Being Somali, Muslim & Gay

What does it mean to grow up Somali, Muslim, and gay?

In this episode of Simspace, I speak openly about my experience navigating identity, faith, culture, and family expectations.

Growing up Somali and Muslim often comes with a script for how life is supposed to unfold. But what happens when your truth doesn’t fit that script?

In this episode I talk about the silence that often surrounds conversations about sexuality in our communities, the tension between culture and religion, and the moment seven years ago when I chose the truth about who I am even though it cost me my home and my family.

This conversation is about identity, honesty, belonging, and what it means to live authentically when the world around you expects something different.

Real talk. No filter.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to episode two of Sim Space. This is the space where we're going to get into things that people don't always say out loud, but they probably should. Recently, I've had a lot of people asking me through DMs and even in my own life with my own friends what it actually truly means to be Somali and gay and what that experience looks like. Because for a lot of people, these two identities don't seem like they can supposedly exist in the same sentence. And I really didn't apply for the position, but here we are. And again, I can only speak from my experience. The truth about being Somali, Muslim, and gay, first of all, it's a triple homicide. But it's one of those experiences that people talk about around. But very rarely do they talk from the inside. Because the moment that you start unpacking those identities together, you realize very quickly that you're stepping into a territory that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But discomfort does not necessarily mean the conversation should not be happening. So today I want to speak honestly about what that experience has actually been for me. Because for a long time, um, these two identities were presented as things that simply could not coexist. And growing up inside, that contradiction forces you to ask very difficult questions about culture, religion, family, and who you are even allowed to be. There is something I think that I specifically remember from when I was younger that stayed with me for a very long time. And at the time I didn't fully understand why it stuck with me the way it did. I remember being in rooms where adults would talk about the future as if it had already been decided for all of us, where conversations about life followed the same exact same patterns every single time. They would talk about schools, about success, about the kind of person you were supposed to marry one day, about the children that you were supposed to have, about the life that you were supposed to build. And everyone around me seemed completely comfortable with that script. It sounded very natural to them. But I remember sitting there quietly and feeling this strange sense of distance from the conversation. Like I was listening to a story that everyone else believed was about their future, but that somehow didn't feel quite like it was about mine. I didn't know it at the time, obviously I was quite young. I didn't have any language for it. I just remember thinking that something about the way my life was being described didn't fully fit the way I experienced the world. And when you are young and you feel that kind of disconnect, you don't immediately question the system around you. You question yourself, you assume you just haven't figured things out yet. So for a long time I told myself that everything would stick into place, that eventually the feelings I was supposed to uh have would appear naturally. Now that eventually the future everyone had described so confidently would start to make sense to me as well. But the older that I got, I realized that the confusion I felt wasn't temporary. It was the beginning of understanding something about myself that the world around me was not prepared to talk about. And that is really where this story begins. There is something very strange about growing up as a Somali, Muslim, and gay. Because before I could even understand what any of those things truly meant, they had already been assigned to me as identities that were supposed to sit together peacefully inside the same body. And the truth is, for a very long time, they did not. That's that's as simple as it gets. They did not. Not peacefully, not neatly, but definitely not in the way that made sense. Because when you are born Somali, you're not just born into a nationality, you're born into a culture that is proud, protective, and incredibly certain about what life is supposed to look like. There's already a script waiting for you before you are old enough to question whether that script has anything to do with who you actually are. You are Somali, you are Muslim, you grow up, you get educated, you marry the opposite sex, you have children, you honor your family, you protect the reputation of your name, and you continue the lineage of the people who came before you. And that script alone is not presented as one possible life. It is presented as the life. One, the life, the only option that you have. And when something inside you doesn't align with it, it doesn't feel like a discomfort, it feels like a problem. I remember realizing very early on when I was young that there were parts of me that didn't fit inside the expectations that had already been placed on my life. And at the time, I didn't even have the language to explain what that meant. All I knew was that the world around me seemed incredibly confident about who I was supposed to become. And something inside me was quietly telling me, yo, hold on, your reality actually looks very different. And the difference in communities like mine, it's not something that gets explored gently. It gets corrected. Because Somali culture is deeply collective. Identity is not treated as something that belongs solely to the individual. It belongs to the family, the community, the lineage, and the choices that you make are rarely seen as yours alone. They're seen as a representation, as representing something bigger than you. So when I began to understand that I was gay, the realization did not arrive as some clean, empowering moment where everything suddenly made sense. It arrived as a collision between different parts of my identity that had always been expected to coexist without tension. Somali, Muslim, gay. And suddenly I was faced with a question that I didn't think many people inside, you know, outside of the communities like mine fully understood. Not who am I, but which parts of me are even allowed to exist. And that's a deep question to have from, you know, when