“You accepted this identity after reading about it; it’s not who you really are,” someone once told me. But how can words ever describe who we are? Just pack us up and hand us a label? Never.
When did I know I was queer?
Perhaps it’s better to ask when I didn’t. It’s not something that has a when or a where, it’s something I have always been. But that understanding didn’t come easily. I had to let go of a lot of unnecessary thinking.
Now when I look back, I can see the pieces of my queerness scattered everywhere. With each passing year, my feelings grew stronger. But if I were to think about the first one, I remember the milk delivery boy. I must have been nine or ten years old. In our neighborhood, divided into the “upside” and the “downside”, we lived in the downside part. There was this young man, maybe in his late teens or early twenties, who came to deliver milk. He was short, chubby, and had a beard. There wasn’t a day I didn’t go out just to see him. I knew exactly what time he came by. I would sit outside, pretending to play with bubbles, waiting for him. He never noticed me, but I remember how happy seeing him made me. Maybe, even though I didn’t know it then, that’s where my queerness began.
Something I can’t forget from my childhood is the first time I heard the phrase “work of Sodom.” We were sitting in the living room, and my parents were watching a foreign movie. I was behind the sofa, playing with Legos. Then my mom said, about the same-sex lovers in the movie, “These are the work of Sodom.” I think it was because I had never heard the word before that I asked, “Mom, what does ‘work of Sodom’ mean?” She said it was nothing and quickly avoided the question.
The answer to everything is in our childhood. When I look back, I see that I was a playful, polite, and respectful child. I understood things on my own and enjoyed my solitude. I was a well-behaved child families loved, but because I was so quiet, they also worried, “What is going to become of him?” My mom especially concerned. My personality was different, unique. I liked magic. I thought of myself as a witch. A female witch, at that.
They didn’t buy me dolls, saying they were for girls, so I played with my mom’s nail polish bottles as if they were girls, and with medicine bottles as boys. Girls were always at the center of my stories. Thinking about it now, it was because I saw more of myself in women. I never hated my maleness, but the only way I could express my hidden identity was through the stories I created in my play.
As far as I remember, I never played a man’s character in playhouse. Because of that, my brother once asked, “Aren’t you tired of acting like the woman?” He didn’t care much when we were children, but as we grew older, the burden of being “a man” fell on his shoulders, put there by society. He started getting angry at me, his big brother with “feminine” characters. Eventually, he stopped playing with me altogether.
I was never forbidden from being how I was in our house compound. To dance, to wear dresses, play like a girl, no one batted an eye. But as I grew up, my mom started to notice how my brothers’ friends were making fun of me, and she started stopping me, saying “they will make fun of you.” She became controlling of even the way I sit and talk. If I was cooking when they came over, she would take it away from me; she pushed me to be like my brother in front of them. That made me so angry. Until now, I don’t understand the gender roles.
When I started to realize there was something I wanted to be but couldn’t, I tried to create my own world. Growing up, my brother, sister and I had a life that was limited to home, school, and back. Even to next-door neighbors, we only went once in a while. Anything we did without permission caused a hitting rage from my mom.
My mom used to say, “you are more of a woman than your sister.” It was because in a society where men don’t groom themselves, me taking care of myself made her uncomfortable. It’s not to say my sister didn’t take care of herself, but until now I remember how my mom’s dresses and heel shoes made me feel like myself. Sadly, now my feet have gotten bigger, so there’s none that fits.
In any opportunity where my mom was out, I would wear her dresses and hold her bags. We used to try modeling with my sister, and I was better at walking in heels than her. For me, walking in heels meant embracing my hidden identity; for my sister, it was just a tool that she picked up for a wedding or an occasion, and that made her wobble.
I chose women’s gatherings over those of men. My equal-age men liked shangeta, soccer, or plays that caused fights. Who likes to play outside in the sun with sweat all over? I never liked that. I sat outside classrooms in school and played marbles, lekelkicho, and played catch with other girls. The girls never made fun of me being with them or undermined me. I don’t remember them ever calling me “girly.”
