"My ninth birthday fell on a school day, a bright and clear-skied Tuesday in September. I expected my mom to bring cupcakes to school during lunch, a tradition I loved because for one day each year, I knew I wouldn’t have to feel like the weird bookworm, the Iranian American, the outsider who couldn’t kick a soccer ball to save his life. I would be celebrated. But that year, no cupcakes. I went home to a dark house, disappointed.

I was too young to know what it meant that my birthday fell on 9/11.

People are always surprised when I tell them my birthday is Sept. 11. They’ll raise their eyebrows, or just flat-out say, “Ouch.” Given that I’m also visibly Middle Eastern, I get it. 9/11 was a day that changed America forever. It changed my life forever, too.

During recess, boys would ask me why “my people” had attacked the Twin Towers. I was taunted and called names, like so many other Muslim and Middle Eastern people at that time. I was already used to feeling like an outsider. Now I was also a “terrorist.”

And there was something else: I’m gay. Growing up in suburban Virginia, I didn’t think I would ever come out. To be Iranian in post-9/11 America was one thing, but to be gay, too? One oppressed identity was enough to make me feel isolated. These two together felt impossible. My identity felt like a contradiction. The kind of equation you punch into the identity calculator and get an error message.

When I did finally come out in college, I kept those two parts of my life separate. It wasn’t hard. I just left out certain details about my weekends and my friends in phone calls back home, and I distanced myself from parts of my heritage. I had, in effect, put up a wall between the me who existed at college in New York, who went on dates with boys and danced to Robyn at gay bars, and the me who went home and was a good Iranian son."

 - Arvin Ahmadi