I feel like I truly came into my identity as a bisexual girl in my first year of university.
I did not struggle with accepting my bisexuality. Even though I came from purity culture, I never thought Jesus was going to put me in hell because I liked girls in the way that I liked boys. I figured he definitely had more important things to worry about. I thought it was cool to be a person who could get on with anyone, provided the attraction was there. I had other kinds of problems and angsts, but my sexual identity was not one of them.
Until it was.
I had a friend who was gay, as openly as one could safely be in the homophobic pressure cooker that is a Nigerian university. One day, we were walking on the road and talking, I can’t even remember what about: something about a gay couple. I think he had been trying to tell me something about bottoms. I didn’t know anything about queer relationships and their dynamics. So I blurted out stupidly: “You mean the one who’s the girl in the relationship?”
With the gift of hindsight, I can appreciate my friend’s frustration. He rolled his eyes and groaned. He tried to explain the concept of top and bottom to me. But in the most dismissive voice possible, he also said something about how I wasn’t queer, so I wouldn’t understand.
I remember that in that moment, I was a little hurt at how dismissive he had been of my queerness. True, I was painfully ignorant of a lot of the dynamics of queer existence, having only just started coming into my own. But here was a queer friend who knew of my attraction to fellow girls, excluding me from the community because I hadn’t had the community yet to know what a bottom was.
The conversation carried on, and bar the few seconds that I had registered his comment as an exclusionary one, I did not have time to dwell on what my friend had said and how it had made me feel. But insidious things that take root do not always make themselves known at first. Their power lies in their subtleness. Over time, I started feeling like a fraud any time I told anyone I was queer. Because, really, I’d say to myself, what did I know about being queer? How active was I in the queer community? Did I become queer simply because I said I was?
What started off as a side remark — as side-remarkable as side remarks can be — ended up dogging my identity efforts for a long time. I started questioning myself. A little voice in my head thought it rich that I never openly canvassed for LGBTQ+ rights, except in the littlest circles and in the most noncommittal way. That voice told me I was merely seeking the benefits of belonging to the community without the responsibilities. Had I ever even been with a girl — truly, truly been with a girl? It became a numbers game, racking up the number of kisses and moments of intimacy with other women, the number of times I had told someone I was queer and they had said they had sensed it; trying to see if the sum of these paltry things felt like enough to qualify myself for admission into the community.
The more distress I felt over my identity, the more badly I wanted to get atop some suitably high rooftop (minding my fear of heights) and scream that, I swear, I am queer! Believe me, please!
Except, I was terrified to death of doing that.
Nigeria is not a safe place to be queer in. More than once, my friend has had to involve me in the paying of some ransom — for real — to secure the freedom of some other mutual friend who was being held hostage by deeply bigoted, hateful individuals whose tiny senses of existence were being threatened by another person’s confident sense of existence. An acquaintance of mine was almost beaten to death by a group of men who masterminded a catfishing strategy. There is a fourteen-year prison term awaiting anyone the state deems is in a same-sex relationship.
There is a lot of hypocrisy and classism at play in the politics of anti-queerness in Nigeria. The politicians who froth at the mouth and get off on prosecuting homosexuality are often the same ones who maintain clandestine queer relationships. For the most part, it is the poor queer who bear the brunt of anti-queer bigotry in the country. Which is, of course, the reality of capitalism.
But my terror at openly identifying as queer had nothing to do with state-sanctioned bigotry. I was not afraid of the police, or individuals too full of hate to reason, or the society that cheers both on. All these were far-off threats for me, too vague to be taken seriously. And perhaps I can acknowledge the place of privilege in making me feel this way.
The immediate, real threat to my desire for the authenticity I felt was waiting for me on the other side of coming out, was my family. I had never tried to imagine what coming out to my family would be like. It was simply not a thing I was willing to grapple with for the longest time.
