Faisal Alam is a gay

Gay

Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

 Pakistani American

Pakistani American

A Pakistani American is any citizen or resident of the United States who has Pakistani heritage.- History in the United States :Muslim immigrants from areas that are now part of Pakistan have been migrating to America and first entered the United States as early as the eighteenth century, working...

 who founded the Al-Fatiha Foundation

Al-Fatiha Foundation

The Al-Fatiha Foundation is an organization which advances the cause of gay, lesbian, and transgender Muslims. It was founded in 1997 by Faisal Alam, a Pakistani American, and is registered as a nonprofit organization in the United States...

, an organization dedicated to advancing the cause of gay, lesbian

Lesbian

Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...

, and transgender

Transgender

Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....

 Muslim

Muslim

A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...

s.

Alam arrived in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 from Pakistan

Pakistan

Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...

 in 1987, at the age of ten, and resided in the rural middle-class town of Ellington

Ellington, Connecticut

Ellington is a town in Tolland County, Connecticut, United States. Ellington was incorporated in May, 1786, from East Windsor. As of the 2000 census, the town population was 12,921...

, Connecticut

Connecticut

Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...

. In 1997, after a failed engagement to a Muslim girl while he was attending Northeastern University

Northeastern University, Boston

Northeastern University , is a private, secular, coeducational research university in Boston, Massachusetts. Northeastern has eight colleges and offers undergraduate majors in 65 departments...

, he started a Yahoo! Group for LGBT

LGBT

LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

 Muslims that quickly became very popular. He founded Al-Fatiha in 1998 and served as its President until stepping down in 2004.
He is a member of the National Religious Leadership Roundtable and the LGBT Program of Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch is an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. Its headquarters are in New York City and it has offices in Berlin, Beirut, Brussels, Chicago, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo,...

.

External links

• Al-Fatiha homepage (website discontinued since 2009)
• Interview with Alam by Johann Hari
  Johann Hari
  Johann Hari is an award winning British journalist who has been a columnist at The Independent, the The Huffington Post, and contributed to several other publications. In 2011, Hari was accused of plagiarism; he subsequently was suspended from The Independent and surrendered his 2008 Orwell Prize...