I am not particularly proud of where I am from.

I love where I am from. That is different.

I am Ethiopian because two Ethiopians had sex and produced me. If my parents had been born somewhere else, I would be from somewhere else. If one of them had married someone of another nationality, I might have inherited another country, another flag, another set of cultural anxieties and an entirely different internet comment section to fight in.

Geography was not my achievement.

The mating was theirs.

Congratulations to my parents.

What followed, however, required some participation from me.

Part One: On Inheritance

There is a strange expectation that we should be proudest of identities we had no hand in acquiring. Nationality. Ethnicity. Sometimes religion. Things handed to us before we could speak are elevated into virtues, and then we are expected to defend them as though we personally negotiated the borders.

I refuse.

This does not mean I reject where I come from.

I love Ethiopia. Not an imaginary Ethiopia scrubbed clean for patriotic consumption, but the actual place. The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the contradictions, the tenderness, the violence, the food, the languages, the ridiculousness, the history, the people.

I belong to it.

And precisely because I belong to it, I reserve the right to criticise it.

Love that requires silence is not love. It is obedience.

I can love what formed me without worshipping it.

I can inherit a culture without inheriting every prejudice it carries.

I can belong without obeying.

I can criticise Ethiopia without becoming less Ethiopian.

This is why I cannot confuse pride with nationalism. I cannot confuse gratitude with submission. I cannot confuse love with the demand that I look away from what is broken.

But there is another distinction worth making.

I did not choose to be gay any more than I chose to be Ethiopian.

My sexuality itself is not an achievement either.

I did, however, have to choose what I would do with that truth.

Shame it.

Hide it.

Apologise for it.

Spend my life negotiating with it.

Or learn to live inside myself without asking permission.

That is where pride begins for me.

Not in the identity itself, but in the relationship I fought to build with myself.

I am much more interested in pride as something earned through the difficult work of becoming.

Part Two: On Becoming

I am proud that I came to understand my sexuality when I had been given every reason to fear it.

I am proud that I learned to be kinder to myself after being taught that parts of me required correction.

I am proud that when homophobia tried to convince me that death would be preferable to being myself, I chose to stay.

I chose here.

I chose now.

I chose life.

And I remain, to the great inconvenience of certain people, spectacularly and rather gaily alive.

That, I am proud of.

I am proud that I refused to spend this life auditioning for tolerance.

I will not lower my voice so somebody else can call themselves accepting.

I will not make myself smaller so somebody can tolerate me more comfortably.

I will not perform the respectable homosexual.

No choreography.

No costume.

No carefully rehearsed gratitude for being permitted into a room I already belong in.

The audition is cancelled.

The show is over.

I am not dancing for anybody.

Part Three: On Justice

But perhaps the thing I am proudest of is that understanding my own oppression did not make me interested only in my own liberation.

It taught me to look around.

Once you understand what it means for society to manufacture a hierarchy of human worth, you begin recognising the machinery elsewhere.

You begin asking harder questions about gender, class, race, ethnicity, disability, borders, religion, power and who gets declared respectable enough to deserve dignity.

My queerness did not simply teach me something about sexuality.

It taught me something about justice.

And justice, I have learned, must come before loyalty.

Before nationality.

Before culture.

Before religion.

Before community.

Even before the identities I love.

Because if my liberation requires somebody else's oppression, I am not interested in calling it liberation.

This is the harder lesson.

It would be easier to stop at my own survival. It would be easier to say: I made it, now leave me alone.

But survival without solidarity is just private relief.

And private relief is not the same as freedom.

I refuse to trade one hierarchy for another. I refuse to accept a world where I am granted dignity at the expense of someone else's.

I refuse to become respectable by stepping on somebody else's neck.

If that makes me inconvenient to nationalism, to tradition, to respectability politics, to the people who would prefer I simply feel grateful and stay quiet, so be it.

Part Four: On Evidence

For years people have insisted that homosexuality is foreign to Ethiopia.

That gay Ethiopians do not exist.

That queerness arrived recently, presumably at Bole International Airport with suspicious luggage.

And yet:

Hello.

I am still here.

Ethiopian.

Gay.

Alive.

Rather inconvenient evidence.

You may dislike me. You may condemn me. You may rewrite history, police language, invoke culture, religion or tradition.

But you cannot honestly say we do not exist while some of us are standing directly in front of you.

Sometimes existence itself becomes an archive.

And I intend to leave evidence.

Not because queer people owe the world visibility.

We do not.

Survival sometimes requires privacy, silence and strategic invisibility, and there is no shame in that. Nobody owes the world their vulnerability as proof of courage. Nobody should have to risk their safety simply to make an argument about our existence.

But I have chosen something different for myself.

I chose to be seen.

I chose to speak.

I chose to remain.

I chose to make my life a document.

A record.

A small, stubborn proof that we were here, that we loved, that we refused, that we built joy in the shadow of rejection.

My visibility is not an instruction to anybody else.

It is simply the life I chose for myself.

And, inconveniently for those invested in our disappearance, it leaves a paper trail.

Part Five: On Pride

So no, I do not feel particularly accomplished because of the accident of where I was born.

I am grateful for what my culture has given me. I love where I come from fiercely enough to refuse to lie about it.

But pride?

I save that word for other things.

For surviving without allowing survival to become my entire identity.

For unlearning shame.

For choosing tenderness.

For refusing respectability.

For practising justice even when it complicates my loyalties.

For becoming someone my younger self could not yet imagine surviving long enough to become.

For choosing life when I had been taught that disappearing would make everybody else more comfortable.

For being here.

For being now.

For being unmistakably myself.

Where I come from was handed to me.

Who I became required my participation.

And this person?

Oh, I worked for this bitch.

Eleven years later, I watched that footage again. A couple of things surfaced.

First, what Cuchi and I were saying carried so much sadness, anger, hurt and, in that dark moment, even prophecy. Cuchi is my fellow co-founder of House of Guramayle, my co-conspirator, family by choice. Watching the footage also revealed where the wound still lives.

Hearing Bahiru speak about what he was and was not feeling at that time reminded me of the story of the monkey who says, “Take the thorn out of my arse first so I can sit.”

I refer to Bahiru in the third person because that traumatised young queer person in Addis was making decisions that would shape the course of his life. He was deciding whether he would be uprooted from everything he knew.

Cuchi, I, and so many other loved ones forced into exile never had the chance to process what had happened to us. We were too busy surviving.

I used to think I simply did not know what I was feeling. Watching the footage eleven years later, I realised that was only partly true. My mind did not know, but my body did. My voice knew. My eyes knew. Even my silence knew. They were speaking a language I would only learn years later.

I kept saying, “I don’t know.”

At the time, those words sounded like uncertainty. Watching them now, I hear something else. They were the language of someone surviving. I did not yet have the distance or the safety to understand what was happening to me, and “I don’t know” was the only honest answer I could give. Those words became the beginning of everything that followed. They became the reason I wanted to build a world where other queer people would not have to stand where I was standing, searching for words that did not yet exist.

Watching the footage, I realised I was not simply looking at a younger version of myself. I was meeting someone I had never had the chance to mourn.

I was emotionally paralysed after watching it.

And yet, I am grateful we documented our darkest moments. They became evidence not only of what was done to us, but of who we were before we had the language, the distance or the safety to understand it. They captured the expressions we could not explain, the sighs that carried our confusion, and the sadness our eyes betrayed long before we were able to name it. Thank you, Lucas, for holding a camera when we were still learning how to hold ourselves.

The footage showed me how far I have come. How far we have come.

After I shared a small snippet, a friend said something that has stayed with me. I am paraphrasing, but she told me that to go through that level of trauma and still come out of it human was profound.

Those words stayed because they made me realise that remaining human was never inevitable. It took years of healing to protect the small, inviolate part of myself that violence had not managed to claim. To resist becoming consumed by bitterness. To hold on to tenderness without surrendering my anger. Perhaps that is what healing has always been: not becoming someone new, but safeguarding the part of yourself that refuses to be diminished.

Another friend reflected that looking back across the timeline of those eleven years, it was impossible not to see everything that pain had made possible. I would never call what happened a gift. Exile is not a blessing, and violence is never a necessary teacher. Nothing can justify what was done to us. But I also cannot ignore what grew despite it.

The frightened young man on that screen could not have imagined House of Guramayle. He could not have imagined Alemé Arts and Culture. He could not have imagined the friendships, the chosen family, the artists, the activists and the countless queer people whose lives would become intertwined with ours. None of these things justify the pain, but they honor the lives that refused to be defined by it.

Perhaps that is why watching the footage left me with something more than grief. It left me with tenderness for the young man who believed he did not know what he was feeling, even though his entire body was trying to tell the truth.

Some anger deserves to stay. Not the kind that corrodes the soul, but the kind that insists on dignity, memory and justice. The kind that reminds us what should never have happened. The kind that keeps me doing the work.

Because if those eleven years have taught me anything, it is this: healing did not give me back my humanity. It protected the small, inviolate part of me that violence could not erase. Everything else grew from there.

አለን:: ነበርን:: እንኖራለን::

​

I wrote my birthday message before I knew what this essay would be about.

It was simple.

Aging is a privilege. Living authentically is a gift.

Today, I celebrate both.

Later that day, I came across a video of a woman reflecting on hope. She mentioned a quote that Mariame Kaba often shares one she learned from a nun:

Hope is a discipline.

The words stopped me.

Because I've spent years thinking about courage, authenticity, joy, and survival. But I'd never thought about hope as something you practice.