From childhood, it was deeply impressed on me that I came from a good family with a family name which must be preserved. Nobody ever said any such words, but the subtext was in the action: the way our wardrobe was heavily censored, the way we had to be very conscious and very well-behaved when we were outside, the way the adults turned up their noses at and spoke disgustedly of people who were behaving “disgracefully.” It was obvious there was no room for bringing disrepute to the family.
And it wasn’t just about the family name. There was also the matter of apparently making God happy. In fact, the two concepts were deeply intertwined. Didn’t the Bible talk extensively about bringing a child up properly and behaving modestly and such?
For my family, then, nothing could be more disgraceful and unchristian than having a child/sibling openly associating with, even identifying as one of, the queers.”
Unresolved trauma was also one of the reasons I dreaded encountering my family if I came out.
Some years back, I had run away from home when my desire for authentic expression — this time wardrobe-related — had clashed with my family’s views and I could not endure the atmosphere at home. It was a wretched six months, which, in some ways, I had not yet healed from. I had returned home and had had conversations, but nothing deep enough to truly address the issue, which was that I desperately wanted to be my own self in a family that demanded homogeneity for a myriad reasons. None of us were ready for the conversation. Years later, I still reeled a little from all that unpleasantness. Was I ready to stir more up, especially when I still made my home here?
To crown all of this, I love my family. Perhaps my own love is tinged with that intensity that people with borderline personality disorder know only too well. But it is true that I come from a communal society where the individual is very closely tied to the group. We do not exist alone. We are part of something bigger, and there is this instinctive desire to contribute to the wholeness of that bigger thing, which anchors us. My family has been there for me in many selfless ways. I am aware enough to acknowledge that their actions are tinged with love and care, the desire to see me well; even if they have expressed those sentiments in questionable and sometimes hurtful ways. Two truths can co-exist. It’s this cognitive discordance that is usually at the base of most of our distress.
So. I want to be authentically queer but I am not ready to have that conversation with my family. How do I stay true to two opposable sides of a coin?
The first step to resolving my internal turmoil was coming to a radical acceptance of my queerness. One day, I had a lightbulb moment and thought, “You know what? I’m done not feeling queer enough because of a comment years ago; because I haven’t got the word PRIDE tattooed onto my forehead. I am a woman who feels attraction to people of varied gender and sexual identities. As far as definitions go, that makes me quite queer. And if I am queer, then I am queer. When the queer community is mentioned, I am part of that. I do not have to bend over backwards, I do not have to prove anything to my dear friend, to the Nigerian state, to my family.”
True, we live in a world where people with a voice have a responsibility to lend that voice in the fight against bigotry of all kinds. I will lend my voice, as I am able at all points. But my first port of call is care for myself. Whatever I do to protect myself and my sanity, I also do for the community.
I have also had to come to terms with my own past bigotry and bias. Acknowledging that there was a time I was anti-queer was not pleasant, but I could do that while extending grace to myself. I have been educated and I have educated myself. I have moved past the sentiments I was exposed to as a child, to come to a place of enlightenment, a place of understanding that all of us deserve a world where we are free to live the truth of our being.
This has helped me in dealing with the matter of my family. Splitting is a phenomenon which is very popular with borderline personality disorder, where we see a person or situation as all good or all bad. It helps to know that people are complex beings, the product of their life experiences, with the capacity for kindness and cruelty. My family are not all saints or all devils. In all honesty, I cannot even predict how they would react if I were to come out to them. I like to think, nothing extreme or hurtful. Maybe a lot of preaching, but really, who can say?
I am not ready for it, though. And that is alright. I am currently openly queer with only my close friends, and I do my sex writing under a pseudonym. I have a working relationship with family, and I am in a position where I can gently push back on anti-queer conversations or state my stance in silence. For the moment, this works. I am at peace with who I am. When my mental health permits, I am even joyful.
The perfectionist in me would have loved to have everything superb: with me out and about; with my family behind me, the best allies; in a state so vibrantly welcoming of difference. But life is so messy, so gloriously messy. I am learning to find joy in all that mess and let myself get lost in it.
