Abdellah Taïa

Taia has noted that he is coauthoring a play to be performed in Paris: https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2020/11/abdellah-taia/

In fall 2015, Taïa visited the University of Pittsburgh as a visiting fellow in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program. While on campus, he recorded a podcast as part of the schools' Year of the Humanities.

After Taïa came out publicly, "it took years to overcome the rifts" between him and his family, he told The New York Times in 2014. "They cried and screamed....I cried when they called me. But I won't apologize. Never."

The scandal over Taïa's coming-out led to "a debate about gay rights and the oppression of the individual in Morocco, and to a greater extent, the entire Arab world." Still, as of 2014, he remains "the only Moroccan intellectual to 'come out.'"

Taïa said in April 2014 that his next book was "a tale about old Moroccan prostitutes who at the end of their careers touring the world have landed in Paris."

According to a 2014 New York Times profile, Taïa "considers himself Muslim because he is very spiritual, and he believes that freedom has existed in Islam through those such as the Arab philosopher Averroes and the Iranian poet Rumi, and in works such as '1001 Nights.'" Taïa told the Times, "I don't want to dissociate myself from Islam....It is part of my identity. It is not because I am gay that I will reject it. We need to recover this freedom that has existed in Islam." In 2013, Taïa told The Atlantic, "I consider myself culturally Muslim. I feel connected to the great writers and thinkers of Islamic civilization, the great philosophers, sociologists and poets. I believe firmly in secularism, and I think that Muslims would be better off liberating themselves from religion. Islam should have no role in government."

He strongly supported the "February 20 movement" in Morocco that demanded democratic reforms. He wrote about this in the 2014 book "Arabs Are No Longer Afraid." He has said that the "people who started the Arab Spring are young people, and the revolution was stolen from them by the Islamists."

"Books, like the film, do not solve anything," Taïa told The New York Times in 2014; "what I produce artistically does not help me in any way in my real life. Nothing is resolved. Everything is complex, complicated. I sincerely believe that there is only love to heal and soothe troubled souls."

Taïa directed a film adaptation of his book Salvation Army. It "gave the Arab world its first on-screen gay protagonist," according to The New York Times. Taïa has said that Michael Powell's film Black Narcissus "directly influenced Salvation Army." The film, a French-Moroccan-Swiss production, was shown at the Venice and Toronto film festivals in 2013. It was screened in February 2014 at the National Film Festival in Tangier, won the Grand Prix at the Angers Film Festival in France, and was shown at the New Directors Festival in New York in March 2014. The reviewer for Variety stated that in the film "Taïa retains the bare bones but strips away warmth and insight, without any fresh perceptions that would compensate." Another reviewer, however, called the film "disciplined and poetic," praising Taïa for managing "to regard his own story with relative objectivity" and concluding that the film "avoids the usual pitfalls of political cinema, precisely because Taïa is able to remain focused on particulars, the overwhelming feel of things." A reviewer for the Atlantic wrote that at a Venice Film Festival "notable for the prevalence of works grappling with global and societal woes, perhaps no film has blended the personal and the political as strikingly as Abdellah Taïa's L'Armée du salut (Salvation Army)."

He participated in October 2013 in the International Festival of Authors.

He described this incident at length in a 2012 op-ed for The New York Times, titled "A Boy to Be Sacrificed":

He said in 2012 that while Moroccan government and society have not changed dramatically in their views of homosexuality, one thing that has changed is that "when officials talk about human rights and the freedom of individuals, they also talk about homosexuals." Also,

As a young boy, he touched a high-voltage power generator and was unconscious and presumed dead for an hour. After he woke up he was labeled "the miracle boy". In 2010 he said: "I still have some of the electricity I got that day. I was somewhere during that 'dead time,' but where, I don't know. Perhaps the reason I write is because I want to know the answer to that question."

