recently that said that women, and this is not non-Muslim
women, women in relationships where both partners work still end up doing the
(16:52):
vast majority of the housework. Raising kids. Exactly.
Absolutely. So despite all the best intentions and sayings of their house.
And all of the kind of, exactly.
Despite all the best intentions, despite all the dialogue around us all being
feminists, who ends up- We let them do it. Exactly. Exactly.
Who ends up holding the baby? Literally.
It's still women. And sending the Christmas cards and calling on birthdays and it's mothers.
(17:16):
And I probably sound quite defensive about Islam when I respond to questions
in that way. And that's because I am.
I think it's very easy for people to take what I have written and use it to
say, well, look, look at the ways in which Islam is oppressive or treats people
(17:36):
poorly if they are gay or women.
And for me, that is not the case. For me, there is a lot of beauty and there
is a lot of love in my faith and in my culture, but there is also a lot of other
stuff. And there's also a lot of complexity and stuff that is not ideal.
And I think that we should be able to celebrate the good and try and improve the bad.
(17:58):
I certainly don't mean to let other religions off the hook. No,
no, no. I know we're talking about Islam. I just think.
What I have always been mindful of when writing about something as complicated
as sexuality and faith is not for there to be any villains,
because I do not believe in the idea that things are as simple as that person
(18:19):
is bad and this person is good or that religion is bad and this.
Well, there's nothing worse than black and white. Absolutely.
And to illustrate the point, when I was publishing the book,
I must confess that this is my own Islamophobia coming out.
I expected to receive horrible
messages from muslims i expected it to
(18:40):
the extent anyone read it i expected muslims who read it to be really discouraging
and the vast majority of the messages i have received from the muslim community
have been loving and kind that's great yeah you know family and religious expectations
were critical in shaping your character one was the idea that that your family
was sacrificing everything so that you could become a success.
(19:02):
And once you did, you'd leverage that success to lift up the other members.
Yeah. How was that expectation a spur and an impediment in your own development?
And how did you balance those expectations with the even more entrenched one
that you'd embrace a traditional Islamic family life?
The spur was to try and get us out.
(19:25):
It was to try and find a way the way
i describe it is poverty is some something like this really deep ditch
and the more that you clamber to try and
get out of the ditch the more mud that seems to fall and further
in you get because of the societal structures that basically allow rich people
to stay rich and poor people to stay poor and i felt the same and so i just
felt like i had to clamber and clamber and clamber as hard as i could to get
(19:48):
out of the ditch and then start building and you know when we when we talk about
class we we forget that you know when you are born born into the middle class or more,
you are not even starting from the ground and building up. You're starting from
a skyscraper and then you're building more.
Whereas for poor people, you're not starting at the ground and building up.
You're starting in that ditch. We have a saying that, you know,
(20:09):
in baseball, do you know what a home run is?
Yes. They say that somebody thinks they hit a home run, but they started on
third base. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Also, incidentally, I don't think there's a problem with saying so.
And I don't think that there is a problem with people acknowledging that.
You can still be really successful, really creative, really good at what you
do and acknowledge that you started at third base. And own your privilege.
(20:31):
Absolutely. And do something with it. Absolutely.
Do you think, this is a hard question to answer and we don't have time to go
into depth, do you think the class
structures in the UK are appreciably different or not than in the US?
To me, it feels like there's more opportunity for people to climb out here,
but there are just as many entrenched barriers that they face to do so.
(20:54):
It's interesting, I think that.
Americans are better at talking about race and British people are better at
talking about class, but neither is very good at doing anything about it.
I would say I would hazard a guess and I'd have to check the numbers.
And because of the lawyer in me, I like to do that, but I won't right now.
I think I would imagine that the gap between rich and poor in America is even
(21:14):
greater than that in Britain.
I think only in the last 40 years, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, mean that's partly to do with the immense wealth in the u.s.
I would imagine that
actually the economic obstacles to
succeed in america if you are poor are probably actually
greater but the societal and structural
(21:37):
obstacles to succeed if you
are poor in britain are greater what i mean by that is
the class structures are
more entrenched in britain we are so tiny tiny
but as soon as somebody opens their mouth other than
me you know you can you know exactly where they are on the
class spectrum when they tell you what school they went to where they
(21:58):
tell you what university they went to when they tell you what supermarket they
shop at all of those things will help somebody to place someone
on this pyramid that we've invented and then try to
keep them in that box yes and it's not even
i don't think it's entirely not intentional on
the part of the individual i think that it is intentional part of the the
system and the structure that is created to keep poor people down well i
(22:20):
should say it's it's intended it's created to keep rich people rich you
know i don't think it's intended that i think poor people are
the byproduct but yeah so i do i i think that
america and britain have different challenges
and different problems when it comes to class and how they address them would
i guess also have to be approached it's a complicated topic absolutely yeah
(22:41):
you spent years fervently praying to allah and doing doing everything you could
to deny and erase your same-sex attractions, like most of us. Yeah.
