“I don’t know, I’ve been gay for as long as I’ve known my name.”
That is the answer I give to every close friend who asks the ‘when-did-you-know’ question. For me, there was never a point of self-discovery or the accidental make-out session with a guy that I found arousing, that made me realise that I was gay; I have always known and knowing just occurred to me naturally. Not that I was ever open about it, but, as a four-year-old child, I just thought that a guy liking another guy was just as natural as a lion preferring meat to grass. Hence, it was just another unspoken normalcy. Plus, my family never had a problem with my effeminate nature.
Once, my mother had a visitor and the woman would not stop admiring this little beautiful human. She finally burst out, saying to my mum, “Your daughter is so beautiful.”
Yes, that is how feminine I was. As I grew older, however, I started to develop a loathing for myself, because I was always called “woman wrapper” – a name that was growing so popular that I had to start building a fence around me to avoid the emotional casualties. The final blow, however, was struck when I understood my true nature in the eyes of my community.
One day, on our way home, my mum and I were having gisting while walking. I was about 10 or 11. I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but she mentioned that a certain guy in our neighbourhood had been beaten and arrested – in that order – because he was a “homo”. It was a little later into our conversation that I learned what “homo” meant. This was the first time that I got to know of a word associated with my desire for other men, and that that desire was as much of an abomination as Satan himself. I still don’t remember how I handled the uneasiness that came with that discovery, but my life was never the same. I started to observe the people around me, and it didn’t take so long for me to put all the figures together and realise that effeminate equals gay equals beat-to-death, or worse.
I gathered momentum, called in reinforcements, and got more aggressive with the building of that wall I had started to build at the tender age of 5. By 12, I had zero close friends and no social life; I lived in absolute oblivion of what people my age were doing and became extremely secretive. Oh! And I also learned to act like a man. My teenage years were characterised by constant depression, a thousand and one insecurities, and a ton of fantasies about all the boys I had crushes on. I figured, since nothing would ever happen with me and those boys, better to do what I wanted with them in my head. Plus I’d heard a few sermons in the church where the preachers talked about a verse in the Bible that says whatever we think with our minds is as good as done in reality. They only ever preached that verse in relation to sin, so that was the one dirty thing I did before I discovered masturbation – which, at that time, I thought I invented.
As a gay teenager living in an extremely homophobic community, with a single mother who gave everything to make sure I had the best life, being gay was my greatest burden. I wished death on myself countless times. Other times I wished that, since I was a boy who felt like a girl, I’d wake up the next morning as a girl. And then there were the times when I prayed so hard for God to change me because I didn’t want to disappoint my mother or go to hell. One time, when I was about sixteen or seventeen, I fasted for a week and prayed, believing strongly that, by the end of that week, I’d be straight. By the end of that week, I was disappointed that I still felt a rush whenever I saw Richard, my first and biggest infatuation in high school and that my heart still skipped a beat when I locked eyes with a random hot guy. I think this was the point in my life when I started considering suicide as a way out, though not constantly.
There was also the “googling phase” when I googled cures and explanations for my sexuality. I googled stuff like “is being gay hereditary”, “how to stop being gay”, “does amnesia change your sexuality”, “how to make yourself forget being gay”, “how to kill yourself without too much pain”, “is being gay a mental disorder” – but, of course, none of those yielded the results that I wanted. It was then that I made up my mind that being gay was my own personal cross. I’d heard from sermons that “every individual has a cross that they have to carry.”
A couple of years later, in a different country, at 20 years old, still a highly sexually inexperienced youngster in a pool of sizzling hot guys that I knew I’d never have, I was lying in bed one day with so much free time, no friends, an almost empty campus, and nowhere to go. I was extremely bored and remembered then that there was a social media account I’d created in my mid-teens when I created an account on every new social media app I heard of. I re-installed Badoo, logged in with my Facebook details, and found that everything was exactly as I’d left it. There was, however, one major difference: it had become a dating app. Or maybe it had always been a dating app and I just didn’t read the name properly. I got to swiping and, not long after, I discovered that you could adjust search preferences to just men, which I did.
Everything that happened felt like I had very little control over it; as if this thing that had stayed subdued for so long had finally emerged and taken control of everything, leaving me in charge of very little. I got bored with the app and went to google different ones. I installed about two or three other apps, and some others I’d heard of from movies. Soon enough, I was making hook-up arrangements with strangers I never ended up meeting – until I matched with Jamie. He was muscular and had sent me a few shirtless pictures that I found sexy. We agreed to meet at his place – in the evening because I was afraid and would be more comfortable in the dark. I had about a hundred scenarios at least in my head, in which I got caught or set up, but I went ahead.
I arrived at Jamie’s place at about 5:30 pm and my heart snapped the moment I first saw him.
