A JOURNEY TO REMEMBER

I come from a small, middle class family. Growing up, I always knew I was different, considering how I preferred male relatives visiting us to the females. I remember vividly how I always wanted to put my head on Uncle Philemon’s chest whenever he came around. I also noticed then that whenever there was a new parishioner in our church and the family had a boy, I’d want to be friends with him and I always felt fulfilled when he responded warmly to my offer of friendship.

When I was six, I had a friend with whom I was very close to. Daniel was his name. He was twelve years old. Now in my family, whenever there’s a new development, you don’t tell outsiders until my parents bring it up themselves or decide to make it public. We were brought up that way. My dad got a new car, and because he hadn’t brought the car home, we weren’t supposed to tell anyone. However, I was with Daniel and I bragged about it. He must have thought that I was lying because he said he was going to tell my mom. My mom was not the typical Nigerian mother who disciplines their child by either scolding them or handing them over to their father to beat them. Oh no. My mother would beat the shit out of you herself. And so, I began begging Daniel not to do so. I begged and begged, and even as he conceded, he seemed smug that he had me begging him.

Then a few days later, on a Monday, we were at a bible study (Yeah, my family went to Deeper Life), and Daniel asked that I follow him to a corner. The look he gave me when I wanted to protest leaving the class to follow him implied that he could still tell my mother what I told him. So, I grudgingly went with him to the corner where nobody could see us. Then he dropped his pants and told me to touch him, asking me to bring out my penis so he could touch me too. Then, he turned me around and began rubbing his penis against my bare buttocks. I was aghast and revolted. I had never done anything like this and I hated that he was using our secret to get me to do this “disgusting thing.” I felt pained and betrayed.

When he finally grunted and pulled away from me, clearly spent, I asked him if he was done. He said yes. I pulled up my shorts, turned to him and said very seriously to him that if I ever see him close to me again, I would put a biro through his eye. I warned him to stay very far away from me for the rest of his life. As far as I was concerned, our friendship was over.

He must have taken the threat very seriously because, not only did he make the effort to never come anywhere near me, but he never told my mother what I told him. (Fourteen years after that incident, I was driving my mother to church in Gbagada, when my mother spotted Daniel walking past. He came over and they exchanged pleasantries. I didn’t speak to him and he didn’t speak to me. This baffled my mother and as we drove on, she asked why Daniel and I didn’t say anything to each other. I didn’t bother responding as I focused on driving, and she didn’t press for an answer.)

***

All through the six years I spent in secondary school, I didn’t explore my sexuality. Not that I knew what I identified as. I knew I didn’t like girls the way I could see other boys do, and no matter how hard I tried, that desire just wasn’t in me. I was in SS1 when a friend of mine, Ade, touched my dick through my trousers. We were at the back of the Economics class. It felt good and I didn’t want him to stop. Encouraged by my lack of recoil from his touch, Ade continued caressing my dick, coaxing it into a very firm erection. I was gasping with pleasure, my attention totally gone from what the teacher was saying as I focused on the pleasure of Ade’s hand on my dick. Then he told me to touch him, which I did with much enthusiasm –

Until the teacher’s voice cut into the haze of passion when she barked a question at us about what was going on there. With the eyes of every other person in the class swiveling to us just as Ade and I were pushing apart from each other like scalded cats, I was startled back to our very public surrounding.

That was the end of it though. Ade got a girlfriend shortly after that incident and neither talked to me about our brief sexual interlude nor made any attempt to revisit the experience with me. Well, except for that one time he kissed me in front of his girlfriend, before hurriedly assuring her – and me – that it was just a friendly kiss.

In SS2, a friend of mine, who left when we were in JSS3, transferred back to the school. His name was Pelumi. Pelumi was heavily built, dark complexioned and good looking. Now that he was back, he was suddenly popular, and everyone, boys and girls, wanted to be his friend. Even the teachers favoured him because he was smart.

We were seatmates, and sometimes, he would make teasing comments to me like, “I’m the man and you’re my woman.” For some reason I couldn’t explain, these remarks turned me on and I always wanted him to say more. We’d play and joke around, and he’d call me a faggot. I didn’t know what that meant, but if Pelumi was saying it to me, then it must be right. On Fridays, we wore shorts to school, and mine always accentuated the big ass I had in secondary school. And Pelumi and his other friend, Afeez, would always slap my ass whenever I walked past them, joking about how I had a girl’s ass. I loved this. One day, I met Afeez with an erection that was visible through his trousers, and when I asked him how he got it, he said a girl in our class had placed her bum on his crotch. Then, as though I needed a demonstration to understand what he was saying, he pulled me close and placed the bulging erection against my behind. And that made me feel good.

And these were about all I ever got up to doing regarding my sexuality in secondary school.

***

I wasn’t able to gain admission into the university I wanted to attend, so my dad asked me to pick any private school I wanted and he’d send me there. That was how I ended up being the only child in the family who attended a private university.

