I’m writing this with my curtains drawn. Not because it’s night – it’s 2 PM – but because I don’t want my neighbors to see me typing. They might ask what I’m writing. They might look over my shoulder. They might see the word “gay” and everything would be over.
This is what my life is like. This is what our lives are like.
The Last Time I Was Beaten
It was three months ago. I was walking home from the market, minding my own business, when a group of boys – they couldn’t have been older than seventeen – started following me.
“Yan daudu! Yan daudu!” they shouted. Homosexual. The Hausa word that has become my nightmare.
I walked faster. They walked faster. I tried to turn into a different street. They cornered me.
The first punch caught me in the stomach. I doubled over. The second hit my face. I tasted blood. Then came the kicks. And the laughter. Always the laughter.
“This is what you get for being an abomination!”
A woman walked past. She saw everything. She kept walking.
An old man stopped, watched for a moment, then nodded approvingly before moving on.
No one helped. No one ever helps.
The Double Life
My mother doesn’t know. The same mother who survived Biafra, who taught me about resilience and survival – she doesn’t know her son is gay.
How can I tell her? How can I add this burden to a woman who has already carried so much pain?
At family gatherings, they ask: “Ifechi, when will you marry? When will you bring us a wife?”
I smile. I lie. “Soon, Mama. Soon.”
Inside, I’m dying. Every lie kills a little piece of me.
I have a “girlfriend” – a lesbian friend who also needs cover. We go to family events together. We pose for photos. We maintain the illusion.
This is survival in Nigeria.
The Law That Wants Me Dead
In 2014, Nigeria passed the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act. It’s not just about marriage – it criminalizes any form of same-sex relationship. The punishment? Fourteen years in prison. In the North, under Sharia law, it’s death by stoning.
Let that sink in. I can be legally killed for loving someone.
But the law is just paper. The real danger is the mob. The vigilantes who take “justice” into their own hands. The lynch mobs. The public executions that the police watch and do nothing about.
I know of at least five gay men who have been killed in my state in the past two years. Beaten to death. Burned alive. Their bodies displayed as warnings.
Their names were never in the newspapers. Their families never spoke up – out of shame, out of fear.
They died alone. Unloved. Unmourned.
The Dating App That Became a Trap
I tried using a dating app once. Just to meet someone, to feel less alone.
I matched with a guy. He was handsome, seemed genuine. We chatted for weeks. He understood me. Or so I thought.
We agreed to meet at a quiet spot.
He came with five men. They beat me, robbed me, and filmed it. “We should kill you right now,” one said, “but we’ll keep this video. If you ever report us, we’ll post it online and then you’ll really die.”
I never reported them. I never told anyone. I just… endured.
This happens all the time. Gay men luring other gay men into traps. Sometimes for money. Sometimes because they hate themselves so much they want to punish others like them.
We can’t even trust each other.
The Church That Cast Me Out
I used to go to church every Sunday. I was in the choir. I taught Sunday school.
Then someone saw me talking to another man “too fondly.” Just talking. Nothing more.
The pastor called me into his office. He had three elders with him.
“Brother Ifechi,” he said, his voice dripping with disgust, “we’ve heard disturbing things about you.”
I denied everything. But my voice shook. My hands trembled. They knew.
“We’re going to pray the demon out of you,” he said.
They held me down. They shouted. They poured oil on my head. They called me possessed, cursed, an agent of Satan.
When it was over, they told me not to come back until I was “delivered.”
I never went back. Not to that church. Not to any church.
God and I… we have a complicated relationship now.
The Question That Haunts Me: What If Biafra Had Won?
I think about this all the time. My mother’s Biafra. The nation that almost was.
Would I be free there? Would LGBTQ+ people have rights in an independent Biafra?
Maybe. Maybe not. But here’s what I know: we were fighting for self-determination. For the right to govern ourselves. For freedom.
Isn’t that what I want? The freedom to be myself? To love who I love? To live without fear?
The Igbo people fought for autonomy because we were marginalized, persecuted, killed. We wanted a place where we could be safe.
I want the same thing.
But Nigeria – the Nigeria that killed Biafran dreams – is the same Nigeria that wants to kill me for being gay.
The Hypocrisy That Kills Me
Here’s what makes me laugh bitterly: the same politicians who criminalize homosexuality are caught in gay scandals abroad. The same pastors who preach against us are found in hotel rooms with young men. The same society that calls us “un-African” ignores that pre-colonial Africa had space for gender diversity and same-sex relationships.
Colonialism brought homophobia. The British gave us the laws that criminalize us. Yet we call homosexuality “Western influence.”
The irony would be funny if it wasn’t killing us.
What I Want – What We All Want
I don’t want much. I don’t want a parade. I don’t need a flag. I just want:
- To walk down the street without fear
- To hold hands with someone I love
- To introduce my partner to my mother without risking her disowning me
- To not have to lie every single day of my life
- To go to sleep without wondering if tonight is the night they come for me
Is that too much to ask?
A Solution? Is There One?
People tell me to leave Nigeria. “Go to Europe. Go to America. Be free.”
But this is my home. My mother’s home. The land my uncle Nkem is buried in. Why should I have to run?
The solution isn’t me leaving. The solution is Nigeria changing.
We need:
- Decriminalization – Repeal the anti-gay laws immediately. Stop making love a crime.
- Education – Teach people that LGBTQ+ people are human beings, not demons or diseases.
- Protection – Police should protect us, not participate in our persecution.
- Visibility – We need prominent Nigerians to come out, to show that we are everywhere – in families, in churches, in government.
- Dialogue – Let’s talk. Let religious leaders, traditional rulers, and LGBTQ+ advocates sit down and actually listen to each other.
And maybe – just maybe – we need to learn from Biafra:
When a people are oppressed, when their basic humanity is denied, they have the right to fight for freedom. The Biafran people fought because they refused to be erased.
We LGBTQ+ Nigerians are being erased. Maybe it’s time we fight too – not with guns, but with truth, with visibility, with refusing to hide anymore.
The Risk I’m Taking Right Now
Publishing this could get me killed. I know that. My friends are begging me not to.
But I’m tired of hiding. I’m tired of fear. I’m tired of watching my community suffer in silence.
If Biafra taught us anything, it’s that silence in the face of injustice is complicity. My mother survived a genocide by being brave when bravery seemed impossible.
Maybe it’s time I inherited that courage.
To My Fellow LGBTQ+ Nigerians
You are not alone. You are not an abomination. You are not cursed.
You are human. You are worthy. You are loved.
I see you. I stand with you. We will survive this.
To Nigeria
You can beat us. You can jail us. You can kill us.
But you cannot erase us. We have always been here. We will always be here.
And one day – maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day – Nigeria will look back at this era with shame, the way the world looks back at apartheid, at segregation, at all the times humanity chose hatred over love.
History will not be kind to you.
But history will remember that we never stopped fighting to exist.
Written with fear and hope, by a gay man who refuses to disappear.
For every LGBTQ+ Nigerian living in hiding. For those who didn’t survive. For the future where we can finally breathe.
We are here. We exist. We matter.
By Ifechi Japhet Nwaorisa
