I know they were really cognizant of not wanting to turn to the queer Muslim to be the “expert,” but knowing that all of my work is deeply informed by a very personal place and very much about identity, it’s something that I was really excited to bring to the room.

What did it mean for you to have a major role in creating this story line?

Even as you’re asking me that question, it makes me emotional. As out and public as I am about my identity, it was not easy, whether it was with family or with friends. There was no representation of positive straight Muslim characters at the time, much less positive queer Muslim representation. So for me, writing was a way of creating some of that representation. Now you have Tan France on the new “Queer Eye”; that was not what we were living 10 years ago. The landscape of television, pop culture and basic representation has shifted so much. It just wasn’t there.

I don’t think the job is ever going to be done. This is just the beginning of the work that we have to do.

Knowing that the sex scene would be so significant, were there any ways in which you exercised caution or approached it differently?

I agonized over it because I knew how important it was for us. I’m not a man, I’m a cisgender woman, but I wanted to represent our queerness strongly. The scene didn’t start as sex. At first, there was a lot of talk about [Daniel being] a grieving widower: “Where is he at in his life?” I said that I feel like these two men, regardless of the complications, I don’t buy that they’re not going to sleep together if they’re alone and they have that like kind of attraction. Grief or no grief, that is real. The other thing that I found really important was, I wanted that to be beautiful. I call it beautiful aggression, that beautiful masculinity that I really love when I see two men together. There’s tenderness, but there’s also this rawness.