I thought, “Wow, I am doing this. I’m here. With a gay man who lives alone. And we’ll do gay stuff.”
I was full-on panicking from the moment I stepped foot in his house, but I masked it perfectly, just as I’d masked my uneasiness when I discovered that I was a “homo”. We talked about random unnecessary stuff that had nothing to do with why we had agreed to meet. I was so thankful when he finally offered me a drink. Being the good boy I was, I normally would not say yes to alcohol, but the current situation required me to not be sober, so I enthusiastically said yes when he offered me a bottle of beer. While I drank my beer, he continued with the awkward conversation. Just as if he had been timing me, when my beer was down to a little below half, he asked, “So you’re a virgin? What do you plan to do about it, Mr Virgin?”
At the time, the alcohol seemed to be doing nothing as my whole body started to tremble.
I started thinking, “He wants to do it! He wants to do gay stuff.”
The panic inside me raged on like the storms that visited Odysseus on his way back to Ithaca, but the subdued thing or person or whatever inside me was in full control as it finally drowned out the other voice that screamed ABORT! A few lines into our conversation about my sex life and how I was down for anything, Jamie was lying in his bed, taking off his clothes. I got into bed with him, and we made love.
The moment I got on the bus to go back to my place, it felt like I had regained control of myself. Everything I had done in the last few hours started to flash before my eyes. The self-loathing started to kick in once these thoughts sank into my mind, and then the scary thoughts came: what if I had been set up, or what if he had a camera hidden somewhere that he’d blackmail me with? By the time I got back to my room, I was so depressed that all I wanted to do was jump off the balcony and make my life more bearable. But, first, I had to wash my abomination away. I probably have not used as much soap in my whole life as I did that night, and I’d never scrubbed harder. While I bathed, the images played again in my mind so vividly, reminding me of where to scrub and where to use more soap.
For one whole week, I was so depressed that I barely stepped outside my room. I deleted my accounts on all the dating apps, along with the apps themselves, and wished so hard that I could delete the memories just as easily as I had deleted the apps. I found myself wishing to die and googling ways I could die in my sleep, but nothing came up except for painful procedures that required choking or bleeding or some other kind of physical pain.
The following week, an idea popped into my mind; I would arrange to go back to Jamie’s place and “borrow” his phone to make a call, and then take it away from him and go to a private place and delete my contact and all our messages on WhatsApp. Then I would go back to my place and be gay no more. With this plan in mind, I replied to his messages (he had been worrying during my week of depression) and finally agreed to meet with him again.
I got to his place late that night, in the fashion of a thief, and he had a friend over! This was the exact thing I was scared of. The lights were switched off the whole time, thankfully. While Jamie and I cuddled up in bed with his friend lying on the floor, Jamie started to touch me. He wanted me. I raised concerns about his friend and he assured me that his friend was cool, plus he was asleep. I’d come for a mission and I would not let anything get in the way of it, not even another week of depression and self-loathing. While we were at it, I suppressed Jamie’s moans so that his friend would not wake up.
Early the next morning, I put my plan in motion. I lied to Jamie that I had an unfinished project in school and I needed to leave that morning to meet my partner – but, first, I needed to make a quick call with his phone. To my utmost disappointment, he had a lock on EVERYTHING on his phone, so I could not access his WhatsApp and contact list. I was frustrated. I had not seen this coming, so I left his place disappointed.
The next day, he called me and said was that he starting to have feelings for me. So, again, I started to panic. This time around, it was about breaking someone’s heart, which I never wanted to do. My whole life I’d lived by the mantra “treat others how you want to be treated” and, with him having feelings, I knew that I’d break his heart either way. After much thought, I decided on what the right thing was, and sent him a text message that evening.
Hi Jamie. The reason why I said I’d text is that I can’t say any of this to you on the phone or in person. Let’s delete each other’s number and not talk ever again. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, but I’m the one with the problem. I still need to figure things out for myself and I’m not ready for any relationship yet.
I did not have any plans for a sexual or romantic life after Jamie. I just wanted to let things sink in with me. I was and still am gay, but I needed to get more comfortable with that fact, as I’d always shoved it aside since my discovery of that hateful term. I retired from fantasising about boys I had crushes on and started to live my fantasies through movies. It was on a search for one such movie that I stumbled on TIERs’ HELL OR HIGH WATER on YouTube. By that time, I was already more comfortable with my sexuality, but seeing people with my accent, from my country, in a film about people like me made me feel even more comfortable and full of hope that I am not alone.
I probably will never come out to my mother or find the love of my life, but I now have a couple of friends and a best friend who makes life better by just being there for me, and TIERs continues to give me hope that there is a future where I won’t have to fear for my life because I am a boy who likes boys.
About the Writer
This writer has chosen to remain anonymous.