Gay Issue - ''Nigeria Is Straight'' By Dr Fola Ojo

It was just about one month after I arrived the US, when my host, my best friend and brother,Tony Fasoore took me to a shopping mall in Providence Rhode Island.  It was my first trip to this part of the world and I loved the glamour, the big cars, the big buildings, and the white faces. As we continued shopping and window-shopping, I stretched out my right hand and held on to  my friend’s hand as people walking by in that brief 5 second move stared at both of us with disgust. 

This was 25 years ago; anyone can do that now and get away with it. Tony’s reaction to my gesture was one of fury and disgust as he violently shook off my hand off his.

“Are you gay”? he asked me.

“What is that”, I asked him.

“Please don’t hold my hand, what is wrong with you?” Tony said.

 I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Tony had been in the U.S for only one year, and had assimilated and “behaved” like an American. When we got in the car, he started explaining to me what the fuss was all about and what “gay” meant.

I was coming from a culture where friends held each other’s hands walking down the street and it did not mean a thing. (Probably now does). In my culture, men are not suspicious of men like that, we just like who we like without attaching some perverted sexual madness to it.  Growing up in Nigeria, we only talked about girls-their gaits, their beauty, their looks, their voices- we talked just girls and it was refreshing to every young man just to talk girls. Girls were like ice-cold water poured on a hot soul, hanging with one, (in some cases two or more)  was a validation that you were accepted and you are a “real man”, or real boy growing up to be a man.

 Talking girls and hanging with them was a confirmation and announcement that you had a future that someone wanted to be part of. Of course boys hung with boys playing soccer, going to the club and to parties. Those were the days of “Kool and the Gang”, “Lakeside”, “Anita Bell”, “Teddy Pendergrass”, “Peter Tosh”. Those were the days of baggy trousers (pants), monkey jackets, high-heels shoes…

When boys took shower together after a soccer game or table-tennis play-out, no eyebrow was raised as to what the motive was. That was how to be a man, and it was a good time.

 I never heard that word “homosexual” until I got to the US, and I was a practicing journalist. May be I was not good enough, or had not read enough, but it wouldn’t have interested me to read up on something like that. No young man had time reading up on what is done in the animal kingdom.  That is why Nigerians are so unanimous in the recent Anti-Gay bill signed into law by President Jonathan. Something is now bringing us together.  

The signing of this law is like Nigeria playing in a soccer match where there is No Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Delta crazy babbling,  we become One Nigeria, and anyone on the other side is a perceived enemy.

Anyone on the other side of this law is a perceived enemy of what Nigeria wants. What Nigerians are now saying is  “give your aids to other countries,  hate Nigeria the more,  take us out of the UN,  refuse us visas, move in the marines and bomb us, kill us, and take our oil, but we are not going back on this”. 

The voice of the people is the voice of God, Nigerians have spoken. I think Mr. John Kerry should remember that only 17 of the 50 states in the US recognize same-sex marriage. The administration should try to get all the US states to go same-sex first before it launches out across the Atlantic Ocean.

 

Dr Fola Ojo writes in from America.