Walking the time tunnel of gay youth

To London without a cat

London was a destination over the weekend by reason of an error in my hotel booking last month where I had inadvertently made a non-refundable hotel booking for March when I was planning for February. A situation not helped by the fact that the first 28 days in a non-leap year are the same for both months, you have to be alert, or you will be caught out.

It reminds me of a time when I booked a flight to depart in the third week of the month and the website automatically presented the next month for my return that when I finally saw what I had booked, I was going away for 5 weeks instead of a week. Were it not that I had booked a ticket that allowed for alterations, I would have been paying through the nose to sort it out.

Shorn a sandal to scandal

Now, I only discovered I had booked a hotel for the wrong dates when I was checking for the address to give a black cab at London Euston Station, it came up that my booking was in 28 days. There wasn’t much I could do than to immediately make another booking for that weekend whilst planning that I would return to London in 4 weeks.

As I told the black cab driver, I was going to Dolphin Square, he did not need giving any directions, it was until later that I realised I was going to a place of political scandal and notoriety, famous for the Profumo Affair amongst other notable controversies. If it once housed 70 MPs and 10 Lords, you only needed to speak the language of the walls to hear some intriguing and hair-raising stories. O was not planning on contributing to the list of ignominy.

The apartment was quite well-proportioned, with sash windows, no air conditioning, or modern conveniences as a dishwasher or a washing machine. There were flat-screen televisions in the living room and the bedroom, ample storage space, but wireless internet came on one voucher for one device. I had to tether other devices off my mobile phone. It was at best a bachelor’s pad on the fifth floor.

To memories of youth wasted

Its proximity to the north bank of the Thames made for an easy route for my walking exercises as I walked up Grosvenor Road then crossed Chelsea Bridge to the south bank onto the Thames path to Battersea Power Station to veer off onto Nine Elms Lane, past the US Embassy and to my left I was surprised that despite all the new developments there were parts of an old gay haunt still standing strong.

About 30 years ago, on Sundays, we attended the Royal Vauxhall Tavern to watch drag acts including Lily Savage, until the pub closed at 2:00 PM and off we went to Market Tavern for the afternoon, a darkened venue that served a Sunday lunch of chilli-con-carne and rice whilst we danced away until the pubs opened again at 7:00 PM. Whilst the Market Tavern has long since gone, the memories did come flooding back.

To memories of lives wasted

Then I walked past Vauxhall and the MI6 headquarters where for the first time, I did see someone, a lady, leave the building. You always had the feeling the workers there secreted themselves into the building by some secret passageway, but that would be a little farfetched, it is people like us who work there, not an alien lifeform.

Walking on toward the St Thomas’ Hospital where the wall facing the Thames hosts the National COVID Memorial Wall and a veritable sign of government ineptitude in the handling of this pandemic that has to date claimed 162,738 lives.

I took my turn back over the Westminster Bridge, by the Houses of Parliament at Westminster Palace, the scaffolding was now taken off the bell tower of Big Ben and wended my way to my accommodations to start my day of social events. My 10,000 steps done and a bit more too.

Beyond queer theory to the experience of living

Exploring our humanity and expression

Reading of the death of Professor Leo Bersani which occurred a few weeks ago at the age of 90, got me thinking of an area of study defined as queer theory that I have not before explored, yet on perusal suggests many of us of a homosexual persuasion might have lived. To codify the lives of homosexuals and sexuality in academic terms definitely makes for an essential area of research. [Advocate: Leo Bersani, Author on Gay Identity, Dies at Age 90]

Only recently, I was reading up on Anti-LGBT rhetoric which to many extents has been to those of the LGBT persuasion lived rather than rhetorical, in discrimination, in ostracism, in queer bashing, sometimes resulting in death, in legislation that delegitimises and dehumanises our person in the pursuit of some nebulous family or culturally based ideal that seeks to set us apart for repudiation and castigation.

The corruption of conformity

Obviously, at once in our suffering and then in our understanding, we are caught in a situation where our difference from heteronormative structures set us up in conflict with family and relations, in community and society as we seek to have a human voice to exist in a humanity is more diverse than the conformity that is expected of us.

For instance, sex to me has always been utilitarian for the simple reason that my first experience of it was from the age of 7, the innocence I lost has had consequences and it would not have mattered whether I grew up for be heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual, once that childhood naivety was given the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, my eyes, as much as anyone else exposed to child sexual abuse were opened.