The more I sat with it, the more I realized that growing older has also been a discipline.

Growing up in Ethiopia, I never imagined myself growing old.

Not because I was sick.

Not because anyone told me I had limited time.

But because I was queer.

And queer in a society where I couldn't see a future that included someone like me.

I have said this before, but it's still true: I genuinely believed I would die before I turned thirty.

When you're young and every message around you says that your existence is shameful, sinful, impossible, or disposable, you begin to lose the ability to imagine a future.

You don't plan for forty.

You barely plan for thirty.

You survive today.

Being Ethiopian. Being queer. Being the firstborn. Carrying expectations while also carrying parts of yourself that feel impossible to reveal. It is a heavy thing.

So when I say aging is a privilege, I mean something very literal.

I made it.

Now I'm here.

Forty-one.

A number my younger self never believed I would live long enough to claim.

Not because I was ill, but because I couldn't imagine a future where a queer Ethiopian like me got to grow old.

I chose myself.

And, perhaps even more remarkably, I am loved by people I chose.

My chosen family sees me completely and loves me exactly as I am.

(My younger self couldn't imagine this version of me. I'm grateful they were wrong. There is something quietly radical about allowing queer people to be photographed in joy: not as survivors alone, but as people who get to play, celebrate, flirt with the camera, hold flowers, and imagine growing old.)

That is not something I take for granted.

To be older.

Emotionally regulated.

Queer.

Loved.

At peace with myself more often than I am at war with myself.

These are privileges I once couldn't imagine.

Sometimes I think about my younger self, who couldn't picture life beyond thirty.

I wish I could tell them that queer Ethiopians grow older.

That we laugh.

We build families.

We heal.

We create homes for one another.

We become the people we needed.

People sometimes ask why I care so much.

Why do I continue asking Ethiopians to love and accept queer people?

Why insist?

My answer has become surprisingly simple.

Because we deserve it.

Not because we've earned it.

Not because we've explained ourselves well enough.

Not because we've become respectable enough.

Because we deserve it.

Love, dignity, and belonging should never depend on whether society has caught up yet.

And politically, I believe in the capacity of our people.

Human beings learn.

Societies change.

We've seen countries move away from homophobia before. Not perfectly, not completely, but profoundly enough to transform lives.

Why should Ethiopians be uniquely incapable of growth?

I don't believe we are.

I believe people change when they're given opportunities to encounter one another differently, when misinformation is challenged, when fear is replaced with relationship, and when enough people continue showing up.

Maybe that is where hope lives.

Not in certainty.

But in practice.

Every conversation.

Every story.

Every act of visibility.

Every organization, like House of Guramayle and so many others, that keeps creating space for queer Ethiopians to exist more fully.

Hope isn't believing the work will succeed.

Hope is deciding the work is worth doing anyway.

Again.

And again.

And again.

That is why hope is a discipline.

As I celebrate another birthday, I realize I'm celebrating more than another year.

I'm celebrating the fact that I get to imagine a future at all.

That I get to grow older.

That I get to become.

That I get to choose myself over and over again.

Perhaps birthdays aren't celebrations of age.

Perhaps they're celebrations of practice.

The practice of hope.

The practice of authenticity.

The practice of joy.

The practice of believing that another future is possible: for ourselves, for our communities, and for the generations of queer Ethiopians who deserve to grow old too.

Aging is a privilege.

Living authentically is a gift.

Today, I celebrate both.

🥂🥂 To another year of choosing myself, finding joy, and being loved exactly as I am.

Cheers to many more.

ተመስገን. ✨

A preacher calling queer people sinful. A politician describing homosexuality as foreign contamination. A man screaming slurs from a passing car. A mob convinced your body, your desire, your existence is an insult to God, culture, nation, masculinity, family.

This violence is crude, naked. And because it is so naked, we know what to call it. Homophobia. Sexism. Misogyny. Racism. State violence. We can point and say: there it is.

But there is another kind of violence, more sophisticated, more socially rewarded, and in many ways more psychologically devastating.

It smiles while it wounds. It praises while it polices. It says I support you… but.

This is respectability politics.

The historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham introduced the term to describe how marginalized communities sometimes adopted “proper” behavior, dress, speech, morality, and public discipline as a strategy for survival in hostile societies. If the world has already decided you are dangerous, immoral, uncivilized, excessive—respectability can feel like armor.

Be educated. Be articulate. Be clean. Be modest. Be non-threatening. Be exceptional.

And maybe—just maybe—they will see your humanity.

But survival strategies have a way of becoming prisons. Over time, the question stops being why is society violent toward us? and becomes why can’t you present yourself in a way people can accept?

That is the sleight of hand. Oppression repackaged as advice. Control rebranded as wisdom. Erasure dressed as mentorship.

You can be gay… just not flamboyant. You can be a woman leader… just not difficult. You can be Black… just not angry. You can protest… just don’t make anyone uncomfortable. You can tell the truth… just mind your tone.

The burden shifts from systems to performance. From justice to likability. From rights to presentation.

And if you stay in movement work long enough, you learn something more unsettling: some of the worst policing does not come from obvious enemies. It comes from our own.

That is the part nobody prepares you for.

You grow up thinking the danger will come from the pastor, the politician, the bureaucrat writing laws that erase you. And yes, those people are dangerous. But some of the deepest cuts come from people who speak your language, share your politics, quote your theory, attend your panels, and call themselves allies—sometimes even members of your own community.

I learned this years before COVID.

An Ethiopian PhD student in the Netherlands studying law and development, human rights gender and proudly branding herself as an intersectional feminist saw another Ethiopian scholar post a simple Happy Pride message. Nothing sexual. Nothing provocative. Nothing radical. Just joy. Just visibility. Just another human being saying Happy Pride.

She quote-tweeted it: “it is not worthy of my time to google filthy practices of sodomy….”

This was not a village elder. Not a drunk uncle at a weeding. the dangerous part of respectability politics:

it does not come dressed in religious extremism.

sometimes it comes with a PHD.

sometimes it spikes the language of feminism.

Then things escalated. Many of us got involved—publicly, privately, collectively. As House of Guramayle, we made the decision to formally write to her university and demand accountability. Because words matter. Because if someone training to shape law and development policy is publicly calling queer people sodomites, that is not simply opinion. That is political danger.

And that was not what broke me. Homophobes are predictable.

What broke me was watching a gay man—a man who claimed to advocate for our community—turn around and call us bullies.

Bullies. For refusing to quietly absorb abuse. For refusing to smile while being publicly dehumanized. For refusing to “be strategic.”

In that moment, I understood something no academic text had ever taught me: respectability politics does not just silence people. It produces collaborators. People who genuinely believe that if they are polite enough, useful enough, educated enough, non-threatening enough—if they never make straight people uncomfortable—then maybe the wolves will eat someone else first.

Those are the people who will not stand beside you when it matters. Those are the people who will hand you over while calling it diplomacy.

That was the day that man died for me. Not physically. Politically. Morally. Spiritually. Because once you watch someone choose acceptance over solidarity while your humanity is debated in real time, you never unsee it.

That was not the first lesson. Nor the last.

A well-known gender expert someone I respected deeply, someone I considered more than an ally once spent an entire day with me. We talked shit. We laughed. We debated politics. We took pictures. It felt human. It felt safe.

And at the end of the day, I was told: Those photos can’t go online.

Why? Because one day she planned to run for office.

I remember standing there, genuinely speechless. Then I said:

Cool.

And that was that.

That was the day I stopped taking photos with people on my phone. They can take pictures with me on theirs. But not on mine. Not unless they are explicitly comfortable being publicly associated with me. I am no longer interested in private solidarity and public cowardice. I am no longer interested in people who can discuss liberation over coffee but need plausible deniability when the cameras come out.

Since then, I have become deeply suspicious of people who brand themselves radical online. The revolutionary bios. The intersectional threads. The carefully curated politics. I’ve met too many of them in person, and too many are terrified of being seen standing next to the wrong homosexual.

They are not homophobic at least not in the way they understand homophobia. But in their minds, there is still an acceptable homosexual. The articulate one. The discreet one. The useful one. The professional one. The one who doesn’t cost them anything.

And sometimes, that policing comes from inside our own spaces.

Before exile, I used to get invited to queer parties in Addis. But the invitation always came with a condition: Don’t bring Cuchi. Cuchi is my queer sibling, too flamboyant, they said. Too much. I can pass sometimes as “straight.” I was also the one who brought condoms and lubricant part of our movement work. So I would drop them off before the program and head home.

So I never went. Not once.

Here’s what’s funny, though. Those parties already had cross-dressers. They already had trans folks. They already had people expressing gender in every way imaginable. Cuchi wasn’t excluded for being flamboyant. Cuchi was excluded because we had started being vocal. We had started campaigns Stop Hate, Spread Love. Underground activism. We had become political.

That was our crime. Not visibility. Not flamboyance. Politics.

The unspoken rule was clear: you can be queer here, as long as you are quiet. You can dance, as long as you don’t demand. You can exist, as long as your existence makes no one uncomfortable enough to change anything.

And don’t get me started on human rights organizations. The representatives who tell us: We are so proud of your courage. The work you do is inspiring. You are so brave. But the moment you ask for collaboration? Silence. Excuses. Our director may not like it. The board is conservative. This could create complications. Please don’t mention that we spoke.

Please don’t mention that we spoke about human rights.

That is not solidarity. That is reputation management.

