THE MEN WHO SLEEP WITH MEN

I graduated from the university in 2016 but couldn’t start my clearance immediately due to some departmental issues. So, I was at home, bored and frustrated about life.

I am a sucker for dark-skinned guys who averagely would be considered introverted. And even though I cannot perfectly match the sewing machine, I know my stuff about fashion.

All these are the factors that made it possible for my problem to exist.

There was this not-so-cute, dark-complected tailor on my street who I’d been noticing for quite some time now. He was always hard at work in his shop, sewing clothes and generally minding his business. I’d never seen him fraternize much with anyone from the neighborhood other than the service provider-customer relationship.

You know how they say an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop? Well, now that I was at home, bored and seeking distraction, all of a sudden, I took a likeness to this tailor. And one day, while I was walking past and he called out a greeting to me, my heart did this funny little jig in my chest cavity. And I suddenly made a decision to get closer to him. Devising a plan to make that happen followed.

I started by making myself his customer. I’d come to him for minor amendments on my clothes, which graduated to giving him a few simple fabrics to help me fix. Predictably, we became quite close and because he liked my knowledge of designs and patterning, I became a regular at his place. Our relationship strengthened when I further became a friend to his family, and as weeks rolled into months, I discovered I had grown very deep feelings for Ige.

Ige and I talked a lot to each other about personal stuff, and one day, he asked me about my love life, and I jokingly told him I was queer and considered him my boyfriend. He laughed at that and didn’t comment on it. Because of my effeminacy, some of his neighbours had begun calling me his wife, while some of his customers regarded me as his manager because he usually left the duty of pricing and choosing patterns and designs to me. We grew from mere friends to something deeper I couldn’t explain at the time, as he’d started letting me touch his dick and feel him up. Never going beyond that anyway.

Then came the period when I was supposed to commence with my clearance. Two days before I was to go to school, I was with him working, when it started raining. It was such a torrential downpour, that he closed shop and we went into the house, which adjoined the shop. It was while we were indoors that I broke the news of my impending departure to him. I would be gone for four weeks, and he didn’t receive this news well. He was obviously unhappy, and the heightened emotions and cold weather set the stage for the intimacy that followed. One thing led to another, and we ended up making out heavily and me giving him a blow job.

Crossing that threshold into full-blown homosexual activity is something I grew to regret till today.

Now, let me give you a preamble of Ige’s background. He is an orphaned child who lives with his father’s younger brother. His uncle has five sons of his own and is a widower. The man was the one who paid for Ige to go to fashion school and set him up in his design business.

Like I said before, during the course of my friendship with Ige, I became really close to his family, so much so with his uncle that the man made me his confidante of sorts. He’d tell me things like his sexual conquests, family issues and sexual fantasies. This relationship with this older man made me know we were cool, but I was careful not to say anything about my sexuality to him.

And so, I left to school for my clearance, and Ige and I would talk regularly on the phone. Something changed, deepened, between us after that intimate evening we shared. It was though a part of him that he didn’t know existed was awakened. It was almost as if we were now boyfriends, the way we talked to each other.

I finished my clearance and returned home. Returned to my routine of hanging around him, although this time, we took our relationship to a much more sexual level. We graduated from foreplay to giving him his first anal sex experience, and it wasn’t very long before he discarded the girls he’d been occasionally seeing and I became his steady booty call. Sex with him was amazing, and I loved the way he appreciated my body at every time we were intimate. We maintained a good business and sexual relationship, and as a late-blooming queer man, it increasingly began to get almost impossible for him to keep his feelings in check around me.

He began to nag over things I did, the same way a typical boyfriend would do when he feels threatened. He would call me all the time to come be with him. He peppered me with questions about the status of my relationship with every guy he saw me with. He called me on the phone incessantly.  He always ensured we ate together. He would show signs of jealousy, openly, whenever he perceived me flirting with other guys, one time with one his cousins. There were so many irrational acts he began exhibiting. It was exhausting. I am someone who believes that two people who are in a relationship should be able to give each other space every now and then, because I’d learnt that love when choked or given in excess tends to burn out fast.

