Queer Life

Nigeria is not a safe place to be queer in. But 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.

LGBTQ+ people experience homelessness at higher rates not because there is something wrong with us or with being LGBTQ+, but because of homophobia, transphobia and other kinds of bias and bigotry.

If you’re bisexual, you might have dealt with or presently be dealing with internalized biphobia. The good news is there are ways to manage and cope with it.

When you’re growing up a bisexual guy, how can you come out or otherwise talk to your friends – be they straight or queer – about your sexuality?

I am an autistic, genderfluid lesbian, and I experience these identifiers as tightly intertwined.

Relationships, like gender and sexuality, don’t fit into a binary. The phrase queer platonic, which comes from the asexual community, means a deep and meaningful intimate relationship which isn’t based on sex. You can have this with anyone – no matter their gender or sexuality. Perhaps if the term were more normalised (I hadn’t heard of it before researching this article), more people would be comfortable with such a relationship.

There’s this feeling of smallness - that your world is confined to secrets you tell in your diary, or to the few people you know in real life that are brave (or perhaps foolish) enough to come out - that I identify as a part of my theory on queer orphanhood. You spend so much time contemplating your identity that you don’t have time to wonder about people out there. There’s a kind of spiritual displacement in being queer and young.

Letters from the author to himself in his teens and early 20s, as he tries to sort out multiple facets of his identity.

Social distancing has introduced new challenges into Pride month. Here are some tips on how to celebrate safely at home, including what to do if it’s not safe for you to be out yet.

We hope every time you open up to someone about your truth they respond with love and kindness. But we also want to make sure you’re prepared in case they don’t, and give you some practical strategies and tools to look after yourself if that’s what happens. With that in mind, here’s a new, totally non-exhaustive, step by step guide to coming out.