One of Atlanta’s newest city council members continues to break glass ceilings — even the ones that not many people know or care about. Liliana Bakhtiari’s bio on the Atlanta City Council website touts her remarkable (at least to the woke) accomplishments.
“Liliana is the first queer Muslim person to be elected in the state of Georgia, and the first nonbinary person elected in the city of Atlanta,” the bio states. “She identifies as gender fluid and uses ‘she/her’ and ‘they/them’ pronouns.”
(Keep the whole pronoun thing in your mind. It’ll come in handy later.)
Bakhtiari is the daughter of Iranian immigrants, which makes me think: I can’t imagine she’d be able to get away with being “queer” and “non-binary” in that country.
The resume of the 34-year-old Bakhtiari is full of the progressive bona fides that won her support in a far-left part of the city, as well as would probably anger anybody in her familial homeland.
“Professionally, Liliana served as the public affairs manager of Planned Parenthood Southeast and lobbied for voting rights with ProGeorgia,” reads her bio. She served as a consultant for Echo Market Research as they built out their Social Justice Division.”
But there’s one feature of Bakhtiari’s life that hasn’t become public until just recently. She’s in a “nonmonogamous” relationship with two other women. Bakhtiari had been dating Kris Brown, a dancer-turned-political operative, for a decade when they decided to add a third woman, Sarah Al-Khayyal, to the mix.
“In the fall of 2020, Bakhtiari met Al-Khayyal through a virtual nonmonogamy support group,” NBC News informs readers in a glowing feature. “Al-Khayyal is a policy manager at a nonprofit and is on the Atlanta mayor’s LGBTQ advisory board.”
For a time, Bakhtiari confessed to NBC News, the three were worried that their complex relationship would come out “in a scandal.”
NBC News reports, “’But we’re openly showing it and proud of it,’ Bakhtiari, 34, said during a video interview, as Brown and Al-Khayyal sat on either side. ‘It should be destigmatized. It’s a very valid familial structure that people should embrace.’”
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Brown said that she was “cool with” adding a third person to the relationship.
“For me, it was kind of a relief as well to be like, ‘OK, I don’t have to be this person’s everything all the time,'” she told NBC News. “‘I can be as much of their life as works for us, and we can have this fluidity,’ and I really liked the feeling of that.”
Bakhtiari had some issues with how other people would perceive the nonmonogamous relationship. NBC News reports, “they carried a lot of shame about being nonmonogamous and feeling ‘that I was a terrible partner, that Kris was only doing this for me, that I was keeping them home while I went out to have my cake and eat it, too — all of these things that were very untrue,’ they said.”
A quick diversion: here’s where the pronoun fun comes in. Bakhtiari uses “she” in her official bio on the city website, but NBC News uses “they” for her (and, I think, Brown), which creates some confusion as you’re reading the NBC profile. It also shows the cognitive dissonance of the whole “nonbinary” pronoun game. Is Bakhtiari using “she/her” in official capacities but “they/them” colloquially? Does she want to have her cake and eat it too when it comes to pronouns?
Al-Khayyal says that nonmonogamous relationships allow people to have the best of both — or all — worlds.
“Nonmonogamy for me doesn’t have to be having multiple partners,” she told NBC News. “It’s also breaking down the platonic-romantic binary and being able to have these relationships that kind of exist in that gray area.”
The three women have also explored the idea of developing a “queer commune” where people can be themselves and not worry about what the rest of the world thinks.
What Bakhtiari has to worry about is what her constituents think. The trio kept their relationship “in the closet” until nine months after she took office, so will voters even in a reliably left-wing district of a progressive city be okay with three women “exploring [their] queerness” together? That remains to be seen.
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