you when you when you're young and you're starting to discover yourself. Because when you grow up Muslim, your relationship with God is supposed to feel like guidance, right? Islam gives you structure to your life. It tells you how to pray, how to live, how to treat people, how to move through the world in a way that brings you closer to Allah. Faith is supposed to feel like a compass. But what happens when the moment that you acknowledge something real about yourself, uh, that very same thing is immediately labeled as haram by the people around you? What happens when the most honest part of your identity becomes the thing everyone tells you must be rejected? For a long time, I try to understand where the conflict was actually coming from. I try to figure out whether what I was feeling was truly a conflict with religion itself or whether it was a conflict with the way religion had been interpreted and enforced around me. Right. So because within many Somali spaces, culture and religion are treated as they are the same thing, people speak about them interchangeably, defend them with the same emotional intensity, and blur the lines between culture, expectations, and religious teachings in a way that makes it incredibly difficult to separate the two. But the more I reflected on my own life, the more I realized that Somali culture and Islam are not the same thing. Islam is obviously a religion, Somali is a nationality, but yet growing up, they were presented to me as if they were inseparable, which then created a problem the moment I started to ask questions. Because I was not trying to rebel, I was not trying to disrespect my faith. If anything, I was trying to understand it more deeply, right? If anything, it was just curiosity. But curiosity, when it challenges tradition, is often treated like defiance, isn't it? So the conversations I needed to have about identity, faith, and sexuality simply were not allowed to happen. The subject of homosexuality was treated like something had already been decided, not something to discuss, not something to analyze, but something to shut down immediately. And when that happens, the person trying to make sense of themselves ends up doing the work alone. You ask yourself questions you were never given permission to ask, right? You start wondering where whether the problem is, the problem that you have is maybe, for example, if you prayed harder, if you fasted more, if you tried harder to be the version of yourself that everyone expected, the conflict would then disappear. And for a while I tried that, like for a long time I tried that, man. It fucking didn't work. I tried to perform normality, I tried to convince myself that maybe the feelings would pass, that maybe if I focused on work, the education, on being the child that my family could be proud of, then the parts of me that did not fit into the script would eventually then fade away. But the truth is, pretending is so fucking exhausting. It's so fucking exhausting. It's ridiculous. I fucking hate it. I'm sorry for swearing, but it's the absolute truth. Because at first it feels manageable because you tell yourself it is temporary, but over time it starts to feel like you're carrying two versions of yourself everywhere you go. The version that exists publicly, and then the version that lives privately inside your mind, right? And eventually the weight of that split becomes impossible to ignore because the truth has a way of insisting on being acknowledged, even when it is inconvenient and even when it's terrifying, right? Like we can at least be honest about that. So when I finally allowed myself to admit the truth about my sexuality, I knew that the real challenge was never going to be understanding myself. The real challenge was going to be how to survive, how other people would respond to the truth. Because in Somali families, reputation is not just personal, it is communal. It's a shared thing. The actions of one person are often seen as a reflection to the entire family, uh, which means that when someone is gay, right, it's not treated simply as an individual reality. It is treated as something that could bring shame. Um, and shame is something many families would go to extraordinary lengths to avoid, especially in the Somali community. Um, so that makes it that is what makes it so painful because the fear is it's never just about being misunderstood, it's about potentially losing the place that you come from. Family in Somali culture is not just a support system, it is an identity, it is belonging, it's language, it's memory, it's history. So when you begin to realize that by being honest about who you are, it might disrupt that relationship. The fear that comes with that is basically enormous. I remember thinking about that constantly. What would happen if my family knew? How would they react? Would they still see me the same way? Would they still love me? Or would I become something unfamiliar to them, something they could not accept, something that they would rather deny than understand? And those questions, you know, sit heavily in your mind when you grow up in a community where family reputation and cultural expectation carries so much weight. Um, because you know that your life is not seen purely as your own. It's tied to everyone around you. And that's what makes the whole thing exhausting because you end up living between two versions of yourself: the version that exists within the expectation of your family and community, and then the version that knows the truth about who you are. Living between two realities takes a toll. It's like I said earlier, it's it's exhausting. It means measuring uh what you say, how much of yourself that you reveal, how much of yourself that you show, and and over time that kind of emotional calculation tends to weigh you down. Uh, because no one wants to live their lives, like their entire bloody life, feeling only partially visible. Everyone deserves the freedom to exist fully without having to shrink themselves to remain acceptable, right? I feel like that's the basic human thing to be able to do that. But within the Somali community, thinking outside the traditional framework of identity can be incredibly difficult for many people. Somali identity is so fucking powerful, it's proud, and it's deeply rooted in history and survival. And because of that, there's often a strong instinct to protect it from anything that feels unfamiliar or threatening. The problem is that sometimes the instinct to protect the culture turns into resistance against acknowledging the complexity that already exists within it. Because Somali people are not a monolith. We are individuals, we have different lives, we have different personalities, we have different journeys. And people