And this soon became the case for Ige and I.

One Friday, he told me on the phone that he was very hungry and that they had just started cooking in his house. And so, I told him to hold on, that I would get him food before nightfall. On my way to a vigil that night, I stopped at his place with food but didn’t meet him. I inquired about his whereabouts from his uncle, who told me he had gone down the street. I followed his directions to where Ige was, met him there and gave him the food. He offered to walk with me to where I’d get a bike. We talked a bit in the dark and then I kissed him and left for church.

I came home from the vigil by past 5 AM the next morning and was resting in my room when my mum came to call me, to let me know that Ige, his uncle and cousin had come to see me. Surprised by this visit, I hurried out to meet them seated in our living room. I should have clued in to the fact that Ige seemed uncomfortable and wouldn’t meet my eyes as we all exchanged pleasantries, but I was too surprised by their visit to dwell on that. I asked why they were at my place, and his uncle responded that he just wanted to talk to my parents. Thinking he perhaps wanted a loan or something official from my parents, I called for my dad and mom to come meet them.

Soon, my parents were out in the living room and seated. And that was when a shocker was dropped on us.

Ige’s uncle began by going on and on about how he’d been suspecting the exact nature of my friendship with Ige for some time now, and decided to be on our case. And finally, he got confirmation of what “the Holy Spirit told him about us” directly from Ige himself that we were both involved in a homosexual relationship. At this, my father immediately sat up straight on the couch and my mum sprang to her feet, clutching at her heart and shooting me a growing scowl. When the man started talking, I’d been feeling this growing sensation of dread, a coldness gradually creeping through my body – until he got to the part about confirming from Ige that we were in a homosexual relationship, and I simply wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.

Ige’s uncle wasn’t done talking. He continued, saying before Ige told him, he’d grown suspicious because of the way his nephew had started displaying a level of affection toward me that was only supposed to be witnessed between a man and a woman. And then one day, he’d overheard us having a lover’s quarrel. This was when he confronted his nephew and got his confirmation.

The man said a lot of terrible things; I couldn’t believe they were coming from the person who had taken me so under his wing, he had told me things he couldn’t even tell his own sons. Then he turned to Ige and asked him to corroborate the things he’d said. Even then, even as I could see the apprehension in Ige’s eyes, I wanted him to defend me, to defend us. I hoped he would lie for us, that he would protect me.

But he didn’t. He opened his mouth and began telling my parents about how I came to his room one day he was asleep and gave him a blow job, and how I continued doing it, every time while he was asleep, and how he’d felt too awkward to stop me each time he woke up to find me doing it. How he didn’t like what I was doing and how that was the reason for our quarrels.

This kind of vicious prevarication devastated me even more than Ige saying anything to side with his uncle. I stared at him in shock, willing him to look at me to see the hurt I was feeling by his betrayal.

My father then turned to me and said angrily, “Young man, explain yourself!”

I shook my head to myself as I came to a decision. If this was how Ige had decided to play this, then two can play that game. I denied everything. Turning my pain into anger, I furiously told my parents that I was surprised to hear such nonsense and that none of what the two men said had ever happened. I told my parents that I was disappointed that they sat down to listen to such nonsense, especially considering from whom it was coming – this I said as I turned a sneering look to Ige’s uncle. I bared my claws and went for the jugular, as I revealed to my parents that the man was unhappy with me because a love affair he started with a friend of mine, a rich single mother, didn’t blossom because the woman dumped him after letting me know she couldn’t handle the man’s baggage. I’d noticed that his attitude toward me changed after he was dumped by the woman, who he was aware is acquainted with me, and I suspected he must think I had contributed to the negative stories about him that made her leave him. All this I revealed to the entire room, spitefully using my close relationship with Ige’s uncle to discredit him in the eyes of my parents.

