But I was already exhausted by the time I arrived here from Nigeria. As an openly gay man there, my boldest priority each time I stepped out of the house was to return home alive. As a Black man in America, that has not changed.
My country was no place for a teenage boy like me, who was gay and camp. Or put more truthfully: I was a social oddity, a threat to a raging brand of toxic masculinity. Fitting in, indeed surviving, forced me to re-engineer my body and learn novel ways of navigating daily life on the streets. My choice of clothes, shoes, my body language — all of those marked one as either a not-to-be-messed-with passer-by or a punk ripe for picking on.
One Saturday afternoon when I was 13, my brother took me to a gym equipment store in Aba, in southeastern Nigeria, to shop for weight lifting gear. After haggling with the hunky middle-aged owner who spent the entire time teasing me for my “girlie” frame, he paid for two five-pound dumbbells, and we rode the bus home. The dumbbells were for me.
I had just moved to the city to begin studying at a rowdy all-boys technical school. At the end of my first week there, I came home with multiple bruises and a new name, Chinelo — an Igbo name given mostly to girls. Aba, Nigeria’s most resilient commercial nerve center was notorious then for its gangs, a bloody vigilante group, and rampant street violence. My brother worried that I might not survive.
Beside buying me weight lifting equipment and ensuring that I trained on it, he also got me Timberland boots and Caterpillar sandals with toothy soles and exaggerated heft. Soon I traded my tight khaki shorts for baggy jeans and wore baseball caps each time I stepped out of the house. Although this artifice, especially the boots, became a signature part of my wardrobe, it didn’t do much to protect me from the rampant and violent homophobia in Nigeria.
The problem with code-switching, with dressing-to-fit, is not that it just does not work (the evening I was abducted in Nigeria I was wearing Caterpillar steel toe boots), it shovels the moral responsibility onto the shoulders of victims of thoughtless bigotry. It asks that Black men, for example, tweak their appearance to lull the neurosis of agitated white people. It asks that queer folks (in the case of Nigeria) go on laboring for a society that will never pause to reckon with its tacit terrorism.
I’ve tuned into this frequency of unsolvable social terror since the age of 13, constantly oscillating between self-defense and self-erasure. At 27, I’m thoroughly fatigued.