What at first seemed coercive became immersive and the pleasure it provided was natural and untainted by philosophy, religion, or morality. Sadly, the criminality of such was rarely prosecuted, rather, it was hushed up in shame and embarrassment with the hope that the child would outgrow the memory of it. They never do.

Understanding how different we are

Then within the conflicts of appreciating, understanding, and accepting one’s sexuality against the requirements to present as ‘normal’, in that one should subsume sexuality for the heteronormative and fulfil all the necessities of such.

This morning, on my walking exercise, I thought about the many males from adolescence with whom sexual relations have been explored who now deploy their heterosexuality in marriage, procreation, and the profession of faith and creed that supports that existence in their collective amnesia of the past. Grandfathers they are today even as some preach the gospel in various forms.

Yet, as Leo Barsani wrote in his 1987 essay, titled, Is the Rectum a Grave? he lambasted as quoted in the Advocate article referenced above, “the tendency among some gay activists to respond to AIDS by downplaying their sexuality and emphasizing the need to replicate bourgeois heterosexuality.” The point, we are not heterosexual, we have never been, we have to define ourselves as who we are, not in the context of others who have no idea of our lives. [Amazon: Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays] Ordered today.

Having sex without angst

In that is the tendency to rail against the apparent promiscuity of homosexuals, but fundamentally, once we begin to understand that homosexuals are not governed by heterosexual constructs and norms, we can also deconstruct the viewpoint of seeing homosexuals only through the lens of sex, lifestyle, and inclination, for we are just as valid an expression of our humanity that has existed from the beginning of humankind.

What seems to dog the homosexual is the tendency to want to ape the heteronormative, and so we read personals that include straight-acting, moralising the concept of monogamy, even though polygamy has defined many human relationship until it was morally and legally constrained by recent Judeo-Christian hegemonies seeking to decide the use and utility of sex, whilst removing from public knowledge the pleasure and enjoyment of sex.

We are schooled to think sex as nothing to derive any stimulation or pleasure from except for the sake of procreation, yet, in our private places, we all know that sex is considerably more pleasurable than we are told it is not.

A remembrance and celebration of lives

Amongst us homosexuals, the enjoyment of sex cut a swathe of death in our population with AIDS for almost 20 years when we lost men in their prime at never nearly 40 into the mid-1990s and the AIDS Memorial Instagram page speaks of lives of men who we have refused to forget, for What Is Remembered Lives. We stopped enjoying sex, seized by fear and loathing, exacerbated by bad faith actors depicting a human disaster as divine wrath. Yet, it is human progress and advancements in medicine has contained this epidemic.

I lost a partner and many friends, I mourn some still, though for the society I lived in, I mourned alone, because until 1995 we had no effective long-term treatment and therapies for HIV. I also was touched by the scourge of AIDS, I survived, and I am grateful for the gift of life.

My AIDS encounter has however not diminished my appetite for sex, for it is essentially part of human nature and it is only those in denial that would suggest we do not have that need. Our world presents us with exploration along with some caution and care, but to become puritanical about sex is to censure human expression.

We were never the same in outlook

When for the heterosexual, it might define uniquely lifelong bonds, it would for the homosexual be once of tryst to which you do not need to attach any emotion. It is very possible to separate the act which is practically animal expression from the higher human state of intelligence. That ability to compartmentalise the functions of the physical, the body, the mind, and the heart, devoting the right attention to the fleeting from the significant is something that probably takes the mimicry of the heterosexuality out of homosexuality.

It does not mean we do not understand commitment, it is just not predicated on sex, either through objectification or deification, its utilitarian function is just that, and where intimacy between partners is involved, there is a totally different dynamic at play than when there are liaisons with strangers.

Through generations, we have been on the margins of society, the only thing we have ever asked for is not to be persecuted or prosecuted, to be able to live our lives equally as part of our diverse humanity, contributing to the advancement of our civilisation all around the world.

For that, we can be grateful for the likes of Leo Barsani, Paul-Michel Foucault, James Baldwin, and many more helping the discourse about sexuality and its full expression.

Blog - Thought Picnic: A child has memories that last a lifetime

Blog - Thought Picnic: How do you lose your virginity?