And it doesn’t only happen in boardrooms.

I once had a straight friend someone who considered themselves an ally introduce me on a night out to a table of strangers in Addis Abeba with: These are my gay friends.

No malice in their voice. No scripture in their hand. No stone. Just the casual weaponization of our identity as social currency. Look how progressive I am. Look how interesting my circle is.

I had to pull them aside and explain: you just outed us to people we don’t know, in a country where that information can cost us everything.

Homophobia does not always arrive holding a Bible or a rock. Sometimes it arrives smiling, buying you a drink, using your existence to upgrade its own self-image and leaving you to deal with the consequences it never bothered to consider.

And that is exactly how oppression survives, not on the strength of fanatics alone, but because educated people with titles, platforms, and influence decide that being liked matters more than being principled. And because ordinary people with good intentions decide that looking progressive matters more than keeping you safe.

Too many elites have confused diplomacy with cowardice. Too many have confused access with integrity. Too many have confused neutrality with morality. Too many would rather be invited to the table than risk flipping it over.

This is why respectability politics and its cousin, performative allyship can feel more dangerous than blatant hatred. Hatred creates enemies. Respectability creates gatekeepers.

Hatred says: You do not belong.

Respectability says: You belong… conditionally.

And there is something uniquely violent about conditional humanity. Because eventually, the system no longer needs to silence you. It simply teaches people who look like you, love like you, work beside you, and claim to fight for you to do it on its behalf.

A term for people, institutions, and movements that speak the language of justice: until Palestine enters the room.

It names a familiar contradiction: a politics that believes in justice everywhere: until justice becomes inconvenient.

But Palestine is not the only exception.

Feminism — except for trans women.

Anti-colonialism — except for queer people.

Human rights — except for migrants.

Justice with asterisks. Liberation with footnotes.

Across the world, we witness what scholars call mediated suffering — the suffering of others that reaches us through stories, screens, speeches, and carefully curated outrage.

It is suffering we see.

Discuss.

Share.

Sometimes even march for.

But mediation does something strange.

Distance makes compassion selective.

Some suffering becomes visible.

Other suffering becomes theoretical.

And when suffering is mediated, it becomes easier to sort: some bodies are framed as deserving of grief, others as threats to it.

We become fluent in the pain of strangers while remaining silent about the violence next door.

And then there is Ethiopia.

A country that has built part of its political imagination on the story of never having been colonized.

And yet our laws still carry colonial ghosts.

The criminalization of queer love.

The disciplining of women’s bodies.

The quiet architecture of patriarchal violence.

Independence at the border.

Colonial morality in the bedroom.

That morality does not sustain itself. It is funded, exported, and maintained.

Today, one of the loudest voices shaping anti-abortion and anti-queer politics across Africa is Seyoum Antonios, Africa director of Family Watch International — a U.S.-based conservative organization exporting anti-LGBTQ and anti-reproductive-rights politics across the continent.

And yet, some who call themselves progressive — even feminist — find common cause when the target is queer people.

The silence is telling.

For years, civil society organizations in Ethiopia fought state restrictions on their right to organize, fundraise, and speak. Yet when that same state granted legal space to openly anti-LGBT organizing, including advocacy for so-called conversion therapy, expanded criminalization, and harsher punishment for queer people; the outrage that once filled press releases, panels, and donor reports became quieter.

A silence captured in the unissued statements, the panels where the question was never raised, the coalitions that chose their battles and left us out.

And in that silence, the space for violence grew.

Suddenly the language of liberation changes.

Patriarchy becomes tradition.

Control becomes culture.

Violence becomes protection.

Exclusion becomes strategy.

And solidarity becomes a euphemism for “not yet… not you.”

And queer people become the acceptable sacrifice that keeps the coalition intact.

This is how exceptions are made:

Not by abandoning justice, but by deciding who was never meant to fully belong inside it.

Justice is not a buffet.

You cannot fight patriarchy while feeding it queer bodies.

You cannot claim decolonization while enforcing colonial morality.

You cannot speak of freedom while deciding which lives are allowed to breathe inside it.

Selective solidarity is not solidarity. It is hierarchy learning the vocabulary of justice.

And perhaps the real measure of a movement is not the enemies it names:

but the people it is willing to abandon.

If your feminism needs us to disappear,

if your anti-colonialism needs us to stay silent,

if your progressivism collapses the moment we enter the room:

then the problem was never queer people.

The problem was always a politics that wanted liberation without us.

Across continents, candles were lit, hymns were sung, and long fasts were broken with celebration. For many Orthodox communities, it is the most sacred day of the year; a moment marking renewal after suffering.

I hosted a few friends and colleagues at my house, and what unfolded that evening made me think about belonging in a different way.

The table was full, injera layered high, Minchet Abesh steaming, glasses clinking. White cotton garments with embroidered hems caught the warm light of the room as laughter moved easily between us.

At some point, one of my guests paused, looked around, and said with genuine surprise:

“You’re very traditional.”

I smiled.

Not because he was wrong but because the word traditional has always felt strange when applied to people like me.

People like me are often told we cannot be traditional.

That we do not belong.

That if we are queer, we must also be foreign.

In Ethiopia, the accusation is familiar:

“You are Western.”

“You are imported.”

“You are not Ethiopian.”

But if you listen carefully, you realize something important: this accusation is not uniquely Ethiopian.

It is global.

Across the world, queer people are told the same story in different languages.

• In Africa, queerness is called Western.

• In Europe, it threatens tradition.

• In the United States, it undermines “family value”

• In the Middle East, it dishonors culture and religion.

Different countries. Different religions. Different political systems.

The same script.

Queer people are always positioned as outsiders to the societies they come from: not inheritors, not legitimate participants, not real members of the nation.

The message is always the same:

You do not belong here.

And yet queer people exist everywhere.

Which raises a simple question that rarely gets asked:

If queerness appears in every culture, every continent, and every historical period. How exactly can it be foreign?

Even well-meaning Ethiopians sometimes ask me something that sounds reasonable on the surface:

“Why do you fight to belong when they clearly don’t want you?”

But my answer is always the same.

First: because the power lies with me to refuse or to be.

Belonging should never be something society has absolute authority over. The collective does not have the moral right to erase individuals from their own cultures.

If I accept the idea that others decide whether I am Ethiopian, I surrender my agency entirely.

Identity should never function like citizenship that can be revoked by prejudice.

Second: because human beings existed long before borders, religions, and the political systems that now claim to define us.

Before nations.

Before flags.

Before identity cards.

And among those human beings were people with diverse sexualities and gender expressions.

Queer people did not suddenly appear in the 21st century. We were not imported with globalization. We were not invented by Western media.

We existed long before the institutions that now try to erase us. Before borders were drawn, before societies decided who counted and who did not.

Which means something simple:

Queer people are not intruders in culture.

We are part of its earliest fabric.

Ethiopia, like many nations, speaks about identity as something sacred.

Nationality is sacred.

Ethnicity is sacred.

Tradition is sacred.

But Ethiopian identity has also long been a site of struggle.

Entire political movements are built around deciding who belongs and who does not.

Who is authentically Ethiopian.

Who represents tradition.

Who threatens it.

In this environment, queer people become convenient outsiders.

Declaring us “foreign” allows society to protect a fantasy of cultural purity.

But human beings have always been diverse. And Ethiopia, like every nation, has always contained far more complexity than its gatekeepers admit.

When I wear Ethiopian traditional clothing, it is not nostalgia.

It is refusal.

A refusal to surrender culture to those who weaponize it.

A refusal to let tradition become a border checkpoint where some bodies are allowed through and others are turned away.

Culture does not belong only to those who conform.

It belongs to everyone who emerges from it.

Which brings me back to Resurrection Sunday.

The holiday celebrates life emerging from what was declared dead.

For many queer people, identity itself has had to be resurrected.

Not because it died naturally but because society declared it impossible.

“You cannot exist here.”

“You cannot belong here.”

“You cannot be both.”

But every time a queer person refuses that sentence, something resurrects.

A culture expands.

A story becomes more honest.

A nation becomes more complete.

That evening at my house was not activism in the traditional sense.

There were no speeches.

No slogans.

No protests.

Just food.

Friends.

Music.

Laughter.

But sometimes the most radical act is simply refusing to disappear.

Refusing exile from your own culture.

Refusing the lie that who you are cancels where you come from.

I am not asking for permission to exist. I am describing what has always already been true.

Identity should never belong exclusively to the collective.

Individuals must have the right to reject identities imposed on them.

And they must also have the right to claim identities others try to deny.

Some people find freedom by leaving.

Others find freedom by reclaiming.

For me, being Ethiopian is not something I wait for permission to be.

It is something I claim.

And in a strange way, that choice mirrors the meaning of the day we celebrated.

Resurrection is the refusal to accept death as the final story.

Reclaiming identity is the refusal to accept erasure as the final truth.

And sometimes the most radical act a person can commit is simply this:

To rise—and remain—in a place where they were told they could never exist.

There are many respectable reasons to darken an embassy's doorstep. I went to the Ethiopian Embassy because my data plan had expired and the season demanded I be near someone who might look at me the way the daffodils looked at the sun.

Technically, there was an event. That's how I crushed a party at the Ethiopian Embassy. Spring makes you bold. And bold, it turns out, starts with WiFi.

The lobby hummed with diaspora diplomacy: men in suits speaking about Ethiopia with the fervour of people who last saw it from an airplane window, women gliding through like they were hosting a UN reception in their living room, everyone clutching red as if the wine itself conferred importance.

