‘I know you love your son, so show your love.’ Photograph: Mark Chilvers/The Guardian ‘Wake up,’ Riyadh’s mother told his father. But he wasn’t far off the mark: Sam’s response was to put his faith and honour first. In his book, Riyadh frames this lightly, as his own “super-dramatic thinking”. He worried that his father – whom he describes as “outrageously heterosexual” – would instigate an honour killing or arranged marriage, or force his son into gay conversion therapy. I searched the house for tablets.” He pauses, and his son asks him about those suicidal thoughts. “I got up and sat in the back garden at 3am.
I always try to fix things if something is broken.” “My head was like a washing machine,” he says now. Riyadh wrote down “I’m gay” on a piece of paper and handed it over. Lorraine told her son to tell his father over dinner one evening.
“I hated him for what he didn’t already know,” Riyadh says. Driving around in the car together, she used to point to a good-looking man and ask: “Would you?”ĭuring this time, Riyadh’s relationship with his father soured. She was also adept at making his sexuality the new normal. “She was my shelter and my confidante,” Riyadh says. She kept her son’s secret from his father for nine months. They fell in love, married and moved to the seaside town of Bray, where they had their first son, Riyadh, two years later.Īt 16, he came out to his mother after she found gay porn on the family computer. He had always hoped to go to Europe (“I loved the way people could live freely”) and on his second attempt he reached England, where he met Lorraine, a Catholic woman from the east coast of Ireland. “You walked down every street, and there was a funeral.” Some died,” he says of the Iraq-Iran war of the time. Born in southern Iraq, he lived in Baghdad until 1982, when an error on a reissued birth certificate (three years were knocked off his age by mistake) gave him a window of time to escape the country before military service beckoned. It wasn’t me.” Riyadh told his father over dinner one evening, writing 'I’m gay' on a piece of paper and handing it over But it was damaging because I couldn’t live up to the expectation. “I knew you were doing it because you were worried about my safety in the big, bad world. I hadn’t got enough masculinity in me to match what you saw as normal or acceptable,” he says, addressing his father directly. “We’d been buddies so closely until that point and then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t enough. “I thought, he was going to get the shit beaten out of him, so I wanted him to toughen up. When Riyadh was in his early teens, in addition to hiking or fishing, his dad took him to karate. “I was worried he was too gentle, I needed to toughen him up,” Sam says now. I loved running around the house in my mother’s pink silk nightgown, black stilettos and anything I could find that sparkled.” At seven, his father told him to start acting like a boy. In his book, he writes that, “I was king of the sissy boys, growing up.
Riyadh, 28, recalls that he was flamboyant as a child. Both men are as candid as the book, particularly with each other. There is also a necessary chapter written from the parents’ perspective, by Sam and Riyadh’s mother, Lorraine. The coming-out drama forms part of a new book by Riyadh, an Irish YouTuber and broadcaster, whose bright, conversational guide to being a young gay man – Yay! You’re Gay! Now What? – offers salient advice on topics from gender identity to anal sex.
He was right: it took him another year, and when Riyadh came out to his dad, Sam says it “came like a fast train, it hit me very hard. Riyadh had stopped hanging out with his dad because he realised he was gay – a revelation he did not think his Muslim father, a garage owner with a passion for football and cars, would take well.