For Naveed Merchant, marching down San Francisco's Market Street in the city's annual Gay Pride parade marks a crucial moment, a public declaration of his long-concealed identity.
But unlike many of the thousands of marchers strutting their stuff beneath fluttering rainbow flags, Merchant's secret is not that he is gay.
It's that he is Muslim.
"I don't think I'm going to be the same person when I go back to Los Angeles," the young Pakistani-American said as he discussed his feelings about taking part in the parade. "I am not going to be in the closet about being Muslim anymore."
For Merchant, and several dozen other gay Muslims, San Francisco's Gay Pride celebration is a chance to raise the flag for one of the world's most invisible populations - gay and lesbian followers of Islam.
"This is all about visibility, about the fact that we finally have a place at the table," said Faisal Alam, the 26-year-old founder of the Al-Fatiha Foundation, a growing nonprofit group devoted to supporting and encouraging Muslims who are attempting to reconcile their faith with their sexual identity.
For a long time nobody knew that there could be such a thing as a gay Muslim. Well, here we are."
San Francisco's Gay Pride festival celebrates everything from the "Dykes on Bikes" lesbian motorcycle squad to the smiling parents of "Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays" (PFLAG) - spiced with rowdy contingents of drag queens, leather fetishists and exhibitionists of every stripe.
But for participants in Al-Fatiha's show of solidarity, the parade marked an important step toward fighting their way back toward religious faith, even in a religion that condemns their very existence.
"I didn't need a Fatwa (religious death decree) on my life. I wanted to kill myself, and I tried," Merchant said. "But Allah did not want me dead. And I'm realising now that being gay and being Muslim are both just metaphors for something very intrinsic: a desire for love, a desire for spirituality and a desire for a connection with God."
For Muslim gays or lesbians there have traditionally been few places to turn. Most religious leaders and scholars agree that Islam holds no place for homosexuality, condemning it as a grievous sin that under some Islamic governments is punishable by death.
"There is no room to be Muslim and gay at the same time," said Dr Taha Jabir Alalwani, president of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, Virginia.
"If they want to be gay, they must be far from Islamic religion and the Muslim community. If they want to be Muslims, they should treat themselves and become clean from this kind of sin. There can be no compromise in this."
Islam is not alone in this prohibition, which also holds for Catholics, Mormons and several Protestant denominations. But while Western societies offer a range of spiritual alternatives for gay Christians, Jews and others who seek to maintain some form of religious faith, Islam has traditionally closed the door to even the notion of homosexuality.
"If gays want to say that Islam discriminates, that is fine. We discriminate, and we are proud of this. And there is no Muslim group in the world that does not have the same position on this sin," Alalwani said.
The Al-Fatiha Foundation, established in 1997, is aimed at giving some breathing room for gay and lesbian Muslims. Launched as a simple Internet discussion group, the foundation now boasts of more than 275 subscribers to its updates from more than 20 countries around the world.
Alam, who began the group in an effort to find ways of reconciling his own Muslim faith with his gay identity, says he believes the foundation has touched thousands, many of them living in countries where being publicly gay or lesbian could result in ostracism, lashings, or even death.
For Alam and others, Islam's strict ban on homosexuality is a human - rather than a divine - edict.
"There are lots of grey areas in Islam, but people want this to be a black and white issue," Alam said. "But what we are trying to do now is build ourselves as a movement before we confront the orthodox interpretation of God's word."
© Reuters