I slipped in like a hangnail at a summit.

First order of business: the WiFi. Every embassy has it. A discreet digital pipeline pumping the motherland directly into your device. Officially intended for urgent cables, economic briefings, the occasional PowerPoint about agricultural reform.

I used it for Grindr.

There's a special kind of poetry in opening a queer dating app inside a building that represents a government where my existence is a criminal offence—punishable by imprisonment. The same government that exiled me for the activism I did with friends. The cognitive dissonance was practically lyrical. Outside, cherry blossoms performed innocence. Inside, I committed micro-aggressions against the state with every swipe.

The WiFi was immaculate. (Clearly not Ethio Telecom's.)

I leaned against a wall adorned with patriotic imagery and scrolled through London's available queers while ambassadors performed diplomacy behind me. Spring was in the air, and apparently also in my phone.

Borders are hilarious.

On the walls: proudly displayed maps of the motherland, drawn with the confidence of people who haven't had to negotiate them in decades. Nostalgia is the first refuge of nations.

On my phone: men within 500 metres, also displaying their own proudly displayed borders, albeit more generously photographed.

That is where I found her.

An Eritrean girl who would later become one of my favourite people on this doomed planet. She was side-eyeing the room, holding a wine glass like a prop in a play she hadn't auditioned for. We locked eyes across the buffet table. Diaspora radar.

Diaspora meetings carry an edge of farce. Two people from countries that spent decades perfecting mutual loathing, meeting at a party neither was fully authorised to attend, united by the simple fact that we both knew the security guard was bluffing.

We bonded instantly—the way migrants do when they recognise each other's luggage. Sarcasm, shared generational trauma, and the quiet understanding that nationalism is easier to play when you're thousands of miles from the consequences.

Between the speeches—something about "Ethiopia's Bright Future," which we toasted ironically—and the obligatory photos, we noticed the wine. Bottles of it, unsupervised. Practically begging.

We looked at each other. We looked at our tote bags. We looked at the wine.

What happened next was not theft. It was reparations.

For her: compensation for decades of Ethiopian statecraft treating her country like an appendix—technically removed, still occasionally inflamed.

For me: damages for the whole queer situation, which the state prefers to pray away rather than acknowledge, and for the exile that separates me from people I love.

Two bottles each. One for the political trauma, one for the personal. The math was sound.

Somewhere between the second glass and our whispered demolition of the decor, I felt someone looking.

He was leaning against the opposite wall. Black Colombian—the kind of gorgeous that makes you understand why people believe in God. The kind of cheekbones that could cut glass. We held eye contact just long enough for it to mean something. Then my phone buzzed.

"I was hoping to find you on here," the message read. He was 47 metres away.

Spring, remember.

He laughed at our geopolitical satire. We laughed at his. The night dissolved into transnational absurdity: Eritrean, Ethiopian, Colombian, London—all of us laughing at the things that, back home, would get you killed or cancelled, often in that order.

And because I am Ethiopian, hospitality is a competitive sport. Also, I had two bottles of stolen wine to justify.

It would have been inhospitable to let the evening end with just witty banter and unresolved tension. So I did what any good Ethiopian does when aggressively marketing the motherland: I left with him to do my part for my country. Fucked his brains out. Dessert, as they say.

The Colombian was excellent. Enthusiastic about the wine. Curious about injera. A natural.

The Ethiopian Embassy, I'm sure, believes its WiFi was strengthening ties with the diaspora, building bridges.

And in a way, it was.

Just not the bridges they had in mind.

This essay was born out of a conversation.

A few weeks ago, Cuchi (my choosen family) and I were talking about Valentine’s Day. About how suffocatingly small it has become. How relentlessly it centers couples, romance, and privatized love. We found ourselves asking a different question: What would it look like to create a space where friends could celebrate Valentine’s Day together? A space to honor the relationships that hold us, save us, and make survival possible.

That conversation became an invitation.

This Valentine’s Day, there is a gathering of people to celebrate love beyond the couple, to honor friendship, chosen family, and communal care. Not as a rejection of romance, but as an expansion of what love is allowed to mean.

As the invitation reads:

Before lovers, there were friends.

Before romance, there was community.

Before pairs, there were constellations.

That language stopped me. Because it is not poetry alone. It is queer history. It is queer survival. It is my life. And it reminded me why I needed to write this.

For queer people, friendship is not a luxury. It is survival. It is family. It is home.

It is the warm embrace that shelters us when the world turns cold.

It is the quiet knowing glance that says, I see you. I know you. I will not let you fall.

I learned this early. My parents’ friendships—built over decades—have remained constant, unshaken by time, distance, or even my loud and unapologetic queerness. These relationships, born in a heterosexual world, proved thicker than blood. Meanwhile, many people tied to me by lineage disappeared.

I am not alone in this. Queer people everywhere lose family simply for existing.

When that happens, friendship does not merely step in: it rebuilds the foundation. It says: you belong here.

Across cultures and histories, queer people have been made outsiders in our own homes, exiles in our own communities. And still, we survive. Not because the world softened, but because we held each other.

Friendship is our infrastructure.

It keeps us housed, medicated, fed, sane.

It keeps us alive.

And yet, we live inside a culture that profoundly misunderstands friendship.

Heteronormativity teaches us that friendship is secondary; a downgrade, a consolation prize. “I see you more as a friend,” they say, as if that is an insult. As if friendship is not one of the highest forms of intimacy, love, and respect.

This devaluation has a cost.

It trains us to endure harm from the person in our bed while abandoning the friend who challenges us, who tells us the truth, who refuses to disappear. We are taught to fight for romance at all costs, but to walk away from friendship at the first sign of friction.

Pause for a moment and ask yourself: honestly:

Who saved your life without being your lover?

Most of us already know the answer.

So I say this, gently and firmly, to my queer family: turn that calculus upside down.

You grant endless chances to partners who actively harm you, convinced by a toxic culture that romantic love is worth any price. Meanwhile, you cut off friends quickly without conversation, without repair.

But friendship is a primary relationship.

It deserves effort.

It deserves honesty.

It deserves the struggle to repair.

This does not mean staying where you are unsafe. Let me be clear: no relationship romantic, platonic, blood, or chosen-should be preserved if it is violent, degrading, or consistently against your well-being. Boundaries are not cruelty. Leaving harm is not failure.

But we must learn to distinguish:

discomfort is not danger; accountability is not betrayal.

Be Gentle With Your Own

Be especially kind to your queer friends—the loud ones, the bold ones, the ones living in full color. They did not arrive here easily. They have lost lovers, families, jobs, safety. Confidence does not erase grief. Bravery does not cancel exhaustion.

And if you are not yet ready to be queer as fuck while your friend is do not resent them. Do not fear them. They are not your enemy.

Homophobia is.

Do not police them the way institutions, churches, families, and states already do so efficiently.

For all of us; but especially for those who are out or forcibly outed, friendship is not optional. It is the difference between isolation and life. Even those who believe they can move between worlds will eventually need the sanctuary of those who see them fully.

So take the energy you pour into seeking heteronormative approval and redirect it.

Pour it into building safety.

Into deliberate care.

Into patience with yourself and with each other.

Friendship is not just going out.

It is choosing to stay.

It is learning how to hold conflict without abandoning each other.

We deserve more than survival.

We deserve love.

We deserve dignity.

Queer friendship is all of this. It is sacred. It is chosen family. It is resistance. It is how we build a world when the one we have refuses us.

And if you are still wondering what kind of love truly sustains us, ask again:

Who saved your life without being your lover?

Closing Note

This essay is shared alongside Valentine’s: Love Beyond the Couple, a gathering hosted by Alemé Arts and Cultures an evening honoring friendship, chosen family, ritual, joy, and collective care.

A space to remember that love was never meant to be small.

That we do not simply pair off.

We gather.

Wherever you are this Valentine’s Day, may you honor the people who stayed.

May you thank the ones who held you.

May you tend to the friendships that saved your life.

Yet this sanctity is brutally selective.

Within Ethiopia’s dominant political imagination, identity is narrowly reduced to ethnicity and language. As feminist critique reveals, nation-building is often a patriarchal project, constructing belonging through rigid, exclusionary frames. identities of gender, sexuality, class, or bodily autonomy. Those that challenge heteronormativity are treated not as facets of life, but as existential threats.

Ethnic federalism did not invent Ethiopian patriarchy or homophobia. Instead, it institutionalized a political framework that promises autonomy through ethnicity while concentrating power in the hands of men who speak in the inviolable name of “culture” and “tradition.” I felt this mechanism personally the day I went to the kebele for my first ID card. The clerk informed me, “Your ethnicity comes from your father only.” In that moment, the politics of blood became clear: women are designated as carriers of ethnic honor, while queer people are framed as dangers to it. Culture becomes sacred when it demands obedience, and untouchable when it inflicts harm.

This exposes Ethiopia’s central contradiction: a society that sanctifies identity when it demands blood, but profanes it when it simply asks to live.

When Sanctity is Selectively Applied

For sexual and gender minorities, the language of sanctity dissolves. Queer Ethiopians are dismissed as foreign implants, moral corruptions, or political fabrications. The society that demands unconditional reverence for ethnic identity simultaneously denies queer people dignity, safety, and belonging.

This hypocrisy unfolds daily, especially online. When a TikTok video outing queer Ethiopians in the diaspora circulated, the reactions were swift and telling. Commenters didn’t just condemn; they exiled:

“They’re all Amhara.”

