3 days ago
'My queer book being banned was a horrible experience, not a badge of honour'
Abdi Nazemian is an author, screenwriter and producer whose notable work includes Like A Love Story and Call Me By Your Name.
The author joins Yahoo's Queer Voices to discuss his latest UK release Like A Love Story, and the experience of it getting banned in some states in America.
Like A Love Story is a coming of age tale of three teens during the AIDs crisis in America, including Iranian immigrant Reza who is coming to terms with being gay and the shame and fear he feels.
My book Like a Love Story has been banned in many districts in America, and it was recently banned statewide in Utah.
That's the first statewide ban it's been a part of, mostly in the United States banning happens school district by school district, the law that Utah passed — which many other states are probably studying to see if they can do the same — bans it in all public schools along with, I believe, now 16 other books. The majority by women, including such huge names as Margaret Atwood and Judy Blume, and then queer authors as well.
The experience of being banned is horrible. Usually people congratulate you and say it's a badge of honour, and I suppose in a way I understand why people feel that way but in reality it is bad for you as an author because it brings down sales and scares people out of inviting you to their schools. But more emotionally it reminds me of the whole reason I wrote the book, which is that when I was young books like this would never have been available in the school I was in.
I thought the fact that this book could come out and be taught in schools was a sign of all the progress we have made, and now it's become a symbol of how they want to bring us back.
It's very, very hard. It feels very shaming, and it breaks my heart. Because I know from all the amazing classrooms I visited in the United States that young kids want to know their history, especially young queer kids. I really find if, as a young person, you don't feel your connection to those who paved the path for you, you feel very lonely.
And so it is very much a goal of mine to make these stories available for young kids, for them to know that they have people — elders who fought for them, who care for them, who paved the path. I say this in the 'author's note' of Like a Love Story: I feel like when we teach history to young people we often focus on the worst of history and say let's not repeat it, and the whole idea of Like a Love Story is to teach the best history.
Let's teach about the heroes, let's talk about Act Up and how they fought back, how they organised. Let's talk about the artists who spoke truth to power like Madonna, who stood up for the queer community back then. Let's talk about how a community came together when everyone, from governments to families, were turning their backs on them.
There's so much to learn, we're in another little moment right now and I think if we study the heroes of that moment we can hopefully meet this moment better.
It was very important for me to draw on my own personal stories when I was writing my books. I very much felt the absence of any story that mirrored my own. Growing up there were very few queer stories available to me, full stop. But if there were a few that became available to me they mostly represented Western White gay communities, and they didn't mirror my experiences as an Iranian immigrant.
And in terms of Iranian stories there were virtually none as well, and certainly none that dealt with the modern life about an Iranian who had moved to the West and was coming out of the closet and finding a whole community there.
So I felt like that intersection between the two core parts of my identity, Iranian and queer, had never been written about. The first book I ever had published, I have been told and no one has corrected I believe, is the first novel to have a male Iranian gay lead, which only came out a decade ago, so that tells you how new these issues are from the community. So for me, there's a real drive to represent my experience because I know other readers, especially young readers out there, are feeling that lack of representation.
Like a Love Story is set during the AIDs crisis in America. All of us grow up with certain world events that impact us in ways that take a lifetime to unravel, I'm sure today's young people are going to be unravelling so much that is happening right now. For me, the biggest world event was the HIV/AIDS crisis. It impacted me in so many ways throughout my life, first in the way that I write about it in Like a Love Story, through fear, shame, stigma.
I was growing up at a time when there was very little available information about the queer community, and for me as a kid moved to the suburbs of America — I did not move to New York City like my character Reza in the novel, I moved to the suburbs and I had a pretty conservative, very culturally conservative home.
We didn't have the Internet, we didn't have queer books and libraries. And so all I knew of being gay was AIDs, and there was this fear that being gay just meant death, it really did. For much of my younger years I just felt like I was going to die young and all my friends felt the same way.
