The Ayatollah's Gaze - A Memoir of the Forbidden and the Fabulous

Majid Parsa

Beschreibung

'Defiant, fabulous and filled with the nuanced challenges so many young queer people struggle to make sense of: family, faith, tradition, affection and belonging. I loved this intimate, heartbreaking coming-of-age story' Henry Fry, author of First Time for Everything
An unflinching memoir about growing up in Iran where homosexuality is punishable by death, and yet underground, hidden from Sharia law, is a vibrant gay scene threatening to burst open.
The dawn prayer calls echo through the streets. As many make their way to mosques, for some it signals the end of another illegal gay party. Under the cover of darkness, smiles on lips and sweat on foreheads, the gays of Tehran blend back into daily life. Hidden in plain sight, they plan when and where they will meet again.
In an unparalleled true story, Majid Parsa recounts how a childhood of war, prayer and obedience was upended by a teenage sexual awakening and, ultimately, pride. He lifts the heavy veil of persecution to reveal the fabulous and flamboyant gay scene right at the heart of the Islamic Republic of Iran, flourishing under the ever-present shadow of the grand Ayatollah and morality police. Eye-opening and at times laugh-out-loud funny, The Ayatollah's Gaze is a story of self-discovery in a country where Sharia is the law.
'The Protagonist, Majid, epitomises the duality of identity. He struggles with his Islamic faith and his burgeoning sexual awakening as a gay man. He finally emerges as a proud peacock but there is a cost to his freedom' Khakan Qureshi, LGBTQ+ activist and founder of Finding a Voice
'When I wasn't laughing with the cast of larger-than-life characters, I was crying and shaking my head in sadness and disbelief . . . an important story for our times, and a testament to how we can find joy in even the bleakest of circumstances' Iqbal Hussain, author of Northern Boy

Verfügbar seit: 08.12.2025.

Drucklänge: 320 Seiten.

Weitere Bücher, die Sie mögen werden

Summer Sweat

Daryl Banner

Ex-football player and town sweetheart Harrison prepares for another hot summer tending to the Strong farm. All he wants to do is work hard, care for the animals, and enjoy the peace and quiet of the Spruce, Texas, countryside. 
 
 
 
But when a down-on-his-luck, cocky young troublemaker is hired on as extra help for the summer—and Harrison is personally tasked with teaching him the ropes—these two men fight, butt heads, and discover more reasons to sweat than just the blistering heat. 
 
 
 
Contains mature themes.

Zum Buch

Choosing Family - A Memoir of...

Francesca T. Royster

A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago’s North and South Sides. 
 
As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties. Choosing Family chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago’s South Side—itself a dynamic character in the memoir—where “family” was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts. 
    
Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including José Esteban Muñoz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a “queer” attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, Choosing Family, ultimately, is about joy—about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.

Zum Buch

Ghostly Target

E.M. Leya

When someone starts killing police officers in the city, Detective Angus Young prioritizes finding out who's attacking those he works with. He's determined to take down the killer before any more officers are targeted. 
 
 
 
Having the skill to speak to the ghosts of the dead is usually helpful to a medical examiner, but not when the ghosts can't identify who killed them. Keeping Angus safe is Lance's first priority as he does everything he can to try and help fit the clues together and bring peace to those who have died. 
 
 
 
Working together, Angus and Lance put everything else on hold as they follow the leads to find a cop killer. With the help of friends both living and dead, the puzzle slowly starts to fit together, but once they have all the pieces, can they find the killer before another officer is shot?

Zum Buch

Mingle

Caleb Parkin

Caleb Parkin's dark and mischievous second poetry collection Mingle stirs up the toxicities between landscapes, ecosystems and bodies, in poems bubbling over with hyper-wealth and haunted by tarnished ideals. Through creatures, compounds and chemicals, the poems probe what makes up our world's matter, and how we use it for good or ill. From gold to hydrocarbons, radioactive gardening to viral memes, the resulting mixture is a potent poetic cocktail…
Here, intimate connections and grand narratives are unsettled; we are implicated in prickly histories and weird futures and the natural world reminds us of its unruliness – as well as our own. Reflections warp in noxious ponds and voices distort and echo in uncanny landscapes. At times hyperreal and surreal, adventurous and technicolour, Mingle fizzes with the possibilities of queered language and altered states of poetic form.

Zum Buch

Your Body of Water

Siouxzi Connor

Sex, death, nature, and the "feminine": an autofiction romance in four acts. 
 
 
 
Your Body of Water is an interweaving of autofiction with hydro-feminist mythologies, exploring via the emotional landscapes of four rivers and four "tragic feminine characters" (Ophelia, Leda, the Lady of Shalott, and Sappho) the author's own real life journey, with a dose of tongue-in-cheek humor—through coming out in Australia, an abusive relationship in Berlin, and navigating queer love in the context of a world literally burning around us—and finding hope for the future in the stories of her ancestors before her.

Zum Buch

Leaving’s Not the Only Way to Go

Kay Acker

Lauren Ashburn left a promising job to help her family in Vermont take care of her dying father. Now that he's gone, Lauren has every intention of returning to her old life—the vibrant, successful one her father had always expected her to have. But Lauren discovers that she feels adrift without his strict guidance. 
 
 
 
Georgia Solomon designs homes for others. But as a bisexual autistic woman, she rarely feels at home herself. When her best friend dies suddenly, leaving her alone with their young daughter, her little slice of happiness vanishes. Now Georgia finds herself struggling to navigate a world that doesn't understand her at all. 
 
 
 
Lauren and Georgia clash at a disastrous work meeting, but Georgia's daughter Hannah pulls them together despite themselves. As they discover new possibilities and priorities for the future, can they make room for love? Or will they have to leave each other behind—in order for them both to move forward?

Zum Buch