“These are Tegaru.”

“I’m glad I’m Oromo—these are ye Menelik people.”

Then came the religious condemnations.

The pattern was undeniable: queerness had to be assigned to a rival ethnicity, a scapegoated “other.” Anyone but “us.” Ethnicity must be defended; queerness must be disowned.

“Different Context”: The Mechanism of Exclusion

This exclusion is rationalized through a convenient mantra. On Clubhouse, a prominent ethno-nationalist figure and outspoken homophobe dismissed a discussion on queer rights, retorting, “You can support that in America. Ethiopia is a different context.”

“Different context” has become Ethiopia’s universal moral escape hatch a phrase that licenses the demand for dignity for oneself while authorizing its denial for others.

The same speaker later argued for economically starving queer communities:

“Gays are untouchable in the West because they have money. We must make sure they don’t get that access here.”

This is not cultural preservation. It is calculated disenfranchisement. The stark irony lies in watching a woman navigating a patriarchal system expertly reproduce its exclusionary logic. Having learned the rules of her cage, she now designs cages for others. Selective solidarity always requires amnesia—forgetting who first authored the language of erasure.

The Demand for Purity

On X, a man once screamed at me: “YOU ARE NOT ETHIOPIAN!!!”

His rage was not personal but ideological a policing of purity within the national imagination. I replied, among other things “Your romanticization is killing you.”

Nationalism thrives on the myth of unity without difference - belonging without contradiction. For queer Ethiopians, this myth is violence. Our existence is framed as contamination. Our lives are rendered negotiable.

The man screaming “un-Ethiopian” and the voices demanding queer exclusion are not opposites. They are twin expressions of the same purity politics. Different aesthetics, identical imperative: erasure sustains belonging.

The Transaction of Conditional Solidarity

These contradictions transcend the digital sphere. During the war in Tigray, a family member sought my help with strategy and advocacy. I gave it. Yet when the related foundation launched, I was told I could not attend.

“I don’t need to protect you — our people are homophobic.” She explained

My queerness was an invisible asset when labor was required, but a visible liability when recognition was at stake.

An Amhara activist friend, a closeted gay man, once told me, “If you’re not for the Amhara people, you’re not for the gay community.” I understood his survival calculus. But his words reveal the brutal transaction of selective belonging: some identities must be entombed so others can be celebrated.

Who dictates this hierarchy? And why are the most vulnerable perpetually asked to disappear?

The Lie of “After the Revolution”

And this is precisely how every politics of “later” becomes a politics of permanent exclusion.

Across liberation struggles, marginalized people are told to postpone their freedom for the “bigger cause.” Fight now. Sacrifice now. Equality will come later.

Egyptian feminist writer Mona Eltahawy has long named this betrayal: women are urged to silence their demands until after victory, only to be discarded once power is secured. Revolutions praise women as symbols of resistance while denying them autonomy in the new order.

History repeats the pattern.

In Algeria’s war of independence, women fought and suffered alongside men, only to be pushed back into rigid patriarchy after liberation.

In the U.S. civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin—a chief architect of the March on Washington—hide his sexuality, deemed a “liability” to the cause.

The message was clear: fight for liberation—just not your own.

I heard the same logic on Clubhouse when someone told me, “Don’t you think it’s time you take a pause from this gay thing and advocate for your people?”

As if queer people were not bombed, displaced and starved like everyone.

As if violence ever rests.

As if Ethiopia’s warring factions don’t instantly unite when it comes to vilifying queer people.

The script never changes:

Now is not the time.

Focus on the bigger enemy.

Your turn will come.

It almost never does.

Those closest to power promise liberation for all after victory — then redesign freedom to preserve their dominance.

It is always the marginalized who are asked to wait.

And always the powerful who decide when waiting ends.

That waiting is a political strategy.

The Litmus Test

Does a political system expand freedom for the most constrained person within it, or only for those closest to power?

Ethnic federalism, as practiced, fails this test categorically. It enshrines ethnicity as sacred while permitting patriarchy and heteronormativity to flourish unchecked within ethnic communities. Culture functions as both shield against critique and weapon against dissent.

We must therefore ask:

Why is it noble to die for an identity, but shameful to live within it authentically?

Why is identity a shield for some, and a target for others?

Why is culture declared immutable when it justifies harm, yet endlessly malleable when mobilizing collective violence?

Conclusion: The Price of Selective Sanctity

If identity is truly sacred, its sanctity cannot be conditional.

A nation cannot ritualize bloodshed in defense of belonging while denying entire communities the right to exist. Ethiopia’s crisis is not one of too much difference, but of profoundly selective morality.

Until our discourse protects the queer child in Addis with the same ferocity it protects ethnic pride—until culture can be critiqued as freely as it is weaponized—all proclamations of justice and freedom remain performative echoes.

What we often sanctify as identity today is blood-soaked rhetoric: a pursuit of liberation that reproduces exclusion, a demand for dignity that denies humanity.

The path forward demands a sanctity that does not discriminate—a belonging that requires no erasure—and a freedom truly meant for all.

Bahiru ዘብሔረ ቡሽቲ

Others grow up surviving one.

This is a story about visibility, faith, and the quiet ways alienation is learned.

The first sound Samson ever belonged to was celebration.

Ululation cut through the air sharp, proud, impossible to ignore. Voices layered over one another, racing to assign meaning.

Elilta. Elilta. Elilta.

Enkuan Mariam marchesh. ( Upon hearing good news especially the news of a safe childbirth. It carries the same emotional weight as “Thank God!” or “Praise be!” in English.)

Is it a boy or a girl?

I didn’t ask as long as it’s healthy.

No one ever explains what healthy is supposed to mean.

// DAWN: THE CITY’S FAITHS

The sun rises over Addis without hesitation.

Before the light fully settles, the sounds arrive first.

From nearby Ethiopian Orthodox churches, the low hum of Kidane Tselot prayers drifts through the morning steady, ancient, pulling the city awake. Bells follow soon after, heavy and confident, echoing across tin roofs and half-built homes.

Almost at the same time, the azan rises from a nearby mosque, long, melodic, stretching across rooftops like a breath held and released.

Different faiths.

One morning.

Satellite dishes tilt toward other worlds.

The city wakes before Samson does.

“Samson…”

The voice comes soft at first.

“Samson…”

He pulls the pillow over his face. Not to sleep. To disappear.

Outside, belief is already louder than his thoughts.

// DAY: THE CITY’S VOICE

By the time Samson steps into the street, Addis is fully speaking.

Minibus conductors hang from open doors, voices cutting through traffic and exhaust.

“4killo! Shiromeda! ! Mexico!”

Near the corner, a man walks slowly, blowing a tirunba- the long, mournful horn slicing through the noise. Between breaths, he announces a death, the name of the departed, the day and place of burial, who must bring tents, chairs, labor.

Grief made public.

Responsibility shared.

Life and death moving through the same street.

From somewhere behind him, a megaphone crackles to life an evangelical church blasting mezmur so loud it rattles windows, the preacher’s voice promising salvation and warning of fire in the same breath.

Further down the road, another loudspeaker announces a kebele meeting, dates and duties spilling into the street like orders no one asked for.

Coins clatter into hands.

Engines cough awake.

Radios argue with one another.

The day has officially begun.

// THEORY: BECOMING INVISIBLE

In Addis, people speak about people like Samson as if they are Abstracts. At weddings. On minibuses. During coffee ceremonies. They discuss queer people loudly, confidently as though no one like that could possibly be sitting among them.

Samson sits there, fully present, while his existence becomes a theory.

Sometimes, in the middle of these conversations, a question rises in his chest:

Can they see me at all?

As the words pile up: sinful, unnatural, impossible; Samson feels himself fading. Not metaphorically.

In his mind, his body softens at the edges. His hands become lighter. His reflection slips away.

He imagines himself disappearing in plain sight, becoming invisible to survive what the world refuses to understand.

Other times, he imagines shooting upward in a single breath rising past rooftops, past tangled electric wires, past clouds escaping the noise in seconds.

Above Addis.

Above judgment.

Down below, they keep talking.

// REFLECTION: THE POSSIBILITY OF GLOW

The city moves fast. Bodies press together on public transport. Vendors shout prices. Horns argue endlessly. A radio plays an old love song that no one fully listens to. Hands exchange coins, blessings, insults.

Samson walks through it like a shadow learning its shape.

In shop windows, his reflection appears and disappears. Clear for a moment, distorted the next.

But sometimes, when no one is watching, something different happens.

In his imagination or maybe not only imagination; his skin begins to glow softly.

Not bright.

Not blinding.

Just enough to be seen.

The light moves under his skin like warmth, like life insisting on itself.

For a few seconds, he exists without apology.

Then the glow fades.

// SANCTUARY?: THE GLOW WITHIN FAITH

At the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, incense rises thick and sweet. The choir swells. Wooden prayer sticks tap softly against the floor. Outside, faintly, the city keeps speaking — horns, voices, life.

People kneel.

People cross themselves.

People pray for futures they already believe they deserve.

When sin is named, it feels personal.

When love is mentioned, it feels selective.

Samson stands near the back, half believing, half bracing.

Once, as bells echo again in the distance, the glow returns; faint but steady, like a heartbeat made visible.

No one notices.

Or maybe they choose not to.

Once, someone meets his eyes across a crowded room.

The noise drops away for a moment.

No words.

No rescue.

Just recognition.

It feels like oxygen.

The glow lingers a second longer.