And I had my first kiss in the first year.

I’d become friends with this boy, John, from another department, who upon taking me to his room one day, introduced me to his cousin, Fred. Fred was biracial, part Nigerian and part Italian. He came from a wealthy home and as a friendship developed between us, he told me that he was gay. He told me he liked me and would want us to have fun sometimes. I told him that he would be my first and that he would have to guide me through whatever it was we would do. The day he kissed me, I felt joy in my stomach explode like a swarm of butterflies fluttering everywhere in the spring.

He also gave me my first blowjob, an act that almost had me passing out from the overwhelming pleasure it gave me. We didn’t go beyond the kissing and the blowing though, and when sometime later, he asked me to be his boyfriend, I agreed and we went on to date for some months.

But like I said, Fred was a rich man’s kid. He didn’t seem serious with anything. He was always missing classes and failing tests, and behaved like someone who had no plans for the future – except that he was waiting to take over his father’s company. I didn’t like this character of his, and now that we were dating, it became more emphasized how little we had in common.

I didn’t know how to break up with him. (I still don’t know how to break up with people. I simply start making myself scarce and expect you to take the hint and move on.) I did this with Fred, and somehow, we quietly stopped being a thing.

Around this time was when I made another friend, Kelly. We became buddies very quickly. But about a year into our friendship, I experienced my first homophobia-driven betrayal. I wasn’t out to Kelly, but he must have picked up on my preference for boys, because he gossiped to a mutual friend of ours who’s a girl that he believes I am a homo, and that he doesn’t like homosexuals. She didn’t believe him and reported back to me. It became an entire mess that ended up with Kelly and I no longer being friends.

I encountered a lot of different people on campus whose presence made me realize that the world I thought I inhabited alone was big enough for other people like me. I was closeted though and struggling with my internalized homophobia, so that whenever I met the effeminate guys, I shied away from making their acquaintance.

And then, in 2017, my kito story happened. (Read HERE)

***

I was by no means a perfect human being. For someone who’d been taken advantage of as a child, I sure made some questionable choices. (As you read from here on, please understand that this narration is by no means a justification of sexual molestation. I am simply going through my life as it has been: the good, the bad and the ugly. As a victim myself, it took a lot of reflection for me to decide to talk about this aspect of my life.)

Like I said, I had been kitoed, but I was fortunate that the experience didn’t impact my life too badly. While my parents were left to figure out the truths behind what happened to me, I returned to school and slowly bounced back into my life.

One evening, while I was in my room, I was chatting with a friend of mine, Sean, who stayed in another hostel. I was horny and I told him. He laughed and said something about me making a move on a roommate of mine that he and I liked. I shot Sean’s suggestion down, because it was a roomful of six guys and this roommate, Fela, was a light sleeper.

As we continued chatting, Fela woke up and asked me to put off the light, as it was disturbing him. I did that, and when I returned to my chatversation with Sean, I told him. He got excited and continued egging me on to do it, to make a move on Fela.

I was hesitant. I looked over to where Fela was lying, softly snoring. The thought of touching him was starting to become very appealing.

What’s the worst that can happen? I thought to myself. He’ll wake up and shout, and the other boys will beat me. Then what?

In that moment, this all appeared to be a small price to pay for indulging the horniness I was feeling. So, with my heart beating loudly, I moved over and touched Fela’s crotch. I stopped and held my breath. He didn’t move. I got braver and proceeded to take out his dick. When he still didn’t move – even though I could have sworn that he’d stopped snoring – I began to wank him, also sucking him, until he came.

After this, I went to the bathroom to wash myself. I was starting to get attacked with guilt as I remembered what happened when I was six and how someone else took advantage of me. I scrubbed and scrubbed at my body and hands and mouth in the bathroom, but I couldn’t scrub away the sadness and the feeling that I was just like Daniel.

When I got back to the room, it was to meet Fela awake. Another roommate was awake. My heart began thumping, as I imagined the beating I was about to get. But Fela simply asked if I was okay. I said yes. And that was it. No confrontation, no issue.

I didn’t stop. I started going to his bed every night after that first time. He would give me a look just before going to bed, and when everyone else was asleep, I would go to him. He would always keep his eyes shut, as though to preserve the illusion that he was asleep whenever I touched him. The only indication that he was aware of what was happening would be him sometimes moving on his bed so that I would get comfortably positioned as I sucked and wanked him. And the next day, he wouldn’t talk to me about anything and nothing was awkward between us.

Then he asked a girl out one day and she said yes. Just like that, he was a boyfriend to a girl – and when I came to his bed that night, he looked at me and said, “I want to sleep.”

That was all I needed to know that our nightly shenanigans were over. (Very recently, after several months of acting like what we did at night never happened, after we’d moved apart to different accommodations, Fela sent me a text, asking me to come see him. The message also read: “So you can suck me like the pro that you are.” I turned down the invite.)

