Voice notes from the closet: Coming out over WhatsApp

I came out to my mom over a WhatsApp voice note.

It wasn’t unusual for my mother and me to talk over recorded voice messages. We built an entire relationship like this, partly because her Internet in Lebanon was too slow for international FaceTime calls and partly because I didn’t always know what to say to my parents.

I’d known I was gay for a long time. I’d walk over to the Internet café in our small town in North Lebanon, an empty floppy disk tucked in my coat pocket. The café smelled of stale Marlboro cigarettes and burnt coffee. I returned home with a disk packed with pictures of shirtless, muscled men. It’s just a phase, I’d reassure my 13-year-old self. Later, I would choose to play the female protagonist in video games on the off-chance there would be a romance option down the line, and I could fantasize about being with another man. Still a phase.

Even then, my mom just wasn’t curious enough to learn more about something she didn’t understand.

There were many opportunities where I thought I could tell her; her sisters in Beirut were gossiping once about a distant third cousin who had left for school in Paris and was now rumored to be gay. I watched my mom’s reaction with bated breath, the sweat rising on my forehead, and my fists clenched like iron clamps. Her face repulsed, a horrifying sight she would deny years later, but it’s a vivid memory etched in my brain.

She was disgusted. On some level, so was I.

Growing up, the parts of me that were gay and the parts that were Arab felt entirely separate. One was suffocated by shame and secrecy, the other bursting with pride and tradition. I thought that keeping the two apart for as long as possible was the only way to live, but I didn’t realize that I was merely surviving.

The words “gay” and “queer” weren’t in our family’s vocabulary. When the news covered it, it was in hushed tones and derogatory words.

I learned to compartmentalize. I was happy to have the shirtless men on the floppy disk, but they also brought me so much shame. There was the version of me who was a proud Arab who danced first at weddings, carried the dabkeh, burned CDs with Nancy Ajram and Haifa Wehbe songs, and argued passionately about Lebanese politics.

And then there was the version of me who existed only in my imagination — a boy who could walk down the streets holding another man’s hands without fear. That boy drank coffee in Central Perk and was one of the six friends, complaining about his love life or attending a lesbian wedding on a typical Saturday afternoon. If you told him to point at the country on a map, he couldn’t tell the difference between Lebanon and Lithuania.

I became an expert at avoiding questions — why I didn’t have a girlfriend at sixteen, or if I wanted to be set up on a blind date. The hardest part wasn’t even the lying; it was the loneliness. I replaced the men on the floppy disk with videos on the Internet, but I still had no one to talk to about the different parts of myself.

My fear of rejection, of incomprehension, of being asked a million other questions (“Are you sure you’re gay?”) always stopped me from pulling the trigger. It felt like no one knew who I really was, not even me.

The Voice Note

I held my phone up to my face and pressed record. It was easier that way — that’s what I told myself, but selfishly, I knew this was more for me than her. The risk of my mother kicking me out or watching her face contort with repulsion was gone.

“What are you talking about?” she responded.

“The guy that I’ve been telling you about,” I continued. “He’s more than just a friend, mama.

“I know my sisters have been sending you pictures of us, and he’s very nice; you would like him. I can never tell Baba, nor do I feel the need to let him know. But I just didn’t want to hide this from you.”

My voice note was delivered and read. I braced for the worst. I comforted myself by remembering that I’d always have my chosen family anyway.

While doom-scrolling on the r/Lebanon subreddit, I found a post about queer Lebanese people living abroad. Some nasty comments aside, it was the first time I had ever interacted with other queer Arabs. I connected with Ramy, one of the internet strangers in the Reddit thread, and our friendship seamlessly moved from DMs to WhatsApp messages to video chats. We talked about how difficult it was having to choose between being gay and Arab, yearned over going back to Lebanon for more than just a summer every two years, and fantasized about coming out to our mothers. Our conversations became a safe space where I could be honest about my hopes and fears.

I felt a strange mix of relief and terror when I finally sent my mother that voice note. She went days without responding. I checked my phone constantly, replaying my voice note over and over, contemplating whether it was the right call to have done this over the phone.

Days later, she sent me a picture of the lemon trees she frequently cared for back home. It was her way of telling me she was still there, processing.

Spring came, and pictures of the lemon trees were replaced with green almonds, dipped in a bit of salt. Then came the olives and the oil my family produced and sold from our olive trees. Pictures of our childhood cat flooded our WhatsApp conversation history, exchanged with pictures of snow I was sending her from Boston. Soon enough, it was impossible to find my original voice note, the one I had thought day and night about.

Was she supportive but playing it off casually? Was she just being tolerant and didn't want to talk about it again? Would she ever want to meet my boyfriend? Or were we pretending this never happened?

“She will come to her senses,” my sisters reassured me. “One day, she will reopen that line of communication again, and you’ll be ready to take it on.”