Blog - Thought Picnic: We Never Knew What a Healthy Sexual Relationship Was Because ...

The mystery of life

We are the travellers on unequal routes

When the morning broke,
Reticent one was to do the things of routine,
Yet one rose slow and going for no records,
The home straight picked up speed,
As the phone in my pocket rang aloud,
At this time you wondered what for,
In answering, I heard many questions of why,
As it sank in, I sank into a park bench,
And wept bowed in anguish and confusion,
To me, she was also indeed a mother,
My construct of love, respect, and pragmatism,
She had passed into the annals of time.

Everything is ephemeral,
Life the hooks on the coat rail of eternity,
From a past long gone to a future unknown,
We are the people who make the stories,
That gives time its sense of existence,
In the quiet of the places of interment,
Stones like shoots of plant life stand,
Starting with everything so beloved,
A name is scrolled, maybe with its ties,
Years of the entrance and departure,
And that is the history of man or woman,
So short on a weathered memorial stone.

Thinking of Feyike - My sister, my daughter

My sister, my daughter

When I bought my apartment in November 2001, my youngest sister was the sole beneficiary, her name appeared on all the forms even though she was never aware of that fact.

She was for me not only my youngest sister but as there was a 17-year gap between us, there are ways in which I considered her my daughter too. Yet, I was like an absent father to a daughter I knew I had but never bonded with.

When she was born, she arrived home on the day I was leaving for school, I did not attend her naming ceremony and for that my father and I got into a physical where he head-butted me out of rage because I did not rise to expected familial responsibilities.

Away and unaware

I had left home at 10 for boarding school and the time I spent at home after that was for holidays apart from the 16^th year when I was a student at the Lagos State Polytechnic before I moved to Yaba College of Technology in late 1982.

In many ways, I was unaware of what was going on at home, siblings fell seriously ill, some were admitted to hospital, another had an operation, I was oblivious of everything and only heard after the event whenever either of my parents deployed an accusatory put down to gain some leverage, I was a problem teenager who got them annoyed about most of what I did.

In hurt and blame

After I left Nigeria, in snippets of conversation I would hear of my sister’s condition, her undulating health status and the complaint that she was not giving enough consideration to her health. That was confirmed when I was able to obtain a full diagnosis from the doctors after her health deteriorated rapidly in mid-2015.

I had begun to mourn my sister and my daughter from that point, not out of resignation but in understanding the gravity of the diagnosis and the prognosis. I still hold the view that in a way my mother bears some responsibility for the way things turned out. We have not spoken and we probably would never speak because of this.

Respecting her choices

From the moment I was acquainted with the situation, I did communicate with my sister through other means apart from speech. It appeared some decisions were being made on her behalf that she was not happy to follow, she did not want a kidney transplant even though that would have given her respite and there was a time she suggested moving abroad to continue her education, giving her the opportunity to have better medical treatment.

At a time when she appeared despondent, I shared my own story about how I lost everything after cancer and invariably that included what she would have been a beneficiary of. I respected her being adamant about the choices she wanted for herself. Then when I was told that she was beginning to think of dying, I resigned myself to honouring that decision and so a few weeks after that she died.

For a memorial beyond the memories

My brother and third sister made the burial arrangements and she was committed to earth that same day somewhere far from home and unmarked. Tradition dictates difficult accommodations for grief, for she was survived by her parents and many older siblings.

A few days ago, I asked if a tombstone was being put over her grave, the response I received broke my heart, and at the point, I knew I had not even begun to grieve the passing of my sister. I do not think I understand or appreciate the gravity of the loss and this is from a distance in all ramifications compared to people saw her everyday, as her health declined and life slowly ebbed out of her tormented body.

I took the day off work and returned the next day pre-occupying myself back into work to weather the loss without pausing to emote and reflect. I busied myself to take my thoughts off it and have not given myself the time to consider until I started writing this blog.

I think of my mortality too, times when I wonder if I would be discovered before the maggots have had their wicked feast on my remains. Yet, even if there is nothing after death that I could either do or feel, I would like something to exist as a token of remembrance that I passed through this world noticed for more than a day. I would like that for my sister too because we never said goodbye and after she had gone, I did die a little.