***

Like I narrated in my kito story, after my father was able to bail me out the trouble I got myself into, a week later, I was using his phone for an internet search and came upon some Google searches that had me reeling with shock. My father had apparently been searching for answers to such queries like: How do you know if your son is gay… How to maintain a relationship with your gay son… Penalties for being gay in Nigeria…

Then my mother also told me that he had told her that he thinks I am gay and wanted to know from her how he should approach me on the issue.

I believe that the reason my parents – my father especially – didn’t turn into homophobic monsters after my kito incident is because of the kind of open-minded relationship they cultivated with us, their children.

I grew up being very close to both my parents, and they always favoured me with stories about how they met. I was like their son and friend, and I always felt like I could approach them about anything. Anything. I remember when I was in 100 Level, and I told my dad that I didn’t like my dick size and we talked freely about that as he gave me tips and dietary suggestions that he swore would increase my manhood. Lol.

At the time, I was sexually active with girls (I stayed a gay virgin until my fourth year in university), and these encounters always ended in disasters. I could talk to him about these disasters, and he would always encourage me that maybe the next time would be better, that he had the same issue with women when he was my age. There was no censure, no chastisement about how I shouldn’t be having sex. In fact, he provided his sons with a steady supply of condoms, always talking to us about sex and safety.

***

In the first semester of my final year, I met Kelly again. We hadn’t really been running in the same circles since we ended our friendship a couple of years ago. We weren’t speaking to each other and I was already walking away past him, when he called my name. Surprised, I turned to face him as he approached me. He looked distressed. He asked for my help. He said he had just resumed, and because he was late, there was no hostel room available for him to stay in, and none of his friends could accommodate him. He was stranded and needed my help.

I wanted to say no, to point out to him that we were no longer friends after he betrayed me. But I couldn’t. We used to be best friends after all. I helped him move into my room that day, and he began sharing my bed with me. This was an inconvenience that I suddenly realized I didn’t much care for, but there was no way out now. I couldn’t kick him out.

I had this mini tradition with my friend, Kachi, where we would wash our underwear every Saturday by midnight at the back of the hostel. There, we would shower and tell jokes and laugh the loudest. On that particular night, we were naked, capering as usual, when someone shone a beam of torchlight on us from my room upstairs. The light stayed on us for a brief moment, and then it was gone.

When I returned to my room later that night, it was to find that only Kelly was awake. This made me suspect that he was the one who’d been shining the torchlight on us.

In the middle of the night, while we slept, I suddenly woke up to the feeling of something hard poking at my ass. I didn’t move as I silently debated what that was. Kelly was the only one in the bed with me, so there was no way that was a dick. There was no way this guy who tried to out me a few years ago would now have an erection poking at my ass.

Then I felt the hardness move. I moved a bit, inching my ass closer to it and I felt it properly.

It was in fact an erection! It was Kelly’s erection!

All that happened in the next few minutes felt like a previously-planned sequence of events. As I turned to face him, he also turned to back me, settling his ass on my crotch and started moving it, grinding his butt against my dick. I started to harden. He felt my erection and ground against it harder, clearly sending a message. I pulled down my boxers as he shucked his. I couldn’t believe it. This was going to be my very first time attempting anal sex. I didn’t care if I knew enough to know what I was doing; I just wanted to bury my dick inside Kelly’s ass. But either I was too big or he didn’t have experience taking dick, because it became an awkward shuffle of me trying to thrust in and out of him, and he wincing and gasping my thighs as though to push me away.

Eventually, he pulled away from me and left the room to go clean up in the bathroom, leaving me to think about the weirdness of what just happened. I had just broken my anal sex virginity by fucking – or trying to fuck – my homophobic ex-friend!

We did again the next night, and the night after that, each time, getting better at it until he was no longer pushing away from me because of the pain, instead letting the sex go all the way to my ejaculation. Then, one night, he begged to fuck me. I told him it would be my first time, and that I would surely wake up the room with my reaction to the pain of his penetration. He persisted and I agreed. I thought that this being my first time would result in a very painful experience. But I was wrong. There was pain, sure. It was uncomfortable. But it wasn’t as frightful as I thought it’d be. In fact, it was a boring experience that I wanted to end almost immediately. When he came, I slipped out of the bed and went to the bathroom to wank and have my bath. And that was it: absolutely nothing spectacular about my first time being penetrated. I felt both good that it’d finally happened and disappointed that it wasn’t more.

That semester eventually ended, and after we went home for the holiday, the COVID-19 pandemic happened, halting everything that had to do with school. I did my second semester online, writing my exams there as well.

***

This story is the summary of the journeys I have taken to get to where I am today as a gay man. There have been so much experienced, and so much more to come, I’m sure.

Today also makes it exactly one year since I found Kito Diaries, and I am forever grateful to everyone here, because your stories and comments and opinions have helped me to become more of the person I want to be. This community is great and I love and cherish you all.

Happy New Year, guys.

Written by Mannie