Homophobia: subtracting ruse from razzmatazz

By Ernest Ogezi

It’s present-day Nigeria and a chorister has decided to join the Catholic seminary to become a priest. On one of his services as a seminarian he is caught by the Parish priest in bed with a boy, he is gay! Wow! Except that he was never gay, he was just set up by a girl frustrated that he had always turned down her advances. But the magnitude of culture shock was quantum. All of a sudden, this young man found that the world was way smaller than he’d ever thought. Sent away from the church, ostracized by his conservative family and living in a little Nigerian village with unforgiving social dynamics, it was little wonder he took his own life just as the truth finally came out. The good news is that this is a plot from a Nollywood movie. But what is the difference, really?

The real-life version of this tale could be riddled with violence and may end up in the lynching of the said young priest. The family of the accused priest will suffer instant perdition. People will avoid them like the pandemic; the priest, if left alive, will suffer consistent and repetitive physical, verbal and mental abuse. I imagine that conservative communities will be less magnanimous to the plight of homosexuals. It is just too confusing for them. This ‘desecration’ could kill off livestock, crops and turn the ‘gods’ on them. From the north to south of Nigeria, homosexuality will be met with a great level of misunderstanding, resistance and brute force.

The situation isn’t that horrible or is it? Well, a Nigerian crossdresser, was given executive treatment one time in Lagos. The young man (or woman) was shooting a skit but he chose the wrong part of town. A neighbourhood with zero tolerance for homosexuality in Lagos. He was manhandled. The rage was real, how dare he?! The veracity of the video clip that went viral soon came into question. The crossdresser himself came online to weep and complain. Whether the event itself was the skit is left for your discretion but better believe that if you are gay you should be careful in Nigeria.

There are celebrity crossdressers in Nigeria and despite the fear of sounding homophobic, a lot of them became celebrities for the ‘minority status’ of the LGBTQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Queer and/or Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual and or Aly) community in Nigeria. Nigeria’s former president Dr Goodluck Jonathan signed the bill prohibiting same-sex relationships and assembly including attendance and membership in gay clubs, societies and organizations. The penalty for contravening the law is 14 years imprisonment; the Nigerian States under Sharia law have a death penalty for the infraction.

That notwithstanding, the population of the LGTBQ community in Nigeria, largely in denial, is large. Asides from facing discrimination, gay people in Nigeria face great healthcare challenges. Hospitals and clinics in Nigeria do not train personnel with the requisite skills for the treatment and cure of gay people. Kits and accessories for the treatment of gay people are also not included in the budget for hospitals in Nigeria. You may have heard of MARPs, most-at-risk-persons, these are people that have the highest proclivity for contracting STDs including HIV. Under this category, there are three main sub-groups disaggregated by lifestyle. They are the MSM, men who have sex with men; FSW, female sex workers; and PWIDs or IDUs, People who Inject Drugs or Injectable Drug Users. The social dynamics that surround people who are under these categories lead to latent but highly significant discrimination against them even as individuals seeking medical care.

But for all this, we must remember that this is Nigeria. Our healthcare system is still grappling with malaria, infant mortality, maternal mortality, Diarrheal diseases and HIV/AIDS. Treatment of grown men and women who have chosen their own sexual orientation seems to be so much of a luxury. The force of society’s denial and the rage with which people would oppose change was seen in 2014 when the British government threatened to withdraw aids from Nigeria if the nation passed antigay laws. The threat was ill-conceived as it spurred the adoption of antigay laws rather than preventing it. As I said before, Nigeria is a country living in plausible deniability.

Perhaps the treatment meted out on gay people in Nigeria is a tad too tough, perhaps! But we are dealing with a conservative society, a society that is strongly opposed to change no matter how enticing it may seem. Religion is a very strong factor in Nigeria. The two biggest religions of Islam and Christianity are strongly opposed to gay interactions. So opposed to it that the Anglican Church in Africa dissociated itself from the rest of the church in terms of its stance on gay marriage and gay priests. Opposing factions have continued to grow in the Anglican church around the world and the case keeps getting more complicated.

Accepting or rejecting gay relationships in Nigeria is more a question of can-do than one of should-do. Can Nigeria even afford to accept gay relationships today? Most probably not but the bookmakers may have you believe otherwise. We live in a country where the number of rape cases across both sexes is grossly underreported, the number of paedophiles is staggering for cultural, ritual and plain perverted reasons but the cases are mostly swept under the rug for fear of the shaming effect of having been abused. Police records give me nightmares. You file a police report today and it gets lost tomorrow. It is that appalling. If gay relationships are legalized, as ideologists insist they should be, what happens to people who will hide under that cover to perpetrate sexual abuse, paedophilia and other extreme sexual violence given the country’s existential realities and policing inadequacies?

Trying to force Nigeria to legalize gay relationships is just another form of neo-colonialism. Maybe the most irritating form. The type that denigrates and relegates the transformation process that a people should undergo to accept social change. The type that believes it can simply hoist upon a people its own ideologies and they are obligated to accept or starve. Both Britain and the USA have had periods in their history when homosexuality was not only criminalized, homosexuals were killed in secret, butchered or lynched. They have transformed gradually from that anarchist and turbulent era in their civilization into refinement. Why can’t we be offered the same opportunity?

Somehow, the repression, so to say, of homosexuals and crossdressers in Nigeria, causes the culture shock that sends them into becoming instant celebrities without any real talent or body of artistic works. What talent does Bobby Risky truly possess or James Brown for that matter? It is just the ruse and razzmatazz that gives them a facelift. But how does a person become a celebrity these days? You may look at the queen of celebrity lifestyle, Kim Kardashian, and give the homosexuals (or crossdressers) in Nigeria a breather.

As popular gay activists and crossdressers or homosexuals continue to gain the media attention to become celebrities, a time is coming when, like all other industries, attendance alone will not suffice but real talent. We can all remember Empire’s Jussie Smollett, the American gay actor who simply wanted more and instead of burning the midnight oil resorted to taking the easy way out. He arranged to be assaulted and when the truth came out, it blew upon his face. The time is coming when one cannot just ride the crest of media attention to become popular as a gay activist, actor, crossdresser or entertainer. It will soon not be enough.

For conservative Nigerians, it isn’t a crime to be conservative or to hold on a little longer to traditional beliefs than the rest of the world. It is in fact, legitimate. The fact that homosexuals are not being lynched on our streets and acceptance of homosexuality as a valid sexual orientation by more Nigerians is a testament that sooner rather than later things may change in Nigeria but we have to be allowed to change things on our own terms.

Until that time comes, we should bother more about the kids that are being sexually abused daily. The impressionable and vulnerable boys who knew no better when perverted paedophiles decided their sexual orientation for them without their consent. We should rework our records so that we can punish and shame perpetrators rather than victims. Can we also have a cloud computing-based record of paedophiles in Nigeria? These things take time, we should be allowed to work with our own timeline rather than the one that is being dictated to us by people who have decided to turn a blind eye on these overt problems or care very little about them.