This is an edited extract from How to Dodge Flying Sandals and Other Advice for Life by Daniel Nour.

Meet Daniel Nour: Egyptian and Australian; loud and painfully awkward; conservative and very confused (especially about other boys). He’s never quite pulled off normal, but ‘not-normal’ is where the best stories are. Now he’s made his peace with that and is ready to share his wisdom in this highly unreliable ethnic memoir.

Told as a series of snapshots from Daniel’s life – from ‘How to Be Born’ to ‘How to Die’ and everything in between – this is a sharply funny tale of culture, family and trying, but not always managing, to come of age.

At turns wildly absurd, sharply insightful and disarmingly heartfelt, How to Dodge Flying Sandals and Other Advice for Life is a fresh take on growing up in Australia.

How to Dodge Flying Sandals and Other Advice for Life is now available for purchase at your local bookseller. 

A faffy boy is his mother’s disgrace.

Tonight is the first night of the rest of my life. Tonight is elation. Tonight is freedom. Tonight is pleasure. Tonight I’m going to Stonewall on Oxford Street.

A dingy club with carpeted floors, Stonewall is so named for the Stonewall riots, which some people say started when a drag queen threw a brick and others say was down to vodka being too expensive.

Header image by: Aleksandr Popov

In the upstairs bathroom of my home, I adorn myself with a sheer top studded with diamantes. My perky tits protrude a little under the heavy fabric.

After raiding Rita’s makeup counter, I carefully dot my eyelids with glitter and brush some shiny silver powder over the lids. Some gets in, stinging my eyes, and I immediately regret my mistake, wiping it off with a thin, scratchy towel. Like a Hallmark card, my therapist Barry’s words come to me unbidden.

It’s okay to feel pain. Just stay present.

I remember when I first started seeing Barry, who first convened the gay men’s group therapy session I started three years ago.

I had called him after falling into a shame spiral brought on by a hungry viewing of ‘Arab men take it raw, doggy’. His bio said, ‘Expert in therapy for culturally and linguistically diverse communities’.

Barry’s office, part of a corporate shared space in Surry Hills, which takes an hour and a half to reach in peak traffic down the M5, was decorated with items that were eye-wateringly erotic. On a shelf on the wall, there stood a row of nine stone statues with huge protuberances that I first thought were noses but then realised were penises – like Easter Island Moai, but gayer. A large fresco of an Ancient Greek man gently lowering himself onto the erect penis of an older bearded man hung on the other side of the room.

‘My mum’s eyes are sad,’ I told Barry pretty soon after we got to talking, my own eyes flitting across to the wall-porn.

My words were met with a respectful silence. His face was soft and easy and his hands folded gently around his belly. I felt safe to continue. I explain how, since my bungled ‘coming out’ a few months ago, we’ve all tacitly agreed to carry on like it never happened.

Barry didn’t console or patronise me. He asked good questions about why and for how long I had felt this way. He suggested that I could love my parents within healthy boundaries, in a way that didn’t compromise my own happiness just to appease them.

He asked if I might date someone, not just for the thrill of sexual adventure but for the possibility of finding someone to settle down with.

Over three months, he peeled me back like an onion – I cried raw, burning tears.

Eventually the weeping stopped, but beneath it was a dull, hard sadness. Beneath this, the deeper and more turbulent magma flow of fear: the hellfire of the vengeful God.

One of the ventures Barry set me on, the one that really tied my stomach in knots, was to go out to a club with no expectations and just have fun.

Tonight, I’m taking up his challenge. Reciting the comforting words he taught me like a litany – ‘I am loved, I am safe, I am accepted’ – I pull on my sluttiest pair of booty shorts and my cleanest white kicks.

Then I cover it all up in one of Dad’s old giant coats and run down the stairs and halfway down the street before my parents can shout out from the family room. Anyway, they are too deep into the episode of El Hajj Metwalee’s Wives where he takes them all on a trip to Sharm El-Sheikh and the older ones get jealous of the younger’s bikini bod.

I see my Uber driver, Hassan, and run towards his Mazda. Inside the car, the sound of prayerful recitation fills my ears.

My eyes take in the miniature golden Qur’an stuck to his dashboard and the Shahada sticker on the windscreen behind me. I pull my coat around me a little tighter.

The streets fade from the greige of the suburbs to the vivid fluorescence of the inner city. I think back on all the confessions I gave to Father Constantinos in the musty sacristy over the last few months. I would jerk off to a porno that started with guys playing soccer and tell him I had ‘acted out’ after watching women’s netball. I would ogle Brad Pitt’s girthsome legs in Troy and tell him I had had ‘impure thoughts’.

Six months ago I had a wet dream after watching an episode of Queer as Folk and told him, ‘The enemy is tempting me.’ No more of that – no more confessing what is true to my nature, I remind myself, remembering Barry’s admonition.

I am loved, I am safe, I am accepted, I tell myself again, releasing a new wave of nausea that threatens to engulf me.

All too soon, I arrive at the shameless pride flag that hangs over Stonewall. I step out onto the footpath, over a puddle and into the line out front, where people are flirting and laughing.

With predictable conventionality, some are singing ‘We’re Off to See the Wizard’, and a girl in a chequered blue miniskirt who looks about nineteen slaps the arse of her twink friend who, in lieu of clothes, is wearing a lion’s tail over a golden jockstrap.

I pay my entry fee, have my hand stamped and walk into a laser show with heavy bass pulsing through giant speakers to the tune of Kylie’s ‘All the Lovers’ and the alternatingly lustful and judgey stares of a thousand shirtless, chiselled gays.

