Growing up gay, Muslim and afraid

I recently read an early review of my debut novel, This Way Out, on Amazon that really cemented why I wrote this book. The person, a gay – presumably white – man from Canada felt that it was “just another coming-out whine”, that my story wasn’t needed, that it had been done to death. “The new normal is gay,” they wrote.

It’s exactly this kind of misguided thinking that compelled me to write my protagonist Amar’s story. While