I was small when I understood that I looked at boys the way my friends looked at girls. Nobody told me. I worked it out from the inside, the way you work out that you are left-handed. And then, from the outside, I was taught what it meant: sermons about abomination, jokes in the school yard, a neighbour beaten in the street, the way adults said the word with their faces twisted. By ten I had two selves. By twelve I was an expert at keeping them apart.
The performance
Growing up gay in Nigeria is a performance with no interval. You learn to laugh at the jokes. You learn to talk about girls. You learn which friend you can sit next to and for how long. You learn to lower your voice half a tone, to hold your hands differently, to walk differently, and then you learn that you have overdone it and the walk itself is suspicious. I wrote a whole chapter about the Sunday performance in God Bless Gay People, because it was the one I was best at.
The exhaustion of it is hard to explain to people who have never had to do it. It is not the fear that wears you down. It is the daily editing of every sentence before it leaves your mouth.
First love, and what it costs
Everyone in Nigeria who is gay has a story about the first person they trusted. Some of those stories end well. Many end in blackmail, because in a country where the law is against you, the person who knows your secret owns you. Nigerians have a word for the set-up, kito: a date that turns out to be a gang, a room that turns out to be a trap, a phone full of photos held over your head. I have my own version of that story and it is in the books. What I want to say here is only that the danger does not come mainly from strangers. It comes from the fact that you cannot go to anyone afterwards.
The law does not just punish what you do. It removes every door you could knock on when something is done to you.
The day it came out
For most of us there is a day. A message read by the wrong person, a friend who talks, a neighbour who saw. Mine came in my twenties and it took the ground out from under me in a single afternoon. The details are in the memoir. The shape of it is the same for thousands of young Nigerians every year: the shouting, the pastor called, the door, the street.
If you are reading this because that day has just happened to you, stop reading and go to the support line. Then come back.
What I would tell that boy
- You are not sick, and you are not a sin. The people who told you that were taught it by people who were taught it.
- Do not trust a new face with your whole life in the first week. Read the safety guide.
- Keep one person who knows. One is enough to stay alive.
- Your country's law is wrong. Wrong laws have been changed before, everywhere, including in the country that wrote ours.
- Write it down. If they take everything else, they cannot take what you have already said.