Ep18. Standing your ground without losing your loved ones
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Ep18. Standing your ground without losing your loved ones
We all need to hear this right now.
And…we’re back with a story of an Egyptian man coming out to his family as a homosexual.
Listen here ☝️ or go to Spotify, Youtube, Apple Podcasts and everywhere else.
There are many voices that tell us to express our truth, but almost none that tell us to do so with grace and respect to our loved ones and their truth.
Our anonymous guest spent 14 years building his own sense of safety before coming out as a homosexual man in a society that was directly opposed to it.
It is remarkable how he created space for his mother, a member of that society, to live her own story.
Our guest today bravely shares his journey of conscious self-acceptance, while waving a tapestry of love to hold his family despite their conflicting views on homosexuality.
“I wanted us to go through it together. I did not want to become someone they did not recognize”
9 min Bonus Soundbite!
There is a segment of the conversation that took us on a riff where my guest shared a lot of the history of homosexuality and the “scientific”-ization of it with Freud and Eugenics. Here it is:
He masterfully pieces together the bits of history as he discovered them in his quest to understand how society reacted to homosexuality, from political will power, and the utility of the Gay identity.
We decided to cut it from the episode but will make it available as a stand alone 9 min segment this week.
The Gumpcast is back with a big OOMPH of an episode that took us 2 months to produce!
Special Kudos to the incredible sound engineer and musical whiz Mostafa El Ezaby who tackled our guest’s story three different times until we got it right.
Today’s Gumpcast story will leave you with:
A new perspective for what it looks like to speak your truth, while holding space for others.
A model for how knowledge can help build a sense of self that is shielded from society.
A deep probe into how the gay identity is engineered for a Western society. How the Arab homosexual identity is inspired by it but does not relate to it.
A big question in the end about the history of man and our relationship to nature.
Support our team by letting us gumptionize someone you love
References:
Desiring Arabs Paperback – Illustrated, September 15, 2008
by Joseph A. Massad (Author)
Orientalism Paperback – October 12, 1979
by Edward W. Said (Author)