I had one close female friend of mine—I don’t remember what we used to talk about, but I remember she was the prettiest in our class. All the boys liked her. We used to go to her house or my house after school; because we were in the same neighborhood, we used to run around.
I used to say she was my wife, just to play. Honestly, when I look back at it, I enjoyed her companionship because I wanted to be her. Not to become a woman, but to get the attention and love the men gave her. I was envious of that attention.
The boys, on the contrary, hated me for the attention she gave me. So, when I would just see them sitting together, my heart would want to come out of my mouth. I didn’t pass by them unless they dispersed. When they sat around the curve to our school, or when they sat together in teams during school break, they bullied me. “You girl,” they called me. They laughed at me and I would stumble.
I was so thin and had a weak body. Plus, my voice is high-pitched, all in all, I have feminine characteristics. So, my walk and just how I am, from their view, was deserving of insults.
But when I look back now, even though I spent most of my time with women, I was only able to have meaningful deep relationships with men. Even when with men, I was craving men. I wanted to have a friendship that doesn’t constitute sex but has the freedom for me to be myself.
My parents were economically strong and educated, doing their own business. They used to buy me books, coloring pencils, markers, and everything I wanted. My mom is the one who taught us how to read. In our house, books would be bought every week, so I had male friends that came to read those. Amongst them, I had a friend who was also called girly by them. With him, after reading the tale books, we would draw and do handmade things with crochet.
When we moved to Shashemene from the town we were in, I was a young adult. I knew of sexual urges. Since becoming a young man, I used to be shy of seeing men’s bodies, but it also made me curious and happy. My parents were Protestant. They were not strict, but they had Christian values. When we got to Shashemene, we slowly stopped going to church.
I don’t know why, but my parents’ marriage was always full of arguments. When financial issues were added to it, things got worse. Maybe they had always fought, even when we were young. But we only noticed when we grew up. We were made to side with my mom and lie to my dad. Sometimes we lied on our own just to keep the peace.
Even though I knew they wouldn’t accept my queerness, they were not strict enough to deprive me of freedom. Now there is no one who scolds me or tells me to be a certain way. I speak about my wants and opinions freely. I argue, defending LGBTQ+ people in front of them. But just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, I also had my own struggles with myself to accept myself before I was sharing my opinions with my family. I didn’t try to hide my struggle. For many Ethiopian queers, the scariest part is telling their parents, for me, that was the easiest part. I asked them to take me to a psychiatrist so that I could get “healed”. I was prayed for by church elders and young pastors. This is what I did to be saved by others. I did all that they told me to do. I even talked to a traditional healer on telegram and told him I would pay whatever he asked if he saved me. But after a while, seeing how stressed my mom was, I lied, saying I was healed, but I was still taking the antidepressants prescribed to me by a psychiatrist, and getting treatment. There is nothing I didn’t do for it. I tried my best to get my answers then.
My father didn’t live with us much. He traveled a lot for work. Because the city we lived in was filled with relatives and half the town knew us, my mom had to play both roles, she became aggressive and strict. Because of this, when I read writings by expert psychiatrists, I thought my problem was what they called a child of an absent father and a controlling mother.
Even though my dad was educated and kind, he hadn’t lived with us since I turned six. I wondered at times if I was looking for the love I wanted from him in other men. Or if I had been raped as a child. Sometimes I wondered if I was possessed by the devil, if it was a punishment placed on me because I hadn’t worshiped God as I should. Since I was into magic, could I have cursed myself by mistake? I thought about it constantly. Could it be a bad curse or evil spiritual attack that came from relatives? Did I have the personality of the fallen Adam? I cried many nights. There were times I tried to hang myself and sat with a knife. The only thing I couldn’t do was kill myself, and what held me back was thinking: if I’m not alive, how will my sister survive? I let go of a lot of poison to not leave her by herself.
When things got worse, I even tried to do a curse where you can change your gender online. My brain was not letting me rest; it said maybe it worked and that’s why you stayed gay. I don’t know.
Around 2009, I created a Facebook account to talk to a friend of mine who moved abroad. As I got used to the environment, I started to look for people who are like me by looking up keywords. I didn’t know the term “zega” then (homosexual), so I looked up “ethio gay” or “lesbian.” God, who saw my dedication, made me come across other queer accounts.