My father quickly got incensed and asked the three men to leave his house and to never come back.

After they left, my parents of course quizzed me further about their claims of my homosexuality in the presence of my younger brother. I stood my ground. Even though it was obvious that Ige and his uncle had sown a seed of doubt in their minds, I refused to water that seed by admitting to anything. Fortunately, my brother backed me up. He told our parents to stop asking me such ridiculous questions, and went on to call my older brother’s attention to what was going on. My elder brother came home to fume at my parents. He said he couldn’t believe they had even allowed “those people” into our house and given them room to utter such nonsense to them. My brother insinuated that the Ige’s uncle must have an evil agenda of breaking up our family, because if he was on the level, he would have at least confronted me with what he’d learned first instead of coming straight to report to my parents. Coupled with my earlier revelations about the man’s involvement with my lady friend, my brother hit the final nail on the man’s discreditation.

In the following days, I stayed away from Ige and his family, and they stayed away from me. Ige however called me incessantly with apologies about what happened, telling me he’d been threatened by his uncle to say the things he did. He pleaded for my forgiveness, admitting that even though he knew that things would never go back to the way they were between us, he couldn’t help how much he missed me. He told me he truly loved me. I was unmoved by his pleas.

Ige’s cousin, the eldest son of his uncle and the one over whom he got jealous because of how he thought I was flirting with him, was another person who stayed in touch with me after the mess with his family. We were always chatting on Facebook, even though he never brought up what happened. Back when I was still just friends with Ige, he was someone I’d had a brief interest in, because he was way better looking than Ige. But nothing came of it, even though we became friends.

One evening, I was at a bar with a friend when he messaged me, saying he was bored at home. So, I asked him over to join us at the bar. He came over. We had some drinks and it was at this time that he brought up the topic of what happened with his father, apologising to me on behalf of his father, and telling me that even if I was gay, it’d still be cool with him because he had nothing against gay people. Hearing him say those things meant a lot to me.

We left the bar late that night, retiring to my friend’s house. Ige’s cousin, James, called his house to let them know he wouldn’t be coming home that night. And while in bed, nearly asleep and under the influence, I touched him. At first, he rebuffed me, but when I touched him again, he responded by touching me back. And before long, we were kissing. From kissing, I was soon sucking his dick. My friend woke up at this time, and it became a threesome. Before morning, we had gone two more rounds of sex. And just like that, James and I became a thing. Just sex though. Nothing as deep as what I shared with his cousin.

Then one day, I was home alone when someone knocked on the front door. When I opened the door, it was to see Ige on his knees, begging me to take him back. That his life had been empty since he’d had to live without me. He was in tears, and I didn’t even know I had tears rolling down my cheeks as I listened to him until I pulled him up and we hugged. And then, we were kissing each other furiously, like we were rediscovering the pleasure of something we’d been starving for a long time. The sex that came after was inevitable. And it was just as good as it’d always been. We officially made up but agreed to keep things quiet so as not to draw any ire from our families. I also had a secondary reason for not wanting the world to know I was back to good terms with Ige; I was still hooking up with his cousin, James.

However, it’s all gotten very exhausting. One of my New Year resolutions was to cut ties with that family entirely. It’s been difficult severing ties with both brothers, but it’s a process I’m still working on. Being attached in any way to Ige and his family has become tasking psychologically for me. just the other day, his uncle, for all his anti-homosexual indignation against me, was caught getting a blow job from a sixteen-year-old girl. The scandal that erupted from that has created quite the stink around that family.

Add to that the fact that the aftermath of Ige’s uncle trying to out me to my family is that the pressure from my parents for me to get married has become a thing. So far, I am resisting, and I know the time will come when I will have to tell them the truth. But right now, I do not have the mind to come out to my family, even though I know they know on some deep level that this is who I am.

Life, they say, is a struggle of many steps. And right now, I am taking mine one day at a time.

Written by Audrey