// NIGHT: A BODY OF ONE’S OWN

At night, Addis exhales. Music drifts from open windows. Laughter fades in and out. A final prayer floats through the dark.

Streetlights blur into halos. His shadow stretches, fades, returns.

For a few quiet moments, the city loosens its grip.

Samson walks freely then, like his body finally belongs to him.

Maybe Samson is an alien here.

Or maybe he is simply proof that this place is larger than the story it tells about itself.

The bells ring again.

He keeps walking.

Some cities are built to hold everyone.

Others pretend they are.

I have been asked countless times, what I lost because of exile. Friends. Family. Familiarity. Culture. Home. The question is always framed as subtraction, as if exile can only be understood through what is taken, never through what is revealed or gained.

This essay refuses that frame.

It is not self-help.

It is not nostalgia.

It is not a plea for understanding.

It is a political and embodied reflection on the conditions that allow thought, clarity, love, and healing to grow. It is written for those who have been told explicitly or quietly that stepping away, refusing access, or choosing distance is betrayal.

People often ask me what I lost because of exile.

They ask gently, as if preparing me for grief. As if the correct response is inventory: country, language, friendships, family. As if exile is only legible through mourning.

I understand the question.

I just don’t answer it the way they expect.

I prefer to talk about what I gained.

I do not linger on loss because much of what people name was never truly mine to begin with. When friends disappeared once I became publicly gay after I was outed, after I stopped pretending that was not loss. When people said, I always knew he was like that, but never once said, I am here for you, that was not loss either.

That is trash taking itself out.

Access that disappears the moment you stop performing safety is not community. Proximity without care is not love. Tolerance that collapses under truth is not something to grieve.

We are taught to call this loss because calling it clarity would indict too many systems.

When people ask why I left home, I always answer the same way:

I left because I wanted to stay alive elsewhere rather than die in a place I was told to call home.

That sentence unsettles people. It should.

James Baldwin wrote that people cling to their delusions because letting go would require them to confront themselves. Home, for many of us, is built on such delusions the belief that harm can be renamed culture, that silence can be mistaken for peace, that survival should be met with gratitude rather than understood as a right.

Leaving was not rejection.

It was recognition.

Exile is supposed to be framed as pure deprivation. But exile also strips away illusion. It reveals who was present out of habit, who stayed out of fear, and who only loved you under conditions you were never meant to survive.

What exile gave me what distance gave me was time.

Because the asylum system did not allow me to work.

Because I was physically removed from everyone and everything I knew.

Because my life was suspended in bureaucratic limbo.

I had time.

Time to think without interruption.

Time to reflect without explanation.

Time to undo what had been done to me in the name of culture, religion, and belonging.

Time to unlearn the belief that proximity equals safety.

And yes time to fuck in peace.

To desire without surveillance.

To take dick in peace.

Exile was also the place where I finally saw my parents as people.

Not only as my parents. Not only as authority. Not only as those who failed to protect me in the ways I needed but as individuals. As two people who were once children themselves, with hopes, griefs, and unfinished lives long before they became responsible for mine.

That seeing required distance.

Under the same roof, under the same authoritarian state, under the same culture of obedience and silence, there was no room for that kind of clarity. There was only survival. Only swallowing what I did not accept. Only managing fear, disappointment, and unsaid truths. Proximity did not create intimacy it produced distortion. All I could see then was what they could not shield me from.

Exile interrupted that.

It gave me space to examine my relationship to them without shame. Without forced gratitude. Without compressing my anger to preserve peace. From afar, I could finally hold complexity: love and harm, tenderness and failure, care and disappointment in the same frame.

Exile did not erase what hurt me.

But it allowed me to understand it.

It allowed honest conversation.

It allowed a relationship no longer organized around fear, obligation, or silence.

This is not a romanticization of exile.

Exile is violent. It is imposed. It fractures lives. It extracts people from language, memory, familiarity, and safety. I would not prescribe it. I would not glorify it.

But it is also true that time and space can change how we see, how we love, and how we heal.

Exile is not only loss.

Sometimes it is the condition that makes honest love possible.

Choosing distance is taboo because it breaks the myth of unconditional access. We are taught that family, culture, religion, and community are owed infinite patience no matter the cost. That withdrawal is cruelty. That refusal is betrayal.

But what if distance is discernment?

What if refusing proximity to harm is not abandonment, but self-recognition?

I did not lose people.

I lost obligations I never consented to.

I did not lose home.

I lost a performance of belonging that demanded my silence.

What I gained was space—

space to think, to desire, to speak, to become difficult, unfinished, and alive.

So when people ask me what exile took from me, I understand the impulse. Loss is easier to digest than refusal. Mourning is more comfortable than reckoning.

But I am not interested in rehearsing grief for things that required my disappearance.

I am interested in naming what distance made possible.

And what it made possible was this:

a life no longer organized around access to my body, my patience, or my silence.

That is not loss.

That is freedom, finally speaking in full sentences.

The Hidden Assumption

When people say “I support gay relationships as long as it’s between two consenting adults,” they reveal an unspoken assumption: that queerness is naturally suspect, existing closer to harm, danger, or criminality than heterosexuality ever does.

Notice what is missing. No one defends heterosexual love by insisting it is “between two consenting adults.” That condition is seamlessly assumed. Straight intimacy is treated as neutral, normal, and self-justifying.

Queer intimacy, by contrast, is framed as permissible only after it has been rhetorically cleared of imagined wrongdoing. This is not accidental. The phrase exists to reassure a fearful audience; not to affirm queer people.

Consent as a Colonial and Christian Veneer

The language of “consenting adults” has a specific historical origin. It emerges from Christian moral frameworks that were secularized and weaponized through colonial law: particularly sodomy statutes.

These laws were never neutral regulations meant to prevent harm. They were theological judgments about “unnatural” sex, later disguised in the language of legality, order, and public morality. Colonial regimes exported these frameworks globally, embedding Christian sexual ethics into modern legal systems.

Consent became a secular mechanism to regulate morality while appearing rational and modern. But the underlying logic remained intact: queer sex is dangerous, suspect, and in need of special permission.

When we defend queer love using this same framework, we remain trapped inside it.

The Demand to Perform Innocence

This is where the phrase becomes most politically revealing.

As theorist Jasbir Puar analyzes, societal power dictates that some bodies are presumed innocent, while others are presumed suspicious and must continually prove they are not dangerous. Queer people particularly queer men and gender non-conforming people are forced into this latter category.²

The insistence on “consenting adults” functions as a demand for legibility and reassurance. Queer subjects must perform harmlessness, respectability, and transparency to be tolerated.

This demand is not applied equally. Sexual abuse of minors is a grave crime, full stop; a principle already established in law and ethics. Yet queer people are singularly tasked with ritually restating this boundary, as if queerness itself exists in anxious proximity to transgression.

The phrase, therefore, does not meaningfully protect the vulnerable; it primarily serves to manage and surveil queer bodies.

This Is Not About Being Vague on Harm

To be clear and this must be said without hesitation or apology: sexual relationships involving minors are a crime. Abuse is abuse. Harm is harm. Orientation is irrelevant.

But that universal principle does not need to be constantly reasserted when discussing queer love. The demand that queer people repeatedly clarify this point implies that queerness is uniquely adjacent to abuse. That is not protection; it is prejudice.

Rejecting the phrase is not about minimizing consent. It is about refusing to frame queer existence as a moral risk that must be managed.

A Better Language

If we truly support queer relationships, we should say so plainly:

I support people loving each other and forming families and communities.

No qualifiers.

No defensive caveats.

No coded reassurance to homophobic fear.

Queer people are not asking to be tolerated as “harmless exceptions.” We are asserting our place as full participants in love, intimacy, kinship, and society.

Beyond Liberal Permission

The continued use of “two consenting adults” reveals the limits of liberal acceptance. It does not dismantle stigma; it manages it politely. It grants queer people conditional entry so long as they remain legible within inherited moral orders.

But queer liberation does not come from permission. It comes from refusing the terms under which our humanity is negotiated.

Queer love does not need to be justified as “safe.” It needs only to be recognized as ordinary. As unremarkable in its humanity as any other. Abandoning this well-intentioned phrase is where that recognition begins.

And yet, queer children survive Ethiopia the way contraband survives a border: illegally, invisibly, and always at risk of seizure.

This is not a metaphor.
It is a method.

From early childhood, the lesson is clear: family is sacred but conditional. Love is not withdrawn suddenly; that would be too honest. Instead, it is rationed. Measured. Withheld until obedience is restored. One unsanctioned desire is enough to convert a home into a checkpoint. The queer child is not expelled. They are monitored. Corrected. Softly erased.

They say: We don’t hate you.
They mean: Disappear quietly, and we will tolerate your presence.

Ethiopian culture does not speak of queer people as people. It speaks of them as consequences. Warnings. Cautionary tales. Stories about “someone else’s child” who embarrassed their family. This indirectness is praised as politeness. In reality, it is cowardice elevated to tradition. By refusing to name queerness, society refuses accountability. One cannot defend what is never acknowledged. One cannot mourn what is declared nonexistent.

They do not say, he is gay.
They say, he shamed his family.

That sentence does not describe harm.
It manufactures it.

Religion enters the room next, pretending its hands are clean. Love, they insist, is divine but only when properly aligned. Anything else is labeled sickness. And sickness, conveniently, demands correction. Violence is anointed. Cruelty is moralized. Exclusion becomes healing. This is not faith. It is control wearing sacred language like a disguise.