Erratum:

My first sister and her church members made the burial arrangements, I did read that my third sister bathed her body and they all were pall-bearers at the end. As the blog read, I only so much about what is going on in my family.

South Africa: Soweto too

Concluding South Africa

I left South Africa just over two weeks ago, but there is at least one last blog I needed to write about my visit to this amazing country. Though I was there for 25 nights, I was quite busy with work-related issues that there was very little time to do anything about discovering the country.

It was my third weekend before I made it to Cape Town and then I extended my stay in South Africa to allow for me to do the needful in Johannesburg.

On my first visit in May, I had done the basic bus tour stopping at the Apartheid Museum and the Constitutional Court, the option to go to Soweto was declined because we had to change from a double-decker bus to van, giving the impression we were about to visit a rather dangerous area.

Contemplating Soweto

You form so many impressions about Soweto and it is very likely that the township idea comes across as shanty towns, slums, rundown crime-ridden inner-city chaos that would endanger the bravest of angels.

I was determined this time to visit Soweto and see things for myself, I felt I had much more to gain by joining one of the more professional tour arrangements and with that having printed out my ticket, I made for the stop where I could board the Soweto tour bus. This was at Gold Reef City which was one of the first gold mines in South Africa before it has been transformed into an amusement park, museum and dangerously, a casino with hundreds of one-armed bandits.

A place that once brought money that was the stuff of dreams now takes hold of dreams of making money from the many whose dreams are a constant suspense and excitement of almost but never getting fulfilled. Yet, I could not help but notice the ‘gun drop’, a kind of left luggage section for guns just before you enter the casino, make of that what you may.

The first sights

I boarded the first tour bus to Soweto and sat in the front with the driver Thabo, unlike the recorded playbacks of the double-decker city sightseeing bus, we had a personal guide to inform us about the tour. Our group comprised people mainly South African residents, but from countries are far away as China and Japan, the Japanese man lived in Durban.

Stopping first at Soccer City or the FNB Stadium, we took pictures and the edifice loomed as a big calabash celebrating Umqombothi beer and bringing back memories of the hit single by Yvonne Chaka Chaka.

Driving past the mine dumps which are a legacy of mining, Apartheid and toxic materials being exposed again with technological developments allowing for the dumps to be re-mined for gold. The more sinister view of the mine dumps was how it completely obscures Soweto from Johannesburg and vice versa.

A revelation

At the main road leading into Soweto which is a contraption of South Western Townships, I stood at the main sign and then learnt depending on you ask that Soweto is an agglomeration of over 85 townships, though about 34 are distinctly identified suburbs of Soweto.

Soweto is huge and vibrant, its architecture covers all strata of means, from the very upmarket parts of Diepkloof through the middle-class areas to the matchbox houses, shanty towns and shacks, and this was a revelation in itself.

The Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital which was one time the world’s largest hospital complex, now the third, scale is sometimes towards the superlative in Soweto, the Bara Taxi Park is the largest in Johannesburg, the Orlando Towers are the cooling towers of a now defunct power station, all colourful and the site of social events including bungee jumping.

The memories and memorials

On to Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, the iconic photograph that signalled the beginning of the decline of Apartheid, the Soweto Uprisings and other stories with undertones rarely voiced. Suffice it to say many children of the chief agitators that sent people onto the streets had their kids in schools abroad, but let us not sour a well-crafted narrative for point-scoring. Apartheid was rotten, it needed to end.

Vilakazi Street which spots the old residences of Nelson Mandela and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu maintains a historical significance in the work these men did towards achieving black majority rule, yet this street is a commercial haven that has lost the solemnity and seriousness of the works of these great Nobel Peace prize laureates.

Everyone is here for a quick buck, performers organised and disorganised, photographers with instant print machines, shops with kitschy tat that could in the haze of tourist awe look valuably commemorative as souvenirs and much else, you are almost jostled out of appreciation of these landmarks.

I cry too for change

Yet, one cannot fail to see how what has been bequeathed is being squandered by the political heirs who now hold power. As we left Soweto, I prayed a little prayer that the promise that South Africa offered to those who suffered and still suffer soon become their reality. My fear of Soweto, put to one side, yet palpable from the obvious gaps between the have-yachts, the haves and the have-nots.

To the outsider that I am, there is much about this great land that leaves one with the story of Cry, the Beloved Country.

