Reza Farahan, who appears on Bravo's
Shahs of Sunset, has said his coming out gay left his Iranian
mother “hysterical.”
Farahan, 38, discussed how his mother
confronted him about his sexuality at the age of 21 in an It
Gets Better video.
“I lived at home. I had just come
back from college. I was 21 years old. And I had gone out drinking
that night,” Farahan said in the video. “And my mom called me
into the kitchen the next morning. And I sat down across from her.
I'm 21, she looks me dead in the eye and she said to me, 'Reza, are
you a gay?'”
“And I thought in that moment, I
either say yes or I have to live a lie for the rest of my life. And
I don't know how I did it but in that moment I mustered up enough
courage to say yes.”
“And she was hysterical.”
“At the end of two minutes, she
pulled herself together, she looked me dead in the eyes and she said,
'You're my son. I love you. I will stick behind you until the day I
die. And our relationship will never change from this point on.'”
Farahan, who was born in Tehran, Iran
and raised in Beverly Hills, is among the group of six young
Persian-American friends featured in Bravo's newest docu-series.
“The only reason I wanted to be on a
reality show was to have an impact on someone's life. Someone from
the Middle East who's at home thinking no Middle Easterners can live
out loud and be themselves. That's not true; look at me,” he
added. (The video is embedded in the right panel of this page.
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