You know, we experienced the same
challenge, but most of us were from more forgiving religious cultures.
What were some of the efforts you made to accommodate the tenets of Islam?
(23:01):
I mean, you talk about them ad infinitum in your book.
Yeah. But just can you give the audience a couple of examples?
So interestingly, the working title of the book for quite a while was 11,000 Prayers.
And that's because I calculated that between around the age of 13 and the age
of 19, maybe 11 and 19, when I was in my teenage years, I was praying five times a day.
(23:23):
And every day and every time I prayed, I just prayed for the same thing, which is not to be gay.
And I calculated that was about 11,000 prayers.
So prayer was a really important part of keeping me on track.
And actually, I miss it now. You know, we talk about transcendental meditation
or even just meditation for five minutes to take time out of your day to be restorative.
(23:44):
And I think that more than anything, that is what prayer is about.
I don't think it's just about ticking a box. I think it is about finding moments in your day for peace.
And I miss that. So prayer was
one. The other was building a really strong relationship with my mosque.
So I would go not just every Friday, but regularly.
(24:08):
And I would help to paint walls or give out food or to set up events.
And all of it was in service of not just my faith, but also of my community.
But it was also an attempt to hold onto my religion and to ignore my sexuality.
(24:32):
As an openly gay man in a large metropolitan area, can one find any sort of
substitute for that? And have you?
I think the answer is no. Yeah. I wish it weren't. Yeah. Yeah.
I do think so. I remember when I was a late teenager, whenever I would go abroad,
we'd find local mosques and people would welcome us and we'd eat with them and we'd pray with them.
(24:57):
And then when I came out and I was in my mid-twenties, when I would go abroad, I'd go to gay bars.
And yeah, okay, part of that was about meeting boys, but it was also about community.
And I would make friends and I would be invited to their homes and
we would eat dinner together and we would bond over
our coming out experiences and how hard our parents were finding it
and and that comparison i think
(25:18):
there is such beauty in because actually when i
left one community i was able to find
another now the problem is that there as with every community there there is
no such thing as one voice or no homogenous way of looking at things and so
i think that i was probably too idealistic about the sense of community i was
(25:40):
getting from the lgbt space i I actually have an example.
Oh, yeah. And that's the AA, the gay AA groups.
Oh. When friends of mine who belong to those organizations travel to any city,
they can immediately go to a meeting and be welcomed with open arms and feel part of something.
Whoa. But, of course, you have to have gone through that whole painful process and have that need.
(26:04):
I wish there was something like that for those of us who didn't go through that.
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because we, well, I say we, I think people that
no longer practice faith or didn't in the first place can sometimes be quick to dismiss it.
And actually, for me, my faith wasn't about God.
(26:25):
It was about feeling less alone.
And I think it would be wonderful to create that.
I do think that the LGBT community has the opportunity to do it.
And I do think there are pockets of it but it is complicated by
the fact that we also like hooking
up with each other and and it's complicated by the fact that we are lgbtqia
(26:46):
plus and not everybody feels like they're part of everybody else yeah yeah i
would love to find a way of creating that space for lgbt people if either of
us comes up with any ideas absolutely let's make sure we connect that's That's the deal.
Coming from the public education system as you did, you never dreamed you might
be accepted into Oxbridge, which for Americans, as I understand,
(27:09):
is the hybrid for Oxford and Cambridge.
Yes. Though your parents always did.
Or at least from the way they talked about Oxford in your book.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, always is probably an overstatement. What happened was,
in my penultimate year of high school, I got top grades.
And it was then that my parents said, okay, well, you've got the grades to apply to Oxford.
(27:32):
And my view was that would be a wasted application.
Because you're limited to six, or I think it's five now, but when I was applying it was six.
So my parents felt that I should apply. I thought it was a wasted slot.