My heart is pumping hard in my chest and I hear a buzzing in my ears that has nothing to do with the next song, the Sakgra remix of ‘Real Groove’. I can feel sweat on my upper lip and my insides churning and bubbling.

I am not cut out for this. What made me think I was?

Still in my coat and headed to the bathroom, I push aside a dozen hairless torsos, past two guys deep-throating each other’s tongues outside the bathroom door, and go into one of the cubicles.

I sit down, fully clothed, on the toilet. My hands hold my head, which I slowly drop between my knees. My racing heart elicits a wave of queasiness, which I force down with all my might. I know that I must breathe slower, but in my panicked state I forget how.

My heart races still faster and threatens to explode in my chest. My stomach turns yet further. Then, somewhere in the halls of my psyche, I hear the echo of Barry’s deep voice.

You are loved, you are safe, you are accepted.

My sprinting heart slows down to a gallop, then a jog. I lift my head slowly, and it begins to clear. I open my eyes to see a flyer on the cubicle door: ‘Friends of Dorothy: Jockstraps and Spellcraft’. Perfect, just perfect.

Still, I have a choice to make: go home in shame or stay and shake my arse, which I have jammed into the white booty shorts I ordered online, and try to make the most of this.

Realising I have to get rid of Dad’s giant burqa-like smock, I head over to Stonewall’s rough-and-ready coat check.

Behind the counter is a dark-eyed, wiry, lithe guy in a white ribbed singlet and green shorts. His brow is shiny with sweat and a mop of soft brown hair sits atop it.

‘Hey, handsome, can I take that off your hands?’

It’s a few seconds before I realise that he has asked me a question.

Flirt with the coat-check guy! I hear Barry say from down one of the shorter hallways in my psyche. Say something clever, now, go!

‘That’s not the only thing you can take off my hands.’ I shake my head. ‘Sorry, that’s a very stupid thing to say.’

Surprisingly, he smiles and shakes his head back. Realising that a drink may help me think less and say something reasonable, I head to the bar. Jostling through the crowd of perky arses and V-shaped torsos, I eventually get the bartender’s attention.

‘What can I get you?’ he shouts over the techno.

‘A gin and tonic,’ I say, as if by rote, remembering the time Rita told me I should stop ordering vodka sunrises because they made me seem like a pussy.

I sip my drink from a short straw, tasting the floral juniper and the acrid, sharp alcohol. That’s when I see that the coat-check guy has joined the throng. I try not to look at him, but the effort just makes me look at him more.

Be relaxed, be straightforward, I hear Barry say from the living room in my mind, where he is sitting cross-legged and drinking Turkish coffee from one of Mum’s tiny cups.

Coat-check guy is now standing beside me ordering his own drink. I side-eye him, trying to seem cool. He takes a sip of something fruity with an umbrella in it.

‘Hung up your own coat for the night?’ I hear myself say. Surprised at my own idiocy, I quickly tell him I’m sorry, again.

‘I accept your apology,’ he says with a wink and a nod, his floppy hair swaying like palm fronds. ‘Let’s dance for a bit.’

I can smell the grenadine and acerbic vodka on his mouth and see the thin sheen of sticky redness that clings to his lips like chapstick.

A sudden vision as he pulls me towards the dance floor, past the semi-naked bodies and through the turbid heat that hits so heavy it makes my arse crack leak sweat. I remember the flies that would buzz around the zapper in our backyard in summer, drawn by the sticky puddles of Coke and lemonade on the plastic outdoor table cover when my cousins and I would jostle for soft drinks. Then we would run to the trampoline, climbing up and jumping so hard and high that one of us would invariably vomit onto the concrete.

I succumb to the rhythm, awkwardly at first, with abrupt little steps, but then with more and more ease. Coat-check is swaying too, and when the beat drops, we jump up and down along with the whole crowd, like all of us have received a secret memo. Legs and arms akimbo, the napes of stout necks glistening and the pooling sweat at the bases of lower backs and beneath the folds of buttocks shining under the light.

On and on with the technotronic beat, wooing us into ecstasy. The springs of the trampoline expanding, then shrinking taut again. Bodies colliding midair. Like when I was a kid, but this time Mum is not here to shout at me for going too near the edge.

This is pure exhibitionism: a trammelled longing bursting forth onto the stage in starlight and laser beams.

I love the attention, the occasional glances from the muscle queens, but mostly the sweet eyes of Coat-check. His mouth forms into a smile as I dance goofily, legs and arms like the zigzags of a pharaoh.

‘I just have to say, you are so hot,’ I tell him.

‘You are too!’ he says.

I get a sudden vision of Saint Sebastian impaled by all those horny arrows. Our lips collide in a long kiss. The bitter gin taste in my mouth combines with his sweet fruitiness. I’m lost in his mouth and the feel of his neck in my palm, the grassy texture of his hair in my fingertips.

Then suddenly he pulls away, telling me he has to get back to the coat check. But I don’t feel abandoned or sad, I just kiss him on the cheek and keep dancing.

I do it for hours. Or is it days? Sometimes I’m joined by naked torsos, sometimes I’m by myself. The music takes me and it’s 2am before I check my phone. Three missed calls from Dad. I look around; the floor has started emptying. I dance a bit more. I pee, missing the urinal and hitting the floor, holding my throbbing temple with my left hand.

After an Uber drive full of Afrobeat for an hour down the M5, I run up the stairs and fall onto my bed, still sticky, shining.

I don’t want to wash this euphoria off.

How to Dodge Flying Sandals and Other Advice for Life is now available for purchase at your local bookseller.