Does Binyavanga being gay make it okay?

Binyavanga Wainaina recently came in public and declared he is gay. PHOTO: COURTESY

By Julie Masiga

No doubt about it, Binyavanga Wainaina has a masterful way with words. Few can spin a yarn quite like this man. He’s good. And he’s famous for it.

A modern day Ngugi wa Thiong’o, he can be described as the voice of Kenya’s post-colonial generation, telling our story as we have come to understand it. Wainaina is respected. In some circles, even revered. On social media platforms, many consider him a ‘bigwig’. A man of influence.

And his influence came into sharp relief when he admitted to the world that he is indeed, homosexual.

He did it, as a writer of his calibre would, in an elegantly written essay, that speaks of the deep grief he felt upon his mother’s passing, and how her death eventually caused him to be ‘born again’, this time as gay - something he says he was aware of since he was five.

In the essay, a lost chapter from his 2011 memoir One Day I Will  Write About This Place, Wainaina also admits to visa fraud while living and working in South Africa. He goes on to reveal that his first homosexual encounter was with a male prostitute in London.

And that being trapped in a world where he couldn’t freely express his own sexuality caused him to masturbate – a lot.

Left no skeleton

Clearly, he has come out of the closet, leaving no skeletons behind. And for the most part, he has been allowed to. Because you see, in this place, few are given a pass to be anything other than straight (heterosexual), and fewer still, the permission to write about it with such honest abandon. In this place, there are still laws on the books that criminalise both same sex relations and prostitution.

 And yet, perhaps spurred on by the rising anti-gay sentiment in Uganda and Nigeria, Wainaina felt safe enough to tell his African admirers, and the world at large, that he is homosexual.

I don’t deny him the courage it must have taken to lay bare his alternative sexual preferences. For that he must be applauded. But were he anyone else, perhaps someone with less of a ‘cool factor’ the backlash might have been that much more severe.

There are some haters in the mix for sure, but for the most part Wainaina has been lauded as a hero for daring to go against the grain in a manner rarely witnessed in this place.

Marked silence

Which begs the question, are we accepting the man or his homosexuality? Does Wainaina being gay make it okay? There has been a marked silence from some opinionated quarters, folks who in the past would not have hesitated to come down on this coming-out with hammers of various persuasions – religious, African traditionalist etc.

I myself, secure in an unbridled and mainstream heterosexuality, I am a firm adherent of the ‘live and let live’ school of thought, as self-satisfied and condescending as that may sound to members of the LGBTIQ (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/intersexed/questioning) community.

I don’t really care to know how people choose to express their love. The thought that someone somewhere is doing it differently than I do is not a particularly riling one. People have the inalienable right to live their lives as they deem fit, and parliaments have no place legislating their sexual choices.

That said, I do believe that in Wainaina’s coming out, we have been outed for the culturally ambiguous lot that we are. It should not escape the attention that many of the freshly-minted, pro-gay advocates have been swayed by the celebrated writer’s ‘cool factor’.

In the strangest way, particularly in a continent that continues to front a hard line intolerance for the homosexual lifestyle, being gay – for those who are not – has become the ‘in thing’ much in the same way as downloading Beyonce’s visual album is the ‘in thing’.

Gay activism, in its current form, is not an African construct. It is distinctly foreign. Just like Beyonce’s visual album. It is perhaps the one thing that we can blame, if indeed that is the right word to use, on the West. The idea that one cannot have an opinion outside of the gay rights movement is as restrictive as it is faulty.

African being converted

On the flip side, homosexuality is what it is. It cannot be defined within the context of hemisphere, nationality or race. Those who say that it is un-African are deceiving themselves. To say that it is not strictly Biblical might be closer to the truth. But then the Bible came with the missionaries and it is in their motherland that the latest gay rights gospel is being preached. And true to type, many Africans are being converted.

In We Must Free Our Imaginations, a documentary that Wainaina released days after he came out, he speaks on a variety of issues against the backdrop of homosexuality in Africa. “I am an African,” he says, “and a pan-Africanist.” Listening to him speak in the six part documentary, it is clear for all to hear that he has indeed rebelled against the white-washing and thought-colonisation that modern-day imperialists are still determined to impose.

So when he then goes on to defend gay rights, it is not because it’s the ‘in thing’, he’s defending gay rights because he is a gay man. Period. “I have a beef because you want to tell me what to do in my bedroom,” he says.

I do find myself wondering why, therefore, he found it necessary to tell us what it is that he does in his bedroom. Straight folks get up to all kinds of queerness behind closed doors, but few are willing to come out about it. You don’t often encounter a heterosexual who will freely admit to paying for sex, or masturbating – a lot.  The debate around homosexuality then, has become more about a sexual act, and less about a lifestyle.

Not role model

Sexual orientation aside, Wainaina is an unlikely role model. He stands out for taking ownership of his own narrative without bowing to the Western agenda, which is to control the worldview of an entire planet. As Africans, all we can be is who we are. Our problem is that most of us don’t know what that is.

We would do well to remember that Wainaina has come out to define himself as an African male who is also a homosexual. That is who he is. Who are you?