And ultimately they were the
ones who encouraged me to do it and i'm really glad they did it seems
like england's educational system is pretty sclerotic
(27:53):
okay in terms of entrenched in
certain you know if you enter that lower form public school
you're probably stuck there and yet
you managed to make an ascent through that system no
doubt by dint of application and ability what do
do you think that was that got you to the point where you would end up at oxford
when people write memoirs it's easy to assume that they are the hero of the
(28:19):
story and it's really important for me in the telling of this story and in the
answering of this question to emphasize that there were people.
Entirely along my path that helped
get me to this point and that includes getting into
a place like like oxford i had teachers that would stay
behind late and talk to me directly because the
(28:42):
class was too riotous during the session the lesson to
be able to give me the attention i needed my parents
would make me sit down and do my homework and more than in order to make sure
that i was getting the support that i needed i couldn't have done that without
the guidance of other people my english teacher, Ms.
(29:05):
Lupton, I remember when I was applying to this fancy school for my final two
years of high school, she helped me write my application form.
I remember we were sat there and as she was helping me with my statement,
she paused and she looked at me and she said, I think that this place will be really good for you.
(29:27):
And I really didn't understand what she meant. I kind of thought,
oh, she's just like my parents making me, you know, do this thing that I don't
want to do, go to the school that I don't want to go to.
But actually, there was so much emotion in what she was saying.
What she was saying was, you have a chance to succeed, and this place will give you that chance.
And I kind of wish I could find her to say thank you.
(29:50):
Perhaps you can. Yeah. Social media. Yeah, I should have a look.
Basically, you had angels and you worked hard. Yeah, I've been very lucky.
It was a long and slow process, and the book details that, for your devout family
to adjust to the fact that you were openly gay and to deal with the impact of
that among their community.
(30:10):
Can you explain what enabled them to make that journey, perhaps painfully at
times, and reach the point of accepting you and loving you for who you are?
And do you think that's something that is clearly not universally possible,
but do you you think it is perhaps more broadly possible if handled right over a long period of time?
(30:30):
To answer your second question first, I think it's very difficult to generalize
about what is and isn't possible for people.
And I always hesitate to do so because everybody is different and every family is different.
My sincere hope is that by talking about these issues and telling these stories,
we come closer to that reality, that more parents and more families can can
(30:54):
be accepting of their children for who they are.
In my case, the way I put it is that my parents instill in each of me and my
two brothers a superpower.
And that superpower was the ability to love.
And what I did was I used that superpower against them.
(31:15):
Every moment that they hated my sexuality and
every moment that they wanted me to leave the
country or go leave the room or go
away or hide the parts of myself including the parts that they didn't like every
moment that they slapped me away I held on but the reason I held on that the
(31:38):
That the fuel was that superpower, was that love.
And so I think that although it did take many years, ultimately,
I was using what they had taught me against them.
Wow. That's powerful. Your professional path has involved you moving through
(31:58):
several different careers.
First, as a solicitor, because you felt the need to lift your family up with
the economic and financial benefits that that provides.
Then as a barrister because that was more true to your passion now you're a
consultant and so i'm kind of curious if you can just tell us briefly about
that path and your motivations.
(32:21):
The law is all about justice and fairness and i have an innate sense of what
i believe to be just and fair and so i think that it was always a natural path
that i would become a lawyer,
and for 13 years I loved being a lawyer and sometimes I do miss it.
(32:41):
As you say I started off life at a big corporate law firm because I was going
to be paid more than my parents combined and there was no way I could say no
to that but my passion was to work.
In the criminal law for lots of reasons, not least because as a kid,
that's what, when you think about a lawyer, you imagine that,
you imagine the litigation in court.
(33:01):
Well, that's closer to justice and fairness than corporate law.
Well, I don't know about that, actually. I mean, I think it's closer to what
we believe is just and fair.
Actually, corporate lawyers are having to uphold the rule of law as well in
their own way, but it was just not the way that I wanted to do it.
I like storytelling. telling I like people I wanted to learn more about people
(33:25):
and I wanted to work with people so part of becoming a barrister was about that
and part of it was releasing myself somewhat from the.
Expectations of somebody who was poor but who
no longer is and what I mean by that is that
as a corporate lawyer I earned a lot of money and I
and if I'd stayed there I'd be on I'd have a lot more money
(33:48):
today but there was a moment when I realized that
that was the only reason I was there and for me that wasn't
a good enough reason but I loved the law because I
believe so much of what lawyers do
and the role they play in society to be extremely important I know they get
about a hard time and so the criminal law felt like a natural calling and for
six years I loved being criminal lawyer ultimately the reason that I have moved
(34:12):
away from it at least for now is because what I do here at Hacklett is very interesting because.