Taïa's parents "stressed education and sent five of their nine children to university." He studied French literature while living in Rabat, "his gaze set upon Paris and the possibilities that city represented to him, namely a career in film." Taïa said in 2010 that "It was clear to me that eventually I had to get to Paris, because this was the city of Isabelle Adjani.... This was the city of Rimbaud and Marcel Proust.... The target was to go there to be free as a homosexual, but at the same time to achieve these dreams–to write movies and books, and to dream big, if I may say that."

His novel Le jour de roi (The King's Day), about King Hassan II, "was banned in Morocco." But after it received the 2010 Prix de Flore literary prize, "the ban was lifted. My books are now translated into Arabic and are available in Morocco, a sign that things are changing."

Taïa wrote a piece for The Guardian in December 2010 about Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who,

Le jour du Roi was awarded the French Prix de Flore in 2010.

Salvation Army was described in Out Magazine as "a gay coming-of-age novel" whose "perspective–rooted in the claustrophobic world of a poor Moroccan neighborhood–lends it freshness rare in English literature." It was described by author David Ebershoff as one of the best gay books of 2009 and by Edmund White, who wrote the introduction to the American edition, as marked by "a simplicity that only intelligence and experience and wide reading can buy." Variety called it "a bold coming out, unadorned by guilt or sensationalism and directly confronting Western expectations, at least in gay circles, of Arab youth as adornments rather than equal companions."

In 2009, when Morocco's interior ministry began to crack down on writing that challenged the country's "moral and religious values," Taïa published an open letter, "Homosexuality Explained to My Mother," in Tel Quel.

Taïa responded to the 2007 death of two young brothers in a suicide attack on the U.S. consulate in Casablanca with a Le Monde editorial titled "We Have to Save Moroccan Youth." At his urging, several Moroccan artists and writers of his generation wrote follow-up essays to his editorial, which were published in 2009 as a book, edited by Taïa, titled Lettres à un jeune marocain (Letters to a Young Moroccan). Pierre Bergé, the partner of Yves Saint Laurent, "agreed to fund the printing and distribution of 90,000 copies of the book in French and Arabic."

In 2007, he publicly came out of the closet in an interview with the literary magazine TelQuel, which created controversy in Morocco.

Described by Interview Magazine as a "literary transgressor and cultural paragon," Taïa became the first openly gay Arab writer in 2006, and, as of 2014, he remains the only openly homosexual Moroccan writer or filmmaker. His first movie, Salvation Army, is widely considered to have given Arab cinema "its first gay protagonist." Since his coming-out, according to one source, Taïa "has become an iconic figure in his homeland of Morocco and throughout the Arab world, and a beacon of hope in a country where homosexuality is illegal."

In 2001, he appeared in a French gay film The Road to Love.

His French skills "improved so much," thanks largely to his diary, "that he won a scholarship to study 18th-century French literature in Geneva." He went to Switzerland in 1998 and studied there for a semester. In 1999 he went to the Sorbonne, on another scholarship, to work on his doctoral thesis. In Paris "Taïa broke away from what he saw as the oppressive confines of his family and Moroccan society and began a process of self-actualization."

Taïa's books deal with his life living in a homophobic society and have autobiographical background on the social experiences of the generation of Moroccans who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. Five of Taïa's novels have been published by Editions du Seuil in France. Two of his novels, Salvation Army (2009) and An Arab Melancholia (2012), have been published in English translation by Semiotext(e).

Taïa lived in Hay Salam from 1974 to 1998. He has described the experience:

Abdellah Taïa (Arabic: عبد الله الطايع; born 1973) is a Moroccan writer and filmmaker who writes in the French language and has been based in Paris since 1998. He has published eight novels, many of them heavily autobiographical. His books have been translated into Basque, Dutch, German, English, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish and Arabic.

Taïa was born in 1973 in Rabat, Morocco. According to The New York Times, Taïa "was born inside the public library of Rabat...where his dad worked as a janitor and where his family lived until he was 2." He grew up in Hay Salam, a neighborhood of Salé, a town near Rabat. His family was poor. He had nine siblings. He first came into contact with literature through his father's job at the library.