ONE night in November 1989, a visitor to Harare, Zimbabwe, sat next to two young ladies at a party. One of the ladies was slim and the other was attractively plump. The visitor shot the breeze with the slim young lady, who conversed charmingly but not flirtatiously.

Suddenly the slim lady said, ‘she is jealous again.’ The plump lady had been trying to stop the conversation, though it was about a Bulawayo outlaw, the criminal counterpart of Lawrence Anini, the bandit who led the Nigeria Police a terrifying merry dance for many months. The young ladies were from Bulawayo.

‘Why should she be jealous?’ the visitor asked

‘We are lesbians’ was her response. She was the dominant lesbian and the plump lady, her girlfriend, did not want her chatting to a man.

‘Lesbians!’ the visitor almost shouted in surprise. They looked like nice young ladies.

‘Not so loud,’ the dominant lesbian said, indeed begged, not wanting her confidence to reach other ears. She did not want her unusual sexuality to be bruited about. She had spoken frankly because the visitor was in Zimbabwe for only a few days. President Robert Mugabe rages against gays and calls them names.

She did not take pride in being a lesbian, unlike some Nigerians who have been demonstrating against the anti-same-sex marriage bill recently passed by the Senate. British and American threats to cut off aid to Nigeria because of the passage of the bill are beneath contempt.

I wrote a column when the anti-gay bill began its journey and it was published on March 20, 2009. The article has been shortened:

Mr Rashidi Williams, unlike Lord Alfred Douglas, spoke the name of his love. It is homosexuality. Lord Douglas in his poem ‘Two Loves’ wrote about ‘The love that dare not speak its name.’ Mr Williams, the spokesman for the Queer Alliance, a Nigerian gay group, crowed about his homosexuality. Mr Williams and his group came out of the closet of furtive sex on March 11. They went to the National Assembly to protest against a bill that seeks to outlaw and punish same-sex marriages.

Mr Williams is the first Nigerian, as far as I know, to openly declare his strange sexuality. Mr Williams is proud of his perverted preference in a country of solid, starchy heterosexuality.

Homosexuals claim that they are the victims of their genes, that they are swept along by a coital current that makes resistance futile. This makes homosexuality a disorder, but it is actually like a hunger for the unusual. It is an indulgence, a self-pandering to indecency.

Homosexuality is not decreed by the genes; it is a homosexual’s choice. Some schoolboys experiment with homosexuality, but do not become homosexuals. They are put off by their first tentative act, which may not have gone beyond a brief embrace. They hate themselves, as many memoirs reveal. Paul Scott, the British author of the Raj Quartet—The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, etc—suffered racking misery for days after a homosexual encounter. ‘It never happened, it never happened,’ he wrote in his diary, in a frantic attempt at muzzling his mocking memory.

Dr Magnus Hirschfeld (born May 14, 1868, died May 14, 1935) who himself was gay, called homosexuality ‘the third sex.’ This categorisation appears to give homosexuality legitimacy if not respectability. But there is nothing legitimate about homosexuality. It is squalid sex, an unnatural act.

Some gays draw sexual support from stories about the pervasiveness of homosexuality in ancient Greece, a place of great civilisation. David Loth in The Erotic in Literature makes such a claim about Grecian sexuality. But a respected authority on ancient Greece states in a new book: ‘Homosexuals were not, as many believed, openly accepted by [Greek] society. They were marginalised and punished by law.’

Oscar Wilde was sent to prison for having a homosexual relationship with Lord Douglas. He denied this during his trial, but admitted his sordid sexual behaviour in De Profundis, which he wrote in prison.

An article in The Newsday Magazine stated that most homosexuals on Long Island, United States, concealed their odd sexuality. A gay barman told the magazine: ‘More [gays] are moderating their behavior.’

If gays can moderate their behaviour, it means they are not prisoners of genetic guards that prevent their escape, as Mr Williams of Queer Alliance claimed: ‘Our sexuality that we have no control nor have we chosen.’

Homosexuality is both a perversion and perversity. Gays persist in doing wrong, though the horrid habit can be kicked. I once read about a man who said he got sexually excited while watching male wrestling. He did not become a homosexual. He stopped watching wrestling on television, though it gave him great enjoyment.

Homosexuals in Nigeria do not want to conform to normal sexual practice, but want their bestial behaviour to be excused, to be approved.

Those whose sexuality is different from the normal do not have to engage in sexual activity. Celibacy does not kill; sex is not the air we breathe.

Homosexuals in Nigeria have torn off the veil and are on the sexual loose. They want to be praised for plumbing the depths of dirty sex.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) wrote in the prologue to his play Sodom:

O sirs you should have brought  a rope to tye
The unruly member close down to your thigh

Nigerian homosexuals do not want to control their unruly members. A prison sentence should reduce their flames of foolish, unnatural sexuality to dead embers.

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Comments (3)

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Criminalizing perversion
written by TA, December 16, 2011

I'd like to shift focus away from the moral, cultural or religious reaction to homosexuality - an act which I neither endorse nor condone - and, rather, focus on the issues of civil liberties which guide all civilized societies.

Civilized societies possess constitutions that are based on two fundamental principles from which all laws spring. These principles are:

1. Protection of individual liberty or freedom
2. Protection of property rights

Within our imperfect and diverse (cultural, religious, ethnic) world, it is very important to understand the significance of these two principles in order to ensure that human rights are protected. It is adherence to these principles that would ensure the protection of a Christian in a majority Islamic society, and vice-versa, ensure the protection of the practices of a Kanuri man in Abeokuta, and vice-versa, and ensure that blacks and Africans can live peaceful in Caucasian societies, and vice-versa.

There appears to be two infractions combined in the Nigerian bill banning or criminalizing homosexuality - one prevents two homosexuals from legally marrying while the other criminalizes (with jail term) homosexual behavior.

Criminalizing, with a jail term, homosexual behavior violates the basic principles on which civilized societies are founded. This is primarily because homosexual behavior between consenting adults is an issue of individual liberty which does not violate or infringe upon the property or rights of any other person. Therefore, criminalizing homosexual behavior is primitive, barbaric and uncivilized.

More importantly, the formation of legislation should be governed by sound principles otherwise our society would be governed by incoherent and inconsistent laws. By prevailing moral standards and known natural laws homosexuality is abhorrent. We can legislate that homosexuality offends civic morality and should not be practiced in public, etc. However, we should not let our visceral reaction to this objectionable practice undermine the foundation of our unfolding civilization in Nigeria as there would be a heavy price to pay.

Other immoralities, like lying and cheating, although not all comparable as to level of aversion, offend our moral sensibilities. But we do not criminalize these immoral behaviors. There is no easy yardstick to measure on what scale of immorality an act should be criminalized. That increasing majority of the people practice certain immoralities neither make the immoralities more acceptable nor more criminal. Our basis for criminating acts should be sound and consistent on the principles or protection of individual liberty and property rights. We should treat homosexual acts in a similar fashion, lest we undermine our civilization.

For those that are religious let us leave the final judgment and punishment for homosexual behavior and other non-criminal immoralities to our creator.

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written by Bamigbola Bola, December 17, 2011

You have raised another critical issue this week.Homosexuality is alien to our culture and orientation.Though I wont say is an aberration,but allowing it in Nigeria because of the threat of some donor countries will amount to selling one's birthright for a plate of porridge.If those engaging in the act are not allowed here, they have freedom to live in other climes.

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Homosexuality
written by Chet, December 27, 2011

Er..Ehm, could you castrate them please?

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