For the first time, I talked to a person online, it was someone with no photo and a fake name. His username was Said. He was such a kind guy. He was the first person to teach me about online safety. One day I posted a photo and a person who had a profile photo of two men kissing commented on it. Said then came to my inbox and told me to delete the comment. With his advice, I decided I shouldn’t talk about “zega” using my real account, so I created another secret account.
Back then I had such high self-hatred, so I used to talk to others under the cover of saying I would ‘save’ them. I told them they were wrong, God wouldn’t accept them, and it was unnatural. I also told them the things I had done to ‘heal.’ On the other hand, I was starting to like Said without knowing him in person. His way of thinking attracted me. I was struggling with the feelings I had for him. I had an internal voice telling me “you are wrong, this is a mistake”, fighting with that was its own wrestling.
Thinking about it now, everyone is on social media looking for answers. It’s not sustainable to continue with the hidden noise and feelings that won’t disappear, so the next necessary step was to look for others like us.
On social media, meeting others like me had its own relief feeling.
The first time I decided to share that I’m nonbinary was to someone who is still a best friend and whom I met on Grindr. I don’t think he understood it in full, but he accepted me. That gave me courage, so I told it to all my queer friends who are close to me. But no one cares about it or understands.
I don’t fall under either gender. Saying I’m nonbinary doesn’t mean I hate being a man or a woman; it’s not about choosing or permission.
When I exist as a man, I have to suffocate half of myself and hide part of my identity because I can’t wear feminine clothing or anything people consider unmanly.
In the area where I was raised, I met many people from Bale, Kofele, Dodola, Arsi Negele, Ziway, Hawassa, Aje, Alaba, Wolaita, and Yirgalem. Forget about being nonbinary, I didn’t even meet anyone who accepted their own queerness. Even if such people existed there, it would have been complicated.
As queers, because of the self-hatred upon us, to say I have accepted myself seems worse than having sex.
There was someone who told me accepting your queerness is the passkey to freely fucking. He said, “God will be kinder to you if you know you are being tested.” I wonder, is it God or someone else we are trying to cheat? It always confuses me.
In all these relationships, the feeling they created in me can’t be expressed easily. From childhood, I never thought I was the only one to feel like this. So when I started to talk to people and met them, it made me empathize when I heard of their experiences and journeys. The internet, to some extent, gave me a place to be myself; it also allowed me to have good friends.
What I gained from social media is that it allowed me to meet great, amazing people and gave me a platform where my voice could be heard. I made friends I haven’t met in person, but we got to know each other through texts. We’ve talked for years, made calls, laughed, and discussed things together. It gave me something like a comfortable family.
Many people shared a lot with me through their writings, and I shared with them too. When I heard and saw what people went through, it made me empathize rather than worry. But some people, on the contrary, aren’t looking for freedom. They can’t even express their views, every action of theirs is watched and they live under constant control.
Even though none of us can always be ourselves as much as we want, I realized the severity varies when I saw people like that. It taught me that each person’s truth is different.
After I accepted myself, I went through a phase where I told others to accept themselves. My tone was forceful, as if I needed their approval. These days, I’ve learned that everyone’s timeline and path is different, so I only share my opinion and avoid arguments. I realize that rushing self-acceptance or clinging to self-hatred, neither is healthy.
Even though I’ve known I had special feelings for men for 18 years, I’ve only been meeting them for seven. It reminds me of how much struggle I went through.
When I was a campus student, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I was more conservative Protestant than my parents. I taught children and participated in prayer groups. In the eyes of others, I was a strong believer, even my age-mates were scared of me. There was speculation that I was a prophet. But through all this, I was suffering inside and hurting.
I lost my laughter when I got into tenth grade. That’s when I started learning the disciple teachings and got baptized.
I read more than I should have for my age. I was looking for answers, chasing knowledge that could save me. I never found it. The truth was there was no one to help me except myself.
Meeting other queers came much later. When I was a second-year student, I met a man living in Shashemene on Facebook. I asked him to teach me how to kiss, and we arranged to meet. I went to his house on Christmas Eve. I decided to go because I thought I was already a sinner, there was no virtue left that could be taken from me.