And then we worked our way out of that fear through community, through art, through action, and so much of Like a Love Story represents that. The part of the book that matters most to me is that it's about a community fighting back through both anger and love to create real change, and Act Up is the group that the book really pays homage to. They created huge systemic change in the United States around how drugs are approved, who's included in clinical trials, how long they take, changes that have impacted us today. In terms of how we deal with health policy.
I look at queer rights group Act Up's work through the character of Uncle Stephen, who is the uncle of one of the main teen characters. He's a person living with AIDS, he's an Act Up activist, and I wrote him because I wanted to show people how important it is to find mentor figures for young queer kids.
It's something we don't talk about enough, I think, the importance of how if you have a child whose identity doesn't mirror your own as a parent it's your responsibility to find mentors for them within that community so that they can have an adult to look to for inspiration or ask questions.
And the whole idea of Uncle Steven and his friend Jimmy is that these are two gay men who are sharing their experience and their history with young people. One of my favourite things Uncle Steven does is he makes note cards for the characters that are kind of passing on queer history, queer culture, queer terminology, reclaiming words like love. I wrote those because when I was young it was unfathomable that queer history would be taught in schools.
And like I said about book banning, I felt like, at least in the US, there was this magical moment where we saw it start to happen that queer history was taught and now the push back begins, which is not entirely surprising because if you study our history every time we seem to be coming into our human rights they start to try to erode them again. And so I think, for me, Uncle Stephen really is there to hopefully show every reader how beautiful and essential it is to have mentorship.
I started working in Hollywood because it was the industry that lit up all my dreams as a kid. Movies were my biggest passion so I became a screenwriter and began working as a producer for films like Call Me By Your Name. But Hollywood's resistance to my most personal stories is also why I started writing books.
It is very hard in Hollywood to get a story about a queer Iranian teenager made for reasons that have to do with the way the business is run. It takes more money to make a movie or TV show, you need more budget, your audience has to be bigger — I'm not making excuses for the industry that I work in and I still love what I learned after about 8 to 10 years of screenwriting but I knew I was going to have to find a different way to tell my stories.
I started to read a lot of the Young Adult books that were coming out of the time books like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe came out. My cousin was a school teacher, now she's a school administrator, but she was sending me a lot of YA books, and I was so inspired by the stories that were being told, by the cultural specificity and the intersectionality, that's when I had this 'aha' moment of making Young Adult books. I felt it was a place that would really welcome my stories, and I was right.
I think as an artist you can find an audience that is craving the stories you need to tell and that becomes this magical relationship. And I've learned as much about myself through writing these stories and revisiting all those emotions and talking to young people about why they're still relevant to them, I've learned as much as readers have.
It's always hard to talk about the impact my work has had on others without sounding like I'm full of myself. People say things to you that are so moving, I've had young people tell me that my book is the first time they've learned about HIV and AIDS because a lot of schools don't teach it, and that inspired them. I had someone recently in Texas telling me that because of Like a Love Story he started his own group called the Queer Liberation Network, which he's now asked me to be involved in, and it's modelled after Act Up.
It's exactly what I had hoped for, which is that some young person might study the way Act Up modelled themselves and then bring it into the future. One young girl told me she was reading the book and spoke to her dad about what happened during those years and that's how she found out her uncle died of AIDS, which had been a family secret because there was so much shame.
Conversations like that to me are what matter the most because they show me that a book like this can really have a huge impact on young life, especially if it's the first time they're hearing this history.
Growing up through my teen years there were very few out queer people. There were many people that I knew were queer even if they didn't necessarily talk about it, like George Michael or even Boy George. I didn't know, but I knew somewhere deep down.
The biggest role model for me was certainly Madonna, who at a very young age I became obsessed with, really from her first video and I forced my parents to take me to the Virgin Tour when I was eight in Toronto and then forced them to take me to the Blonde Ambition tour when I was 13, and they become fans of their own. But she was so embedded in our home that when she started to really be more overt about including queer culture in her work with Vogue and Truth or Dare, and that era of her work, it was really life changing for me because there was no way to edit that out of our home.