like me exist in the intersections of identity. Uh the community has not yet figured out how to make space for. That's that's basically what shaped my experience more than anything else growing up. The silence, the fucking silence. Not loud silence, not the kind where people are, how do you say it, intentionally avoiding a topic after it'd been raised, but the kind of silence where the subject never even appears in the first place. In my house, in my extended family, in the Somali spaces I grew up in, sexuality was never something that existed as a real conversation. It it's really that simple as that. There were rules, there were expectations, there were things that were clearly right or wrong, black and white, but there was never no, there was never no actual language for identity attraction or what it means to be human in all of its complexity. So when I started realizing things about myself, I had nowhere to go. There were no framework, no example of someone who looked like me, spoke my language, shared my culture, and was also openly navigating the same questions. The only time homosexuality was ever mentioned was usually as a warning, a joke, something that belongs somewhere else, somewhere far away, somewhere western, even if you were in the West yourself, somewhere foreign, somewhere far away from Somali people. And because of that, I grew up with this strange feeling that if what I was experiencing was real, then it must, you know, it must mean I had somehow drifted outside the boundaries of my own culture, something disconnected, something that did not quite belong. And the isolation did not come from being gay, it came from the silence around it, like let's be fucking for real. Because when something is never spoken about, it does create the illusion that you are the only one experiencing it. And you begin to believe what you are feeling must be so rare or wrong simply because nobody around you is acknowledging that it even fucking exists. I spent years, years trying to reconcile what I felt internally with everything that had been taught externally. And the strange thing is something about the process is that it never felt like a rebellion. It felt like I was trying to desperately hold on to my faith and my culture while, you know, also being honest with myself. Because Islam had always been central in my life. Faith was not an abstract to me. It was part of the rhythm of everyday life, the prayers, the recitation, the reminders about accountability to God, the sense that life had meaning and structure, you know, which made the conflict even more complicated because I'd grown up hearing that being Muslim and being gay were two identities that simply could not co-fucking exist. That one had to cancel out the other. So, for example, let me make it simple for you. It was like they said, you can be gay, but you can't be Muslim, or you can be Muslim, but you can't be gay. Now add the Somali part in it. So you can be Somali, you can be Muslim, but you cannot be gay. You can be gay, but you can't be Muslim, and you can't be Somali. It makes no fucking sense. That's what I grew up with. Uh so for a long time I tried to figure out, you know, which one was I supposed to be, you know, which one was I supposed to let win. Like, and eventually I, you know, realized that one of the biggest challenges within the Somali community is the way culture and religion are fused together so tightly that people stop recognizing where one ends and where the other one begins. And then came the point where I had to stop pretending that the tension I was living with was temporary. For years I kept telling myself, you know, that eventually everything, everything would just fall into place. That eventually I would wake up one day and somehow these different parts of my identity would reconcile themselves without me having to confront what was actually happening. What came instead was the slow and uncomfortable realization, the slow and uncomfortable understanding that a life that was expected, you know, of me to live was not the life I was going to be able to live honestly. And the longer I delayed confronting the truth, the heavier it became because there is only so long a person can perform a version of themselves that exists purely for the comfort of other people. And people who grow up outside of tight-knit uh cultures do not always understand that when you are Somali, the expectations placed on you are not abstract, you know, ideas that are just floating quietly in the background of your life. They are constant, they are present and reinforced through relatives, aunties, family gatherings and the same questions that come up over and over again about marriage, about the future, about who you're supposed to become. And for a long time, I allowed those expectations to exist without challenging them directly. Not because I believed they were true, but because I understood the emotional investments behind them. When your parents have sacrificed everything to build a life for their children, the last thing that you want to do is become the source of their pain in their story, right? And I remember very clearly the moment where that idea stopped being theoretical for me and it became something real. Because about, I'd say, about seven years ago, I was confronted directly about bisexuality. And in that moment, I was given a choice. I think internally I gave myself a choice that a lot of people in my position, I think, are given, uh, which is whether to say it out loud or not. I had the opportunity to lie and it would have been believed. I could have pretended that I was exactly what I had been assigned to be my whole life, straight, feminine in the way that made people comfortable, on the path everyone expected from me, where one day I would marry a man, settle down, produce the next generation, the way Somali families imagined their future unfolding. I could have said what people wanted me to hear. I could have reassured everyone that the script they had written for my life was still intact. For that moment I understood very clearly how easy that lie would have been. Because that lie would have protected everything. It would have protected my home. It would have protected my place in my family, it would have protected the version of me that people were comfortable loving. But it also would have meant continuing to live a life that was not mine. And in that moment I realized something very simple but very heavy. I didn't want to lie anymore. I didn't want to hide. So I chose the truth. And choosing the truth cost me more than I think people realize when they talk about these things from the outside.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Because the truth cost me my home. It cost me my entire family.