Allows me to learn a lot more about the world outside of the law.
And that was an important part of my kind of evolution as a professional.
It was trying to figure out how I can be something other than the one thing
I have done for the last 13 years.
(34:34):
And as wonderful and amazing as the law is, I've always felt like there's a
certain straitjacket to the Socratic method, at least in this country.
That makes you look at every problem through that lens.
Absolutely. And not be able to be creative about other possible ways to solve
it. Yeah, and I think the best lawyers are able to do that.
(34:54):
The way that I put it is, if I could lead nine lives, one of mine would be as a criminal barrister.
Definitely, because I'm sure that I would have a wonderful life and I would
enjoy it very much. But because I only get to lead one, I have to see what else is out there.
You've had numerous awards and honors, both in the legal profession and as an LGBTQ activist.
(35:18):
The Financial Times, I believe, listed you as one of the top 20 future LGBT leaders in the UK.
How do you manage to balance your professional and your activist responsibilities?
I think to suggest balance is to suggest that they are somehow different.
I mean, I suppose they are different, but I try to lead one life.
And focus on the things i care about professionally
(35:42):
they yet professionally sometimes they're
different to the things that are personal but i think at
the core of everything that i do is a sense of a value system of the things
i care about and the person i'd like to be in the world i'd like to live in
on a on a kind of more practical practical basis it's a question of time management
(36:03):
which which I try to be quite good at.
It does mean that I probably work most weekends, most evenings.
Actually, that's not quite true. I try to have some downtime as well.
The things I'm doing, both personally and professionally, I'm doing because
I love and care about them.
And I think the most important thing is being discerning about the things that
(36:23):
you're doing for the right reasons and the wrong reasons.
And I think that, as I said a moment ago, I realized that I was a corporate
lawyer because of the money and that that wasn't a good enough reason.
In your memoir, you discuss the challenges of being South Asian in the gay male
community, where conscious and unconscious racism is fairly widespread.
I mean, it's widespread everywhere, we're not just there. How do you deal with
(36:45):
that feeling of being different even within a community of other outsiders?
Sometimes not very well is the answer.
There are times when you are rendered invisible in those spaces and there are
times when you're rendered hyper
visible in those spaces And both can be dehumanizing and uncomfortable.
(37:13):
My reaction when I was first out was to aspire to whiteness,
was to only run after white men,
and to dumb down as much as possible my difference.
Don't you think society kind of impels people
(37:33):
in that position it does to do that yeah it
does and but i think that's magnified in the
in the gay in the gay male community in particular i think
that there are forces that create such
a strong sense of what it means to
be gay and what it doesn't and what it means to be attractive in
the gay community and what it doesn't so one so as when i was younger i my my
(37:56):
solution was to aspire to whiteness and as you can probably see that didn't
go very well but then when i got older i sought out spaces where there were
other lgbt people who were people of color.
And there is a wonder and a fullness of life that I feel in those spaces that
(38:18):
I don't really feel anywhere else.
And the more time I spent in those spaces and the more time I spent around black
and brown people, handsome and beautiful black and brown people,
the more I was able to look in a mirror and feel that same beauty for myself.
And so ultimately, I had to escape the white male, the gay white male gaze.
(38:40):
Gaze is in sight, not just the gaze is in gaze.
But I had to escape that in order to rid myself of it.
I got taken to task for the monochromatic nature of some of my photos from the past.
When in fact, we were not thrown together with people of different color.
But it made me look at today and the photos I take, and it made me take the
(39:05):
invitation of a black friend and go to an all-black LGBTQ cultural affairs weekend
where I was one of two whites and 322 people.
But it's an experience to put oneself in the shoes of a minority,
of a different minority.
We're already in one for the very first time. And what I learned,
above all else, is that people in that community look at color before they look
(39:30):
at sexual orientation because color is immutable. You can't hide it.
Sexual orientation, you can. I think that's one reason, actually.
I think there are others as well.
Some of them are economic. Generally
speaking, people of color are disproportionately more likely to be poor.
Your economic experience has a direct impact on who you are and the life that
you lead and the values that you have and the way that you look at the world.
(39:51):
Well, so what you end up with is a community of people of color in the LGBT
space who are different in not just the skin tones, but in their life experiences.
They can't afford to go to Provincetown.
