CHILDREN OF DUST

Please forgive me, for my demons have taken free rein over my mind.

It was one of those Sunday services that make me resent my conviction to stay Christian in spite of all the harm that religion continues to cause people like me. The Pastor stood there at the pulpit, saying the things that I have come to expect from him, expressing his strong disdain for queer people and everything I represent.

“God hates homosexuals! They are an abomination before Him and that is why they continue to die of terrible diseases!” he spat out to the congregation.

Tiny tremors of shock found their way to my soul at his words, at the hatefulness that was coming from the holiness of the altar. This is a man I constantly have to find a place in my heart to respect despite his homophobia, and on this day, his words had found their target in my heart, striking my soul with a precision that awakened a pain I thought I’d overcome.

I am 30 years old, and in all this time that I have lived and experienced life as a queer man, I have loved and lost more friends and acquaintances than I can count on my two hands. It’s always been a case of “here today, gone tomorrow”, like they were marked for certain doom for being who they are. Whether it be cancer, HIV-related or the requisite mysterious illness, my immediate community has known so much loss, that we have begun to hold yearly candle-light memorials for those who were once so bright and full of dreams and aspirations, but who are now no more. Having to catch up with friends on the walk to the gravesides have become a sort of trauma, during which the question that stays utmost on my mind always is: “Who’s next?”

In January 2019, I lost one of my closest friends to leukemia. The day he called me, barely three months before his demise, will remain the saddest day of my life for a very long time. He had so much to live for. We both had dreams and aspirations, and by God, we were fighting our way to the top, arm in arm, project after project. Even as he endured his affliction, he stayed hopeful, positive that his light could never be dimmed.

But I had to watch him diminish into nothing, right in front of the eyes of his single mother who’d built her entire existence around him as her only child.

It was one of the most crushing losses I’d ever suffered.

And then came 2020, when I too fell sick and there was just no discernable diagnosis for what was wrong with me. Every time I looked into the eyes of my mother and saw the confusion in there over what I was going through, I ached.

This was it, I told myself. It was finally here. And all I could think of was the shame and disgrace that accompanies the dying of a gay man in Nigeria. How everyone would automatically assume you got what you deserved because of the life you’d chosen to live. I remembered being at a friend’s funeral and overhearing two strangers gossiping.

“Such a young man… Dying just like that… Such a waste.”

“I heard he died of the homo sickness.”

And they hissed and murmured their revulsion over the “young man who chose to waste his life with the homo sickness.”

I couldn’t even tell my closest friends that I was sick because I feared everyone would start speculating that I would be next. In my mind, I had made my final wish which was to be secretly buried with no one knowing for as long as possible.

I recovered. I would eventually get to know that I suffered from a form of COVID-19 called Long COVID.

Someone once called me a moralist, and I think they might’ve not been too far from the truth. Maybe it comes from the fact that I am deeply religious, or maybe it comes from the fact that I live in constant fear of the punishment that comes with living an immodest life. I find myself thinking that if I don’t indulge in rampant sexual desires, there might be some form of redemption for me; that if I lived more right-mindedly, if I got my friends to live more right-mindedly, then I could save us. Maybe then, we could be spared the wrath of whatever was claiming our lives.

These are troubling thoughts that sometimes I am aware I am having. But how can I help it? What with all the layers that have been piled upon us from birth to adulthood to hate who we are and repent from living our truths. How can I not despair when there doesn’t appear to be a happy ending for someone like me?

The evening I finished watching Netflix’s Christmas gay romcom, Single All The Way, I battled tears as I asked questions of the God I serve. Was He who made the Western gays different from He who Nigerian gays like me worship? I watched the scene where Peter and Nick sealed their love to the cheers of their family and it filled me with a longing that placed me so far away from this reality. That there exists parents who would do anything, going as far as orchestrating romance for their son, just for his happiness was painfully fictional to me. Why aren’t they punished and tortured like I am? Why do they not know the condemnation that those of us over here suffer?

Please forgive me, but I am in so much pain. And the truth is that I no longer know how to grieve.

I lost another friend recently. Andre was my rock, more than a friend. He was a big part of my story. He knew me almost as well as I knew myself. We shared so much of life together: a passion for movies, Drag Race, fashion and everything in between. He was the only one of my close friends who my mother treated like a son of hers. He was my best friend.

And on Friday, after trying to reach him for a few days to no avail, I called his mother. The note of devastation in her voice should have prepared me for what she said.

“He was sick… He even became anemic. And we lost him.”

Just like that, it was over. He was gone, laid to rest quietly, so unobtrusively, like he hadn’t meant anything to me, to all the many friends whose lives he touched. To the amazing community he started in school after I graduated, each one of them leaning on him for guidance and support. I was reeling. I was enraged. I was sad. I was in pain.

Then I remembered how I was sick and how I’d hoped to exit this world quietly. Had my friend wanted the same thing? Had he struggled with shame on his dying bed? Had he been lucid enough during his sickness to express his fears to his mother?

Was this to be our lot in life: to know shame in life and when dying?

No.

No, not for Andre at least. He knew joy. He knew pride. He knew life to the fullest.

And dust to dust he may be, but I will remember him as glorious in death as he was in life. Tomorrow, I may have fears and questions about who’s next. But today, I will celebrate the memory of my friend, Andre Immanuel, and all the ways he was a very Proud and Loud Gay Man that I loved.

Written by Wiffey