They do not ask whether queer people are harmed.
They ask whether harm is justified.

Growing up queer in Ethiopia requires discipline more than self-discovery. Masculinity is enforced like law. Femininity is treated as evidence. The body becomes a crime scene. Gestures are interrogated. Voices are corrected. Survival depends on splitting the self in two: one for public consumption, another buried so deeply it barely remembers its own name.

This fracture is not tragic.
It is efficient.

The system works exactly as intended.

Then comes the lie that queerness is foreign. Imported. Western. Un-African. As if fear were not indigenous. As if silence were not ancestral. As if surveillance, punishment, and moral panic had to be shipped in from elsewhere. The violence is local. The denial is traditional. The suffering is homegrown.

Under these conditions, freedom becomes imaginable only through absence. Through exile. Through disappearance. Sometimes through death. Sometimes even through the death of those one loves. Not because queer people lack humanity, but because humanity has been made inaccessible to them. When existence is framed as harm, erasure begins to resemble responsibility.

This is what internalized homophobia actually is: obedience perfected. The culture no longer needs to police; the policing is self-administered. Desire is censored. Normalcy is rehearsed. The self shrinks preemptively. One becomes a reliable participant in one’s own containment.

And then the culture points to the resulting silence and says:

See? They do not exist.

This is not contradiction.
It is choreography.

Queer Ethiopians are accused of threatening society, yet it is society that collapses at the possibility of their honesty. They are accused of destroying families, yet it is family honor that demands their dismemberment. They are accused of immorality, yet the moral system requires lying, cruelty, and collective denial to survive.

This is not a misunderstanding.
It is not ignorance.
It is a design.

This Is Not About Tolerance

Tolerance is the language of power speaking to those it harms. Tolerance does not mean freedom. It means permission. Conditional survival. We will allow you to exist as long as you remain quiet, grateful, and small. Tolerance demands silence in exchange for safety and obedience in exchange for life.

Queer people in Ethiopia do not need tolerance.
They need the violence to stop.
They need families that do not treat love as leverage.
They need cultures that do not confuse obedience with morality.
They need religious institutions that stop laundering cruelty through God.
They need societies that stop calling erasure “tradition.”

This is not a request to be included in a system built on exclusion.
It is a refusal to accept a system that requires disappearance to function.

Queer Ethiopians do not owe this culture reassurance.
They do not owe it patience.
They do not owe it gratitude for survival.

Existence is not a compromise.

And the most dangerous thing they can do—more dangerous than protest, more dangerous than anger—is to live openly in a society that survives by pretending they do not.

That is not rebellion.
That is exposure.

And exposure is what this culture fears most.

or whichever version of me clocked in today.

The world has theories; I have range.

I was born in Bahirdar, a city so gorgeous it could catfish heaven.

But I didn’t grow up there

I met my birthplace later, wandering like a tourist in my own origin story.

And here’s the divine comedy:

the lubricant I sent to my queer community in Bahirdar met my birthplace before I did.

Imagine being overshadowed by your own postal package.

History has favorites, clearly.

The soil that raised me was Kombolcha, Wello

where vegetables tasted like secrets,

fruits tasted like forgiveness,

and childhood braided the Qur’an and the Bible like two halves of the same heartbeat.

It’s where desire whispered my name long before shame learned its lines.

At nine, I moved to Addis Abeba,

the city that mothers you, mocks you, molds you,

then hands you back to yourself with extra seasoning.

Until she left me for exile at thirty.

Addis is where I built my queer family from shisha smoke, sarcasm, heartbreak,

man jam, Facebook messiness, and popper-sniffing.

Where men broke my heart and my habits.

Where police questioned me for being a little too alive.

Where I danced myself into new identities.

Where I had my first orgasm

which honestly explains my patriotic confusion.

And now?

Now I orgasm in exile, from London to Nairobi.

International borders couldn’t stop me;

I became the sexually liberated shermuta my queer ancestors have been waiting for

You can kick the Ethiopian out of Ethiopia,

but baby,

you can never kick munching on meat I don’t chew out of me

Addis is my greatest love story and my most chaotic ex

blocked on Monday, unblocked by Friday,

texting me at midnight asking if I’ve eaten.

I feel everything in surround sound.

I don’t do lukewarm.

I don’t do neutral.

My settings are either blazing or battery dead.

Justice is my daily ritual.

Stories are my prayer beads.

When I ask “How are you?”,

I’m auditing your soul, not your script.

I love cake, sex, and coffee,

depending on the moon, the mood, and the mischief level.

Google Maps is my most consistent partner.

Shisha is my toxic soulmate dramatic, smoky, unforgettable.

Small talk? We don’t get along. Still learning. Slowly. Painfully. Reluctantly.

So here I am:

queer, tender, resurrected, mischievous, Ethiopian

a walking poem with a rebellious pulse,

a soft flame refusing to dim.

Welcome to my world.

Remove your shoes.

Bring your whole self.

Leave shame outside;

she starts fights and never pays her share.

with love

Bahiru/ Bahi/ Luyc-fer/ Beki

At a time when Ethiopia is reeling from the aftermath of the war in Tigray where an estimated 600,000 dead await accountability alongside ongoing conflicts in Amhara and Oromia, mass displacement, inflation, and unaddressed atrocities, the government and its allied religious institutions have chosen an easier target: queer bodies.

Rather than confront these intersecting national crises, the state has shrunk the political conversation to what it can most easily discipline: the private lives of its citizens.

The Hotline That Became a National Participation Campaign

In August 2023, the Addis Ababa Police Commission opened a free hotline encouraging citizens to report “homosexual acts.” The move followed weeks of intense online activism and public outing campaigns by anti-LGBTQ figures, who shamed the state for not doing enough to prosecute queer people. Faced with this pressure, the government’s solution was not to defend rights or calm hatred, but to institutionalize the vigilante impulse.

They turned a moral panic into official policy.

What followed was not law enforcement; it was a national participation campaign. The state did not merely incite it was answering a public call, and the response was a roar of enthusiasm. What unfolded was not only repression from above, but violence from below: neighbors, classmates, influencers, strangers.

This was not just a witch hunt.

It was crowdsourced cruelty.

Reuters documented TikTok and Telegram users urging followers to hunt, beat, and kill queer Ethiopians. BBC Amharic reported influencers publishing names and photos of alleged queer people digital hit lists. Deutsche Welle interviewed individuals outed online and then assaulted or evicted.

What queer and suspected queer people received was not only exposure it was instruction for annihilation. Comment sections filled with threats of rape, stoning, burning, and “corrective” violence. The language was not metaphorical. It was explicit.

Ethiopia did not merely debate our existence; it rehearsed our destruction.

At some point, this is no longer only about the state.

It is about a society that found pleasure in the violence.

Recently a young TikToker went viral for attending an award ceremony in Addis Ababa dressed elegantly and carrying a clutch bag. Online comment sections erupted with homophobic accusations. He was soon forced to film a public apology declaring how much he “hates the gays.”

Across TikTok and other platforms, endless videos circulate often by young women listing gestures, clothes, speech patterns, or emotions that supposedly “prove” a man is gay.

In Ethiopia, however, this did not emerge in a vacuum. For years, anti-LGBT agitators like Seyum and Dereje have toured churches, podcasts, and digital platforms, obsessively describing how “gays dress,” how they cut their hair, how they walk and speak. That same script now reappears on TikTok, repackaged as popular “diagnosis.”

These movements did not simply spread hatred, they actively lobbied the state for harsher punishment. They demanded longer sentences, stricter surveillance, broader criminalization. The government did not invent this terror alone; it was petitioned into it.

When repression arrived, it arrived with public applause.

This is what collapse looks like: when citizens beg the state to be more violent.

Even in the act of accusation, the source of the knowledge is erased. What is repeated as intuition is in fact inherited from a script written by misogynistic, sexist men.

The result is a familiar patriarchal reflex: misogyny repackaged as queerphobia. Violent, abusive men are defended as “real men,” while tenderness, elegance, restraint, or care must be expelled from masculinity and labeled homosexual.

Straight male violence is normalized; gentleness is criminalized.

Then came

Tsedenia Gebremarkos. Even a widely celebrated, award-winning artist was not spared.

In an interview, she used the phrase “same-sex lovers” , a neutral descriptor globally. For this alone, she was accused of “promoting homosexuality.”

She was summoned onto a YouTube platform and publicly compelled not only to assert her homophobia but to go further: to declare that she does not believe homosexuality is a human right.

Performing hatred was not enough. She was required to deny queer humanity itself.

This is absurdity: that you must perform hatred to remain safe.

There are moments in history when cruelty becomes systemic and there are moments when it becomes popular. Ethiopia has entered the second.

At this point, we are no longer speaking only of bad governance. We are speaking of ethical disintegration. A failure not just of law, but of imagination. A failure not only of institutions, but of human recognition.

This is what it means to fail as a society:

when neighbors become informants,

when entertainment becomes execution rehearsal,

when laughter accompanies the promise of rape.

Criminalized by Law, Violated by the State

While the state criminalizes consensual same-sex intimacy, it has long relied on non-consensual sexual violence including forced sodomy as a tool of torture and control.

Human Rights Watch has documented sexual humiliation and threats of rape in detention (2010). The U.S. State Department (2014) has recorded forced sodomy in custody. Widespread sexual violence has been documented in Somalia region (2018). The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has acknowledged patterns of torture consistent with sexual abuse.