“If she doesn’t accept you for who you are, then you have every right to cut her out of your life,” reasoned my queer non-Arab friends, my chosen family in the United States. Once again, I had to choose between two sides of the same coin. Neither side could fully understand how I was feeling, and sometimes neither could I..

“I can’t just cut my mother out,” I snapped back at my queer friends. “She’s one of the most important people in my life.

The Conversation

I wanted her to yell at me, scream obscene things, and call me a slur, a loute. So, my sisters and I flew her out to the U.S. for a summer, partly for a vacation away from the unbearably humid Lebanese summers, and partly so I could have the single most important conversation of my life.

I felt a strange mix of relief and terror when I finally sent my mother that voice note. She went days without responding. I checked my phone constantly, replaying my voice note over and over, contemplating whether it was the right call to have done this over the phone.

She stayed with one of my sisters in Texas, and I flew out from Boston. By the time I landed, I was a mess. My heart was pounding, and my anxiety started spiraling out of control. How was this going to go? My brain made up all sorts of different scenarios: was she going to hug me, slap me, kiss me? What if she started crying, blaming herself, and asking where she went wrong?

When we pulled into the driveway, I sat still. My mind raced back to the kid with the floppy disks. Back then, the idea of coming out—of being out—was inconceivable, an impossible fantasy, something that belonged in other places, with other people, not for me, not in my world.

No more hiding. No more floppy disks. No more hushed tones and secret conversations. It was all out in the open now. I loved it. I loved the freedom of it, the honesty, the confidence I had in myself being an out, proud, queer, Arab man.

The air was thick with the scent of my sister’s gardenia flowers and the dozen plants she never stopped gabbing about. My mother greeted me right by the door, and everything was right in the world.

She hugged me tighter than she ever had, kissed my cheeks and forehead, and immediately mentioned that I had lost some weight. Her auburn hair was shorter than the last time I’d seen her, a few years before lockdown, but I would recognize her thick, round glasses and Dior J’adore perfume anytime, anywhere.

We chatted over Arabic coffee and za’atar flatbread, which she loved to make herself because it was my favorite breakfast food, while my sister started a mint-flavored hookah. When we were alone again, I felt the air around us shift. Her posture changed, and her shoulders softened. She put down her ceramic coffee cup and took a deep breath.

“So,” she started, her voice tentative, “you’re sure about this?”

“Am I sure about what?” I wasn’t playing dumb. I wasn’t playing at all. More than ever, I wanted us both to lay our cards on the table, to be completely honest with each other.

“Chris,” she grunted, her tone sharper now. “Are you sure about what you said to me, about wanting to pursue this more?”

I swallowed, my throat dry. “It’s more than just wanting it.”

“Don’t talk down to me like I don’t know anything,” she leaned back in her chair, her eyes narrowing. “We did our best, your father and I.”

“I will continue to thank you and appreciate everything you’ve done for all of us,” I interjected, my voice steady but firm. “But I also need to know that you’d support me, too. That you would visit me and my boyfriend the same way you visit any of my sisters and their husbands. That you wouldn’t treat us any differently. That you would love me for who I am, not for who you thought I should be. That the education and the roof over my head that you kindly provided for 20-something years wasn’t contingent on me marrying a woman and having babies.”

“What’s wrong with wanting more grandchildren?” she sighed, her gaze dropping to her hands. We sat in silence for a moment, the weight of everything we’d said hanging between us.

Then she looked up, her eyes searching mine. “I just have one question for you, habibi.”

A million possibilities raced through my mind. Is there any way you can go back to being straight? Are you sure you’re not bisexual? Can you keep it a secret?

“Are you happy?”

My heart dropped, and for a moment, I couldn’t speak. She reached across the table, placing one hand over mine. Our tears came at the same time, flowing in a rhythm that felt like a dance, orchestrated by years of love and misunderstanding.

That question wasn’t everything I wanted, but it was a start. She meant it—she wanted nothing more than to see me happy.

The next question she asked me was, “When can I meet your boyfriend?”

No more hiding. No more floppy disks. No more hushed tones and secret conversations. It was all out in the open now. I loved it. I loved the freedom of it, the honesty, the confidence I had in myself being an out, proud, queer, Arab man.

Soon enough, my mom would be hugging him, pestering him with questions that didn’t always translate well from Arabic. One day, she would unashamedly ask, “Why are you so white?” and another day, she would demand to meet his family. Eventually, she would dance at our wedding—better than anyone else in the room—and make breakfast for us in our Boston apartment, all while refusing to pet our anxious dog.

She started sending me WhatsApp voice notes again, not just pictures of lemon trees. She asks about my husband and the new house we’re buying together. She demands weekly pictures and occasional video calls, now that her Internet in Lebanon has gotten better. Now and then, she asks again: “Are you happy?”

I assured her, every time, that I was. That this—this love, this life, this version of myself that was no longer a fantasy, this freedom to be myself—was how every queer Arab person in the world deserves to feel.