I met Mohammed Shaik Hussain Ali in that quintessential San Francisco meeting space — an airy industrial coffee shop — busy, crowded, in fact, for a Sunday morning. He arrived, dressed in a blue shirt and black vest, and we sat down at one end of a large communal table to talk about what it meant to him to be queer and Muslim — two apparently polar identities that he seems to navigate with ease. Never feeling an internal conflict between these two identities or the need to choose one over the other, Ali rejects the mainstream Islamic idea that the Quran outrightly forbids homosexuality. “I learnt Arabic to read the Quran because I didn’t want to rely on anyone else’s translation. And what I read buttressed the idea that there was no sin in this and me being gay does not affect my following any of the other tenets of the religion like prayer, fasting or zakat,” he explains.

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