It was really the first time, the first time I saw the Gay Pride parade was in Truth or Dare, the first time I saw a gay kiss was in Truth or Dare. The first time I saw queer men who were not white was in Truth or Dare. And the Vogue video presented a version of queer culture that was celebratory, that was diverse, that showed me the life I would be chasing when I was an adult.
As I got a little older, I discovered more queer authors and James Baldwin was certainly the one who changed me the most. Again, that was the first time I read a book that was by a queer man who wasn't white. The way he explored intersectionality in books like Another Country really affected me, and there were plenty of others like Armistead Maupin and Andrew Holler, and that original generation of out authors who really inspired me.
What young people have to understand is that — although we are facing such immense challenges both in the US and the UK and worldwide when it comes to human rights, queer rights, and how people's rights are being taken away worldwide — I think when it comes to free representation they have to understand what we have now feels like a miracle to someone like me who grew up in a time when there was virtually nothing.
When it was the assumption that everything you saw in a movie theatre, on TV, would be filled with homophobia. I mean the homophobia in that era, I was young in the 80s, it would hit you from the strangest places. I have so many memories of going to see what felt like a mainstream comedy and then there's all this homophobic humour in it.
So for me to see everything from something like Heartstopper, which is so life affirming for young people, to Baby Reindeer that deals with queer sexual abuse in a way that felt unheard of when I was young, to one of my favourite shows: the Spanish limited series called Veneno, which tells the true story of a Spanish trans woman.
So much of the trans representation is something we couldn't have imagined at the time. And many people I'm learning from seeing what young people are making, learning about the way our community is expanding.
As a young person, I didn't have that many queer role models. I was very lucky in that when I went to boarding school there were some queer teachers. The teacher who really took me under his wing, he was my English teacher, was not queer but he was the first person that I came out to.
It's a very close relationship that a lot of teenagers develop with their English teacher. If you are a literary minded kid, if you are a queer kid, I've talked to many fellow members of our community about this and that relationship can feel so intimate as through the books you discuss your own identity, your own experiences. And for me, it felt very safe to come out to my English teacher more than anyone else.
So he matters a lot to me, despite not being queer, there was a queer teacher who showed many of us documentaries like Paris is Burning and the Life and Times of Harvey Milk, and that was very important. But I never had a mentor that was queer in the way that Uncle Stephen is a mentor in my book, which is part of why I wrote that, to model what it might have looked like because it's what I wanted. It's what I wished for but never really happened.
I think there's still a lot that can still improve in terms of queer storytelling. I still think we're seeing the majority of queer stories be about white gay people, when it comes to representation of members of our community who are trans, non-binary, from communities of colour, it's still very few and far between.
But at the same time, I do think the representation has improved in such huge ways that it also feels like we should celebrate what has been done while still pushing for better.
The magic of storytelling in all its forms is that it opens people's hearts through allowing you into how a person experiences the world, and this has been studied and proven. If we don't know someone or a certain community personally it's very easy to be bigoted toward them, as you get to know people of a community you suddenly realise they're human just like you and you see that the bigotry is unwarranted.
And so I just think we need more open communication, both through storytelling but also through real conversations, and I think that has to happen in schools, that has to happen in families. We just need more openness to hearing others' experiences of the world.
Part of my advice to young people is to stay strong, to hold tight to the community. As a queer person, I know how important it is at every age to find a community that mirrors your values, because often queer youth don't have that in their families or in their school administration, so you have to really hold tight to those bonds.
But I also always want to say, because I think so much is expected from this generation and they're growing up so much more engaged in the world because of social media and the way the world is structured, I really do believe young people also need to be young and shouldn't put too much pressure on themselves to change the world.
If they can that's great, if it naturally comes to them, but young people should feel OK if all they're doing is focusing on learning, building knowledge, building core relationships, building those foundations so that when they're a grown up they have a strong core from which to spread their wings and do the things they love to do.
