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By: Obinna Tony-Francis Ochem

Long before I called myself queer, I called myself gay because it was the only language I had for my attraction to men. Growing up in Nigeria, the word rarely belonged to people like me. Among young people, “gay” was less an identity than an insult, tossed around with the same venom as the “F-word” in many Western contexts. The older generations preferred “homosexual,” as insults often shortened to “homo,” a word that lingered in church sermons and everyday conversations with unmistakable disgust. I remember how pastors would stretch the first syllable as though the word itself carried contamination. Before I understood my sexuality, I understood the shame attached to naming it.

For me, embracing the word was not about replacing “gay” with something more fashionable. It was about finding a vocabulary expansive enough to describe both my identity and the politics that emerged from living it.

As a Nigerian living in a country where visibility often comes with significant personal risk, queerness allows me to exist without constantly explaining or defending every part of myself. More importantly, it has become the language through which my advocacy for LGBT+ rights intersects with my advocacy for culture and history.

That connection became clearer as I began thinking more deeply about my Igbo identity. Before colonialism and the widespread influence of Christianity, Igbo society contained ways of understanding gender and social roles that did not always conform to the rigid binaries. These histories are often dismissed or forgotten, replaced by the assumption that anything outside contemporary heterosexual norms is inherently “un-African.”

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Recognizing this transformed how I understood myself; I no longer saw queerness only as a descriptor of my sexuality. It became a framework for questioning the stories I had inherited about culture, faith, and belonging. Existing as a queer Nigerian means inhabiting multiple forms of difference at once. My sexuality places me outside dominant expectations, but so does my commitment to recovering cultural histories that have been obscured by colonial and religious narratives.

One example that continues to resonate with me is the Adamma masquerade in Igbo culture, where male performers embody feminine beauty through elaborate costumes, movement, and performance. While it would be historically inaccurate to impose contemporary LGBT+ identities onto these traditions, they remind me that expressions of gender have long been more complex than today’s public discourse often allows. Queerness gives me a language to appreciate these histories without forcing them into rigid modern categories. 

That broader understanding of queerness also transformed how I understood my own desires. I identify as a same-gender-loving man, and my attraction has always been rooted in masculinity. Living in Nigeria, where legal and social realities severely constrain queer relationships, I have not had the opportunity to explore relationships with trans men. Yet my attraction has never been limited by the sex assigned at birth. I am attracted to masculine trans men who identify as gay and are open to relationships with cisgender men. Before I encountered queer politics, I often felt pressured to reconcile this attraction with rigid categories that left little room for complexity. Queerness offered another possibility. Rather than asking me to defend or simplify my experiences, it allowed me to understand attraction as something shaped by identity, embodiment, intimacy, and selfhood.

That expansiveness matters beyond my own life. Across much of the Global South, many of us have adapted the language of queerness to make sense of our realities rather than merely adopting Western frameworks. We have interpreted it through our own cultures, histories, and political struggles, reclaiming identities that have long been dismissed as foreign or impossible. Queerness, for me, is not valuable because it dissolves identity, but because it creates room for identities that have always existed. It makes space for ambiguity, for contradiction, and for the many ways people experience themselves outside rigid binaries. Fluidity is not the absence of identity; it is an acknowledgment that human experience has always exceeded the categories used to contain it.

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I arrived at that understanding in 2020. Like many people, the COVID-19 pandemic altered my relationship with the world. I was confined to my home during my final year at university and spent more time online than ever before. Online, I found queer scholarship, films, and essays that explored sexuality as inseparable from history, race, gender, colonialism, and power. I learned from queer people who generously shared their lives and political thinking in ways that made ideas once confined to academic spaces feel immediate and accessible. Their work gave me a language for questions I had carried for years without knowing how to ask.

The more I learned, the more I realized that queerness was asking something of me beyond self-understanding. It taught me that supporting trans people was not an optional extension of advocacy but part of understanding the fullness of queer liberation. It reshaped how I thought about sexuality itself, not as something determined solely by bodies, but as an intricate interplay of attraction, identity, intimacy, and personhood. That shift helped me understand why trans men belong in gay spaces and why a movement that excludes the most marginalized among us ultimately diminishes all of us.

The word has shaped how I understand culture, history, and community, reminding me that none of our struggles exist in isolation. It has taught me to see my advocacy not simply as the pursuit of rights for people who look like me, but as a commitment to collective liberation grounded in curiosity, empathy, and solidarity. In a society that has repeatedly told people like me that we do not belong, queerness has given me more than an identity. It has given me a way to imagine belonging, not only for myself, but for everyone whose existence has been pushed to the margins.

Bio: Obinna Tony-Francis Ochem (he/they) is a Nigerian writer, journalist, and storyteller whose work sits at the intersection of identity, culture, and social justice. He draws from lived experience and a deep engagement with queer Nigerian realities, exploring themes of sexuality, religion, mental health, and belonging with nuance and emotional clarity. His works can be found here: https://linktr.ee/obynofranc

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