SPEAKER_01 21:51

Seven years ago was the last time I slept in my family home. Seven years ago was also the last time I experienced.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

What it meant to have a family in a way I had known in my entire life.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

And that is why I say what I'm about to say with absolute certainty. Protecting other people from discomfort by lying about who you are. It's not love. It's fucking self-erasure. And self-erasure is a quiet kind of death. Because from the outside, you still look functional.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

You still show up. You still smile in pictures. You still play the role everyone recognizes.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

But internally, something suffocating. So when the truth about who I was supposed to be, or who I was, you know, who I was stopped being something I could keep contained inside my own head, it didn't feel heroic or cinematic. It felt heavy. It felt like standing at the edge of a conversation, and you had the power to change everything. Absolutely everything I had known my entire life. And what made it harder was that I loved my family deeply. People outside of cultures like mine sometimes imagine a simple story where someone just rejects their family and walks away. But that's not the reality for most of us. The people who raised you are not villains, they're human beings. You know, uh, they're also shaped by their own upbringings, their own fears, and their own understanding of religion and culture themselves. But understanding that does not make the reaction less painful. Because when the truth about me entered the room, the reaction was not curiosity, it was shock, it was confusion, and the kind of anger that comes from a belief system being shaken in real time. And I remember thinking how strange it was that the same identity I had spent years slowly accepting about myself was now being treated like some you know catastrophic event that had appeared out of nowhere, as if I had not already spent years fucking wrestling with it privately before everyone else had time to fucking confront it. The cheek of it. Absolutely ridiculous. And by the time family is here, something like this, the the person living that reality had already lived through the hardest parts of it. They've already analyzed themselves, you know, you've already questioned yourself, you've already tried to suppress it, you've negotiated with it, you've reshaped it into something more acceptable. But sexuality does not disappear simply because people want it to. Once the truth was out, the the illusion that silence could protect my relationship, you know, my relationships disappeared completely. What replaced it was a harsher reality, right? That sometimes people are willing to love you only within the boundaries of the version of you they expected. And the moment that you exist outside of those boundaries, that love becomes conditional. And that's one fucking brutal hit in the guts that a lot of you are not ready to fucking look at. Because conditional love forces you to make choices most people never have to make. It forces you to decide whether maintaining peace with your family is worth sacrificing honesty about who you are. And that's not a small decision because the cost of honesty can be enormous. But the cost of dishonesty is your entire self. And I realized that if I kept hiding who I was simply to persevere, comfort for other people, I would eventually lose the ability to fucking respect myself. And I care about that. Sorry. So there was a point where I had to accept that the life I was building might look very different from the life my family had imagined for me. And after that came anger, not quiet, polished kind of fucking anger that people like to romanticize. But the kind that burns through you because you suddenly realize how much of your life you spent trying to protect people from a truth that was never actually harming anyone. The anger comes from years of silence, years of shrinking yourself, um, years of homosexuality being spoken about as if as if it were some abstract moral failure without anyone ever considering that someone sitting right there might be living that reality. And once that anger arrives, it forced me to confront something I had avoided for a long time, which was the fact that love in my culture did not mean I had to accept every part of it without question, because I'm sorry. But Somali culture, like every other culture, it's not perfect. It's powerful, it's beautiful and resilient, but it is also human, which means it has contradictions, it has blind spots, and it has limitations. And for a long time I had been afraid to say that out loud because when you grow up in Somali, you're taught to defend a culture almost instinctively, but eventually I realized that criticism is not betrayal. Sometimes criticism is the most honest form of fucking care. Because if you love something deeply, you should be able to look at it clearly, right? And the truth I had to confront was that Somali culture struggles deeply within the idea of individuality. Not because Somali people are incapable of individuality, but because the collective identity of the community has long been prioritized above individual expressions, and