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If you thought you had
it tough growing up, try being young and gay or lesbian in Liberia, says Jess Langley.
"I’m more nervous than a go-go dancer at a Madonna audition,”
quips Samuel down the line in a mellow West African accent. “The dancing queens
are fired up and we’re ready to go!”
It’s karaoke night in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, and I’m
bumping down Tubman Boulevard in a rattly Land Cruiser. Dressed 1980s punk
style, I’ve applied safety pins to my clothes, written ‘love’ on my knuckles,
and wound a studded belt around my neck.
A Nigerian peacekeeper cocks his head at the next
checkpoint. I lift my dark glasses to give him a smile, and he nods and waves
me through, one finger on the trigger of his assault rifle.
“You see, it works,” proclaims Emma, dressed in skater pants,
her hair in tight braids. She flexes a wiry bicep covered in a blue biro tattoo
of a Chinese dragon, painstakingly copied from a pirated DVD. “When you grow
up, the bad men start to come behind you. And so it’s better to be a boy. They
leave you be.”
Emma is 16 years old, or so the evidence suggests. She tells
strangers she’s 13, and her small frame doesn’t betray her.
“You do that,” I tell her. “You keep telling people you’re
13. It will stop people wanting to marry you.”
She gives a knowing nod and a smile. In a recent government
survey, 92 per cent of Liberian women reported experiencing some form of sexual
violence. Emma’s ambiguous gender is a force field.
I’ve spent a year in Monrovia, and we’ve formed a motley
crew. In the driveway of my heavily fortified compound we laugh and break coconuts
as brown-uniformed guards watch on. The coconuts bounce off the concrete
driveway in unexpected directions like errant footballs. When one cracks,
Samuel’s dark muscles ripple as he drives his fingers into the wedge to prise
the green husk from the precious nut inside.
Samuel and Emma enter my compound on a daily basis. Emma
lives with her grandma in a tarpaulin-roofed shack outside my gate. We do
homework together. I’m a terrible educationalist and Emma seems dyslexic, but
it’s a good excuse to feed her a hot meal.
The neighbours see Samuel come and go with Hans, my
neighbour. As he walks the laneway of corrugated-iron dwellings to visit his
older German lover, Samuel runs the gauntlet of sideways glances. Samuel tells
Emma to be careful too, coming and going to my house. He doesn’t want her to
attract the same whispering suspicions.
There are an estimated 1.5 million people in Monrovia. The
average life expectancy is less than 45 and 23 per cent of babies born will not
reach their fifth birthday. Reminders of a brutal civil war stagger down
potholed streets in the forms of blind beggars and amputees. Gay liberation
exists only on hotjocks.com and hi5, delivered via a heart-breakingly slow
modem.
We take a break from Whitney, Elton and ‘My Sharona’ in the
karaoke lounge, and celebrate a queer New Year’s Eve over a bottle of whiskey
in a backyard by a swamp. In a city with no running water and no mains
electricity, we’re lucky to have a single naked bulb for light and a Nokia
phone for music.
“We don’t want to attract attention,” says another friend, Jojo,
as he leans against the chest of his partner of five years.
Over the course of a year we’ve come to love each other;
we’re a family. Emma’s grandma has a boyfriend now; he eats the fried fish and
rice that she puts on the table each day, and Emma comes to me thinner than
before, despite the foil-wrapped food parcels I send home with her each night.
Samuel’s older lover seems to be getting gruffer and more
down-beat as the stress of his job takes hold.
“14 years in Africa. I must be crazy,” Hans mutters in a
thick Bavarian accent, shaking his head like a condemned man.
I try to be a good role model in the time we have together. I
tell Emma she never needs to marry; she never even needs to kiss a boy. I don’t
kiss boys. I have my best friend Sally and we live together and might have a
family one day.
Emma nods, tucking her hands into the pockets of her hoodie.
I show her photos on the internet of drag kings, and a shot of me with a fake
moustache.
Emma brings a doe-eyed teenage girl to my farewell party,
and reaches up and whispers in my ear: “This is Bindu, my girlfriend.”
Samuel has tears in his eyes as I drop him at home for the
last time. He gives me a string of plastic beads, still warm from his chest,
and says, “Until I met you I never thought I could be happy to be gay.”
Jess Langley is a Melbourne-based writer and
humanitarian worker.
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Out of Africa
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