That night still amazes me. We didn’t have sex, but it felt right. Our relationship wasn’t about love, but when our bodies touched, I realized it was natural. It had a magnetic pull that made me think, “What about this is unnatural?” It was a connection that needed to happen because a man’s body is naturally attractive to me.
I stayed the night at his house, then went home early and told my family, “The night at church was great,” I lied. We still talk with the guy, even though our views are completely different. He hates who he is and calls it a sin. I left that way of thinking behind long ago.
In 2013, the infatuation I had for a straight man in campus was my starting point to assess my lifelong belief of self-hatred. “If what I feel is love, how can this love be wrong?” I asked myself. From saying “I am a sinner,” I started asking, “Why a sinner? How?”
Then in 2014, I met a man on social media. He was older than me, and we started to get to know each other well. He was the kind of man I wanted for love, but he was the prisoner of his own mind. He said, “I wish I could come out, but since I can’t, I am stuck here, lost.” Even then, he was a calm, collected man. Whenever I thought about my life, I imagined him with me. I imagined us getting married and living together. He used to tell me he loved me, but he also said he didn’t want to meet up in person. After talking for over nine months, a mutual friend of ours told me he had a girlfriend. I was shocked. Even though he has feelings for men, he lives married to a woman and has a child. He told me he got married for the sake of his mom and because he wanted to be a father. It’s just not easy.
I’ve never had a romantic relationship that felt right and strong. I’ve never committed to one either, because I haven’t met anyone who views love and companionship the way I do, or whose values and goals align with mine.
I have few regrets in my life. I think it’s because I live by accepting what has happened and what will happen. I believe that if love begins, it needs to last. I should be able to give my all. Because of this, I’m afraid of being the only one trying, of putting in effort alone.
These days, I don’t think about love or finding a partner as much, it only crosses my mind suddenly sometimes. That scares me. I want love, not because I’m incomplete on my own or need someone to complete me, but because I want to share my life with someone.
In general, I understand how difficult it is to accept yourself while living in Ethiopia. The fear of getting caught or being outed dominates our lives. It’s especially difficult to meet other people these days. Before, I wasn’t as worried. It used to be normal to go out and meet people like us. But now, with what I hear, I feel all eyes are on us. My caution and anxiety have increased. To protect myself, I’ve learned about privacy protection methods on social media.
For dating, I’ve used Facebook or Grindr, but it’s better to call it meeting than dating. Dating means having a future in mind, seeing and assessing each other beyond sexual connection. I haven’t experienced much of that. Meeting for sex is far more common, and I’m not being judgmental. No one is as horny as I am, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want something more. I crave growing old together with someone. This creates a deep loneliness in me. Sometimes I think I have no hope unless I leave Ethiopia.
Love, with whoever it is, is love. What we should worry about and ask is whether the love is true. Of course, I can’t deny that living this love as a queer person is very difficult. Finding a partner and dating is difficult for straight people too. For queer Ethiopians, it’s ten times worse. There are cautions that need to be taken and risks associated even before the love and searching for a partner. More than anything, it requires controlling oneself. Even if we come across health problems during intercourse, we don’t have the freedom to get medical care.
We are in hiding and suppressed, looking to grow love with someone who is also hiding and suppressed. This kind of love needs dedication and commitment to work and sustain.
This ruins the process of love. It turns it into work and becomes exhausting. Touching my boyfriend’s hand in a café is dangerous. Living together in one house is dangerous, even though roommates are normal, knowing what’s at stake makes it terrifying. Many are tortured because of family pressure. Isn’t it absurd? We’re trying to survive in a community that doesn’t want us to exist.
When I think about my future love life, if people talk about me, I hope they’ll say, “This guy lived with someone for 30 or 40 years, they must be gay.” If I stay in Ethiopia hoping for change, I wish to live with one person, sharing my life. To last forever in our house, in our own world.
But honestly, I don’t want to live in Ethiopia under such conditions. I want us to be a couple that shows our love in public and fights for our freedom. Just because we found love doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about others. I want us to be a voice for those who have none.