that makes historical sense in people, uh, shaped by survival, by displacement and struggle. And the same mindset that protects a community during crisis can become restrictive when individuals begin living lives that do not follow the traditional script. That is exactly what happened to me. My existence as a gay Somali Muslim forced people around me to confront a reality that they had never allowed themselves to imagine before. And instead of responding with curiosity, the instinctive response was resistance. Because accepting me as I am would actually mean accepting that Somali identity is more complex than the narrow version many people are comfortable with. And complexity makes people uncomfortable. So, what my experiences forced me was to separate the different parts of my identity and rebuild my relationships with each of them individually. I had to ask myself what Islam actually meant to me outside of the interpretation and culture expectations that has surrounded it throughout my upbringing. And that process was difficult because faith is not something you detach from your childhood and analyze like a school fucking subject. Faith is emotional, it's spiritual, it's tied to memory, it's tied to family, it's tied to community. But eventually I realized that the conflict I had been experiencing was not necessarily between me and God. It was between me and the way people interpreted religion within the culture environment I grew up in. And that distinction changed everything. Because if my relationship, right, with God is sincere, then it cannot be defined solely by the opinions of other people. It has to exist in the quiet moments where I speak to God directly, where I reflect on my intentions and where I ask myself whether I'm living with honesty, compassion, and integrity. And once I understood that, something shifted in me. I stopped viewing my identity as something that needed to be constantly defended. I stopped feeling like I had to justify my existence to people who had already decided what they believed about me before I even spoke. And instead, I started focusing on something much more important: building a life that actually felt honest. Because no amount of cultural approval is worth living a life that feels like a lie. No amount of acceptance is worth losing yourself. And when I think back to my childhood now, what stands out to me most is not one dramatic moment where everything suddenly made sense, but the quiet accumulation of small realizations that something about me moved through the world differently from what everyone around me expected. In a Somali household, there is a very strong sense of what boys are supposed to be like, what girls are supposed to be like, and how everyone is supposed to move through life. And even when those expectations are not said, are not being said directly, you absorb them constantly through jokes, through comments, through the way adults talk about relationships, masculinity, femininity, and what a proper Somali person is supposed to become. And as a child, you do not analyze these messages critically, you absorb them as truth. Even while I was absorbing all of that, there was always this quiet awareness sitting somewhere in the back of my mind that the way I experienced attraction, the way I looked at people, the way I imagined relationships did not align with the script everyone else seems so confidently about. At first, that awareness was vague. I couldn't name it. I couldn't explain it. It was just a feeling that certain conversations about the future did not sound like they were describing my life. When you are young, you feel uh the kind of disconnect. Your first instinct is not to challenge the system around you. Your first instinct is to assume something about you must be wrong. So for a long time, I told myself that eventually everything would click into place, that eventually the feeling I was supposed to have would appear naturally, that eventually I would look back on, what do you call it, the confusion and realization uh that it had all just been a face. But as the years passed, the explanation became less convincing because the feeling that was supposed to appear never appeared. And the feeling I had been trying to, you know, not to look at too closely never disappeared. And that is when the internal conflict really began because growing up Muslim adds another layer to all of that. People outside of religious environments don't always fully understand wallah. What faith is, you know, when faith is part of your daily life, when prayer and accountability to God are central to how you were raised, um, the idea that something about you might be considered sinful is not just a societal, um, it's not just a social issue. It becomes a spiritual one. And that creates enormous um pressure because now, you know, you're not only thinking about your family or your community, you're thinking about God, you're thinking about judgment, hellfire, you're thinking about whether the way you exist in the world places you in conflict with the faith you were raised to respect deeply. And that kind of internal question is heavy because every possible answer seems to create another problem. So if you deny your sexuality, you protect your place in your family and your community, but you spend your life pretending. If you acknowledge it, you