Berlin: That We May Never Forget

A sign of times past

Just at the entrance of Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn Station is a panel board of place names. Twelve in a list that spells the recording of one of man’s greatest inhumanities to man.

A list of Nazi Concentration Camps

These were the Nazi Concentration Camp names of which if you have read a bit of World War II history, Auschwitz is the most prominent.

The Nazis used these camps for various activities as hostage, labour, prisoner-of-war, re-education, transit and extermination camps. It was in some of these extermination camps that they systemically killed off people, most especially the Jews in what is known as the Holocaust.

Feeling the presence of pain

Now, I have never visited any of these places, but in 2007, I visited Pawiak Prison in Warsaw and that experience still lives with me, for I am of the opinion that where innocent blood is shed, there is always a memorial of feeling and uneasiness that beclouds that place.

Blog - PAWIAK!

However, what struck me more about the Nazi setup was their attention to detail that created a bureaucracy of such efficiency that the particularity of things they documented just took your breath away.

Badges of badgering

One good example of this was the identification in the Nazi Concentration Camps where tattooed numbers, badges and armbands immediately identified the type of prisoner you were.

Nazi Concentration Camp Badges – Courtesy Wikipedia

So, you had political prisoners (red), professional criminals (green), emigrants (blue), Jehovah’s Witnesses (purple), Homosexuals and sexual offenders (pink), asocial elements (black), Roma gypsies (brown) and so on. Pink triangle along with the rainbow flag now signify LGBTI causes and diversity.

The Original Rainbow Flag – Courtesy Wikipedia

The two superimposed triangles in the sign of the Star of David depicted Jews, typically yellow but could have other colours signifying Jew and another offender category.

That we may never forget.

The most important lesson to learn from this and in that understand why World War II was fought and won for our liberty, freedom and acceptance of difference and diversity is in the many memorials that say as shown on that sign, “Orte Des Schreckens, Die Wir Niemals Vergessen Dürfen.” This roughly translates to, “The Places of Horror, That We May Never Forget.”

They who have no history and keep no memorials are destined to repeat history, those reminded of the horrific past are quicker to embrace the greater good of humanity and human existence.

More correctly, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana or “Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.” Edmund Burke.

We speak of history because there is a burden of truth we must carry for the present in order to secure a future of peace and happiness.

The changing ceremonies of death

The modern funeral

Having not attended a funeral for 31 years, I never knew what to expect of a church service or the committal at the crematorium.

I soon found out that coffins do not get hoisted on the shoulders anymore; a special trolley/gurney was used to take the deceased to the altar.

Powderhouse Crematorium

After the church service we drove to the crematorium in a funeral cortège a few miles to the other end of town where my warped imagination could not help but notice the crematorium was on Powderhouse Lane, I would not have believed it if I had not seen it.

My fellow passengers in the car did not catch on to my thinking until later, it was just slightly less direct from being Ash Road, but the powder of the ash was what got me – one almost expected John Cleese to jump out from behind a tombstone but the solemnity of the occasion bored down that set of silly thoughts.

To earth or to ashes

I had never been to a crematorium and recently whilst chatting to a Dutch funeral director he opined that more people prefer to be buried than be cremated because they want a place for a memorial.

Whilst a crematorium and its grounds can offer places for remembrance and contemplation for loved ones, it looked like a poor imitation of the traditional cemetery – some innovation like remembrance walls and so on just looked so different.

The suddenness of ceremony

I also felt that a crematorium does not lend itself fully to the ceremony of ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust where everyone completely breaks down, the deepest emotions was probably at the eulogy where my pocket square absorbed secretions from my tear ducts.

I also learnt that wake-keeping ceremonies were more an Irish think than English, some even end with drinks and fights, I have never really understood the Nigerian version where the children stay up all night – it is stressful enough grieving for the dead.

We were part of a conveyor belt of commercial activity and so soon after the curtains closed we were ushered out to see the family flowers and commiserate with the family – like a doctor’s surgery, the NEXT sign must have lit up for those after and this was to go on till dusk.

We later retired to the village pub for drinks and some food, it was there after I had expressed my views about a crematorium on Powderhouse Lane that I was told the name of the funeral director is Mr. Cook.

Surely, someone was pulling my leg, but the truth is always just what it is – sometimes incredible.