A Hausa Muslim queer online acquaintance once remarked when we first met in person, “Your parents must be really progressive for you to be professing your queer sexuality so openly all over social media,” and I replied that they are. I also replied that they are not in fact that much progressive on the matter of queerness, they are only beholden to the love that my shamelessly professed love for them – regardless of how much our society may ostracise me because I am queer – demands back from them, and even that comes with a catch.
I have avoided writing about my coming out story largely because I am of the opinion that queer people owe no one a coming out when their heterosexual peers never need to do the same. I have not forgotten that structural injustice of widespread homophobia exists and it makes our realities vastly different. I simply choose my battles like all queer Nigerians do every day across this country that is determined to exterminate us.
Coming out isn’t a uniquely queer experience, to begin with. We all come out in our own ways and for different reasons based on our circumstances. You come out as someone who loves eating boiled eggs in adulthood for instance, after you have been a child that throws a tantrum every time they near it with an egg; or as an extrovert after being an introvert due to your circumstance (aka your parents) making it impossible to be more yourself in your teenage years. What’s unique about queer coming out is the particular kind of violence we often face when we do.
I have had to come out many times, so I am never at a loss for how to come out if I choose to. This multiple coming out may perhaps be because the confluence of my politics sits on the bedrock of our shared human dignity, and my identity is one that intersects with more than one minority class.
Yet, when my closet was demolished, it wasn’t because I roared and brought down its suffocating walls, it was because someone finally got tired of the audacity that my friend recognized in me and decided to report me to my parents to wrap “this nonsense up.” This nonsense being my queerness and my refusal to hide it and keep it out of sight.
My sexuality – which has always sat pretty and unspoken in every room I have ever been in from my teenage years through my adulthood, has never been a secret I needed to protect. I understood very early on that whatever you hide in night’s darkness daybreak will reveal it and force you to face the guilt that made you hide it. And if day breaks and your secret remains hidden, the guilt that dogged you through the night will continue to, all day and for the rest of your days till you face and deal with it. So why labour to hide who you are? The injury of silence is bad enough without active self-diminishment. I have never had the strength to balance both.
My parents must have always known this.
After they had been advised and in so doing forced to face the truth of my sexuality and gender expression which they must have lived in denial of for all of my 27 years – this happened 2 years ago – their grouse became about silence.
“Why do you need to announce to the world that you’re gay?” My mother said tearily after she confronted me with anger about a tweet screenshot ascribed to me that she saw circulating. I had written it after I multiply used my partner’s ‘He/Him’ pronouns in a phone call with my sister and it didn’t seem like she saw it as a big deal.
The offending tweet:
This reaction, even as hard as it was for me to come to grips with – my whole body had seized with a mixture of dread and rage – was a delightful surprise.
I was angry because I was having to defend the truth of my humanity. I was terrified at a number of things, some of which are here listed:
i. That my mother will reject me and I will have to relearn the contours of grief – that beastly human emotion that shreds through you until you no longer recognize yourself as a living breathing being. I have grieved the possibility of my mother’s love being conditional my whole life up to this difficult point when some loathsome idiot forced the moment of reckoning to descend on me unprepared. Here I sit now about to find out if her love is in fact unconditional.
ii. That my rage will consume me fully and everyone in my family with it, because goodness knows even I don’t know the limit of my rage in the event I am dehumanized by people who I didn’t choose to be related to – my family, who I learnt to love without condition over a lifetime. Strangers I can ignore if they try to dehumanize me because they hold no such power. My humanity is mine to share with them as I deem fit and I am always ready to fight them or walk away.
iii. That my parents will allow strangers to disrespect me in the name of ‘correcting’ me.
None of these things happened. My mother, bless her, is only concerned for my safety here and in her iteration of a (the) hereafter. One I shared for most of my life until my concept of life and death evolved over time.
Yet even this mercy is a rose hiding many sharp thorns.
Where before there was a kind of understanding about my stance on marriage – it is an unjust institution I have no desire to partake in – now all of a sudden my parents and older siblings are constantly talking about marriage. Discussing blind dates and asking who this or that male friend is – the unspoken question being “Is he one of those you fuck/who fuck you?”
My audacity, what my friend didn’t know then or now, comes at a price. One of constant haranguing about simple things he will never get disturbed about as a Hausa Muslim man who is safely lodged in his closet and can navigate the world as a queer ghost.
Things like whether or not he has prayed.
Things like why he listens to music (foreign or otherwise).
Things like where he is at any given time, but especially at night – this one I have come to understand is always about the possibility that I could be somewhere fucking or getting fucked by someone.
I have shrugged off my cloak of invisibility in a moment of all-consuming joy, I have rode audacity to strut in the open daylight and command the heavens and its human exalters to see me. “Look at me, I am queer and alive and grateful for everything about my being,” I had said. And every day for the rest of my life I will pay the price – some price – in derision or social ostracism.
Yet now I go to bed daily with a chest empty of heaviness because I am free to be me – queerness and all. I wake up and when I pass by a mirror I appear to glow, and I look taller. I am radiant with a joy that only comes to those who know themselves and are pleased by what they learnt.
I want my Hausa Muslim friend to have that, but I doubt it will happen in this life time.
Ado Aminu Aminu is a nonbinary writer of human curiosities. When not reading, writing or venting about how the patriarchy continues to ruin everything, you will find him daydreaming about his next cup of Hibiscus tea. You can follow him on Twitter - @Pettymuse, for rants and bants.
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