risk losing the acceptance of the people who raised you and potentially possibly the spiritual framework that shaped your childhood. So you spend years hoping there's uh some third option you simply have not found yet. And during that time, you become incredibly skilled at hiding, not just from other people, but even from yourself. You learn how to filter what parts of you are visible, you know, how to avoid certain conversations, how to present the version of yourself that fits comfortably within the expectations around you. And eventually that kind of hiding becomes unsustainable because living your life while carefully filtering what parts of you are allowed to exist in public requires a level of emotional labor that most people never have to think about. And the longer you live like that, the more you start asking yourself one very simple question. How long am I supposed to do this? Because if the answer is forever, then the cost of silence becomes enormous. That was the beginning of the moment where I started to realize that the life I'd been quietly trying to preserve by staying silent was not actually sustainable because pretending is manageable for a while. But pretending for an entire lifetime, that's that is something else entirely. And once the realization enters your mind, it becomes very difficult to ignore. Because suddenly I'm there now, not just thinking about how to survive the present moment. I'm also thinking about the life I want to build. I'm thinking about whether I want to spend the rest of my life hiding fundamental parts about who I am. I'm thinking about whether the approval of other people is worth sacrificing my ability to live honestly. And at some point for me, the answer became no. At this point in my life, I have spent enough time sitting with my own story to understand that the hardest parts of being Somali, Muslim, and gay, was never actually my sexuality. The real struggle was everything and everyone around it. The expectations, the silence, the refusal of entire communities acknowledging Safe simply because doing so would force them to confront realities they're not emotionally prepared for. And what I want people to understand, especially Somali parents and Somali families, or even if, you know, you come from a different culture, different, you know, religion, whatever the case might be, if you hear conversations like this and you immediately feel defensive, you've got to understand that people like me are not trying to destroy your culture. You know, we're not trying to destroy our cultures. We're not trying to disrespect Islam. We're not trying to abandon our communities. We are trying to exist honestly within the same culture that raised us. Because I am Somali, I speak the language, I understand the culture, I carry the same history of resilience and survival that every other Somali person carries. The difference is simply that my life does not follow the script many people assumed was universal. That script was never universal. It was the version of lives that people were comfortable imagining. And the reality is that queer Somalis have always existed. The difference now is that some of us no longer are willing to live our entire lives in silence just to maintain the illusion that we do not. And to the queer Somalis listening to this, the ones still sitting quietly in rooms where these conversations feel impossible, the ones carrying the weight of secrecy because they're afraid of what will happen if their truth becomes visible. I need you to know that your existence is not a mistake. You are not broken. You are not a Western corruption. You are not a failure of culture or religion. You are simply a human being whose life does not follow the narrow script other people expect it. And that does not make you less Somali, does not make you less Muslim, it does not make you less deserving of belonging. It means you are part of a generation that is beginning to live life more honestly than the generations before us were able to. And honesty is never something to apologize for because every single person listening to this has one life. One life to figure out who they are, one life to build a relationship that feels genuine, one life to stand in their truth without constantly shrinking themselves to fit the comfort of other people. And I refuse to spend that life pretending to be someone I'm not. I refuse to apologize for existing, you know, at the intersection of identities that some people still struggle to understand. My life is not a contradiction. My life is evidence that identity is more complex than the boxes people are trying to put us in. I am Somali, I am Muslim, and I'm fucking gay as hell. And none of those truths cancel each other out. They exist together. I'm not less in any. They've always existed together. And I'm done pretending otherwise. I hope you understand. Um, and I hope that this has answered some of the questions that you may have had on what it's like to be Somali, gay, and Muslim. Because it's hard as hell. But guess what? I have the strength. The same people that made me live my life or raised me believing my life should be a certain way. Are the same people that gave me the strength that I have today to stand before anybody to say I'm living the life I want to live.

SPEAKER_00 39:25

And if you don't like it, fuck off.