I've been facetious, but I'm not. Well, yeah, I mean, I think...
(40:11):
There is more to it than that in the sense of, as somebody who is a person of
color, you are othered in a white majority society in plenty of ways.
People of color have been told for centuries that they are not good enough,
they are not attractive enough, they're not intelligent enough,
they don't meet the white standards.
White standards of beauty are hyper-sexualized in the gay space.
(40:35):
I'm going to speak specifically about gay men here. and so it's
very easy to look at those spaces
and to feel inferior even if nobody in
those spaces feels that way about you right right i feel
a sense of safety in queer spaces in queer spaces of color and a sense in fact
(40:56):
the best way to put it is that i don't feel anything in those spaces i'm not
feeling insecure i'm not worried about what i'm wearing i'm not worried about my skin tone.
I'm not worried about the job that I do or the way that I speak. Exactly.
What I am doing is just being. If anything, I mean, I'm excited because I've
just hit upon this, right?
(41:16):
But if anything, it's an absence of emotion because you just get to exist in that space.
But that's amazing because it's so few places where you don't have these inputs.
Absolutely. So when I talked about the wonder, what I actually was probably
feeling was free. Right.
In your book, you talk about when you first began to date and accept yourself
(41:37):
and was your boyfriend Matthew?
Matthew. And I just found out today, not knowing that in fact,
you and Matthew got married.
We did. So tell us a little bit about your life and how you got here.
We met in a gay bar in London called The Two Brewers, which is nicknamed The
Two Sewers because of how terrible people say it is, although I think it's a
(41:57):
fantastic place to go out.
And seven and a half years later, we are now married. We were supposed to get
married in Ireland on the 4th of April 2020, and then COVID scuppered that.
But we did get married last year, and then we moved to New York also last year,
where we are enjoying our lives.
What is Matthew doing here? He's the creative director of a brand called Roadbook,
which is a travel, online travel brand. Oh, wonderful. Yeah,
(42:20):
he's a graphic designer by training.
Final question. Do you have any advice for others facing the same journey you
did of self-acceptance and of being accepted as queer by their conservative
religious families? I mean, we've touched on it.
Yeah. So I get asked this, and I have an answer that means something to me,
and so I give it whenever I'm asked it.
(42:42):
I go to the gym and I try and lift weights I'm
not very good at it as you can see but I do try and it
does make me feel better which is the main thing and I go
in and one of my trainers is a guy called Alex and he used to say lift that
and he'd point at this bar with some heavy weights on it and I'd be like no
no I can't I can't and he would say Mohsin you can't yet and I think that the
(43:03):
same thing is true of our identities of things that can feel too heavy to lift
but that doesn't mean that they always will be.
When I was an 18, 19-year-old having to deal with class and race and sexuality
and faith, all of those issues were too heavy for me to lift.
As I built my strength, I would and was able one day to lift them.
(43:27):
Relatedly, I was watching this TV program once and there was a story about a
woman and her son in a park and the little boy was pointing to a boulder and
he said to his mum, I want to be able to lift that.
And she said, if you lift with all of your strength, you will be able to do it.
So he goes over, he tries to pick it up, he can't move it. And he says to his
mum, mum, you said if I lifted with all of my strength, I'd be able to do this.
(43:49):
And she says, wait a second. She gets up, she goes over to the boulder,
she takes the other side and they lift it together.
And she says to him, now you are lifting with all of your strength.
For people like us, it might not be our mothers that can lift with us,
but you have to find those people
that will help you with those really difficult
(44:11):
things in in your life so i guess that my advice in
summary is just because
something feels too heavy to lift now doesn't mean that
it always will be and second you should
never have to lift alone so the first thing is to believe that it will be possible
yes and the second is to find allies and tools that will enable you to yes so
(44:35):
you don't remain stuck wherever you are yeah this has been wonderful I appreciate
you taking the time out of a crazy career.
Thank you for having me. My pleasure. If you don't mind, I know how busy you
are, but I might on the side. I'm writing a memoir.
Yeah. And I'm having a hard time putting myself into the seven-year-old me.
Oh, okay. And not writing into the voice of today.
(44:57):
Yeah, that's challenging. So some advice at some point. Very happy to.
This has been wonderful. Thank you so much again. Thank you for having me. My pleasure.
Music.
The podcast you've been listening to is produced by Mike Balaban and Tom Walker,
recorded and researched by Mike Balaban, with editing and music from Henry Lay.
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