By maintaining criminalization while denying protection, the Ethiopian state manufactures a population that can be violated twice:

first by the law,

then by society.

Queer people are rendered permanently suspect, unable to report assault, blackmail, eviction, or abuse without risking arrest themselves.

In this framework, the state does not merely fail to prevent violence.

It curates the conditions for it.

Distraction as Governance

Police harass youth for hairstyles, dress, or mannerisms while the country remains engulfed in crisis: wartime rape survivors await justice, entire regions remain traumatized, Coridor-projects displace thousands, and millions are IDPs in there own country.

Yet orchestrated moral outrage remains focused on queer-coded youth:

not on mass graves,

not on war crimes,

not on corruption.

Some Ethiopian feminists now appear on misogynistic platforms, distancing themselves from queer people as if patriarchy will reward that loyalty. A self proclaimed feminist warns if queer rights were to be respected in Ethiopia, she says that “women will leave with their men.”

This is not feminism.

This is patriarchy in drag.

This is Heteronationalism. Heteronationalism is the belief that a nation must be straight to be legitimate that survival, culture, and morality depend on policing sexuality. It turns heterosexuality into a patriotic duty and casts queer existence as a form of national betrayal.

Across the continent, Ethiopia’s trajectory is not isolated: Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, Ghana’s proposed criminalization, routine arrests in Cameroon, the dismantling of public health programs in Tanzania.

This is not culture.

It is choreography.

We Refuse the Scapegoat Role

Ethiopia’s crisis is not queer people.

It is war.

It is corruption.

It is impunity.

It is a moral panic.

We refuse to be a distraction.

We refuse to be the scapegoat.

A country that polices love while ignoring graves,

that turns violence into a pastime,

will never learn how to stop producing death.

………………. ……………………….. ……………………….

**** these are a couple of videos I have attached down here to show, what we have received and collected over 300 videos on TikTok before they were shut down.

People ask me, “How did you leave him?” Their voices are often low, urgent, leaning in as if the answer is a secret key that might fit their own locked door. I notice it most from women. Women who have lived the intimate terror of a man’s love turning to stone in his fist. Queer men ask less, perhaps because we are not yet ready to admit how often that same terror inhabits our homes.

It surprises them to find such a familiar ghost in my story, a gay man from Addis Abeba, Ethiopia. But it shouldn’t.

Oppression is a master linguist; it speaks the native language of its target homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, ableism but its grammar is always the same: dominance.

After I published A City Between Us, readers mostly women, mostly survivors sent me the same quiet question:

“How did you leave him?”

People don’t ask this for gossip.

They ask because they are tracing the outlines of their own exits, hoping mine might illuminate theirs. They aren’t asking for a story; they’re asking for a map.

This essay is that map.

Because leaving Dany was never just leaving a man.

It was seceding from a system a silent grammar of dominance that shaped us both long before we met.

We leave people, but we are fleeing systems.

bell hooks names it clearly: a culture built on domination turns all relationships into power struggles.

I didn’t have the language for that in the beginning, but I felt it everywhere.

When I met Dany, the city was loud with warnings, police raids, moral panics, magazine caricatures detailing how to “identify” men like me. Those warnings split my identity in two:

Me, the careful, acceptable queer man.

Them the grotesque caricature I feared becoming.

Dany was the first person who made an Us feel possible.

And that is where systems thrive: in relationships that feel like refuge but function like capture.

Oppression has many dialects but one grammar: dominance.

With him, the question was never:

“Why is he hurting me?”

but rather:

“Whose logic is he performing?”

Once I understood that, everything came sharply into focus.

Leaving started with language not courage.

My body left last.

My vocabulary left first.

The moment I stopped calling fear protection,

jealousy passion,

and violence love,

the architecture of my cage revealed itself.

From the outside, our relationship looked contradictory:

Dany cooked for me, ran baths, kissed my neck like a prayer.

He also tightened his hands around my throat and whispered:

“If you ever leave me, I’ll kill you.”

I lived inside that contradiction until one clarifying sentence formed:

The tenderness was his.

The violence was the System’s.

That distinction didn’t excuse him, it freed me.

It allowed me to see the pattern instead of drowning in the moment.

Why it took so long?

Let me be clear:

I knew it was violent.

There was no denial left in me.

I did not stay because I was in love.

I stayed because I was grieving

my time, my effort, my innocence, my belief in what love could have been.

And I knew this:

If I left before I was ready, I might return.

And returning would have been total surrender, returning could have meant death.

Leaving required preparation, certainty, and support.

I wasn’t waiting for courage;

I was waiting for clarity.

Solidarity was not sentimental, it was structural.

Women asked gentle questions that felt less like curiosity and more like quiet warnings.

But the person who changed the landscape of my isolation was Cuchi, a childhood friend who reappeared exactly when my world had narrowed to a single, dangerous point. Cuchi saw what was happening without flinching. They stood beside me steady, unwavering and said:

“This needs to end. You are not alone.”

That is solidarity: not pity, not rescue, but a presence that interrupts isolation.

I had seen this kind of allegiance before. My grandmother once chose her daughter-in-law over her own son. She told her:

“Leave him. And when you do, I will be here.”

That was my earliest lesson in real loyalty:

protection over patriarchy,

chosen kinship over blood.

Their support did more than comfort me; it strategized with me.

It gave me perspective, timing, and a shield.

No one escapes a system alone.

Every exit route is constructed through connection.

I didn’t leave a man. I seceded from a nation.

The morning he kissed a bruise he had created, clarity arrived not dramatically, but quietly, with the inevitability of daylight pushing under a door.

I realized I wasn’t ending a relationship.

I was withdrawing my citizenship from a nation built on domination.

This is what survivors deserve to hear:

You are not weak for staying.

You are not strong for leaving.

You are navigating the laws of a country you never agreed to belong to.

Sometimes the most radical act is defection.

Ask better questions, and the pattern reveals itself.

We often ask:

“Why do men do this?”

“Why do queer people stay?”

“Why do women endure that?”

These questions shrink systemic violence into personal pathology.

Better questions are:

What form of dominance is at work?

Who benefits from it?

How do we interrupt it?

Because the husband’s fist,

the policeman’s baton,

and the anti-queer law

are different expressions of the same hierarchy.

Different wings.

Same prison.

Same jailer.

Understanding this makes solidarity not optional, but necessary.

Our liberations are interdependent.

So, how did I leave him?

I left when I understood the door was not locked by Dany,

but by the System that shaped him and me and the city around us.

I walked out through a path built by others:

• my mother’s prayers

• Cuchi’s steadfast remembering

• my grandmother’s rebellion

• the strangers whose eyes whispered, I know that bruise

The city still hums its warnings,

but beneath them I now hear a counter-rhythm

a global murmur of people remembering themselves and one another back into freedom.

We are mapping escape routes.

We are learning the architecture of each other’s cages.

And in stubborn, strategic, collective love,

We are building a city without walls.

“The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression.” bell hooks

Love yourself.

Choose yourself.

With love,

Bahiru

“One for you,” her note said, “and the other for your friend.”

I held them, and their weight felt familiar.

It was the same weight as all the unsaid things between us.

My mother used to say, “አስተውል እና አስተዋይ ሁን” — be mindful and be perceptive.

She said it when she wanted me to obey, and when she wanted me to know she loved me.

I was never sure which she meant.

I think she wasn’t sure either.

When I was a child, I believed her voice could heal things.

I remember her humming as she washed dishes, her gold earring catching the light, her body swaying to a rhythm only she could hear.

I remember trying to match her tone, my voice too soft, too high

until one day she stopped, startled.

Like she’d seen her reflection do something it shouldn’t.

It wasn’t cruel.

Just a quiet severing.

After that, I learned to hum when she wasn’t around.

Years later, when I left home, I told her I was chasing work.

She didn’t ask for details.

We both lied.

I was chasing air

the kind of air that doesn’t choke you for breathing wrong.

In the city, I tried to live as if I were free.

But freedom, I discovered, isn’t the same as peace.

It’s louder.

It asks you to perform yourself until you start to forget what your real self sounds like.

I became fluent in pretending.

Smiling when I was scared.

Loving when I was lonely.

Acting like leaving didn’t mean losing.

They said the truth hurts, so I lied.

But the lie grew.

Quietly.

Like mold under wet paint.

I told myself it was protection.

That survival was reason enough.

And yet, every time I laughed, something in my chest stayed still

a shadow refusing to move with me.

It was easier to keep busy.

To let the frantic motion of survival masquerade as purpose.

Then one day she called.

Her voice, smaller than I remembered:

“Bahir,” she said. “You sound… different.”

I wanted to say: I am different, Mama. I’m trying to be whole.

But instead I said:

“It’s just the line. The connection’s bad.”

The connection was bad.

Not the line.

Us.

She asked if I was taking care of myself.

If I’d met someone.

Then, softly almost casually she asked about “your friend”

the one I’d spent so much time with,

the one whose voice she never heard,

the one I never introduced over the phone,

though I introduced all my other friends.

She said the two identical Gabi she sent

one was for me,

and one was for “your friend.”

Not a question.

A knowing.

She had practiced this kind of perception before.

My parents were the first people I told when we started an underground LGBTQ+ movement, Dana social club.

When I explained how the national health roadmap of Ethiopia excluded gay people, she said:

“But the law allows people responsible for the Red Terror; people with actual blood on their hands have access to health services and they also study in prison up to university level,”

She understood injustice long before she understood me.

Telling them wasn’t a confession; it was a strategy for survival.

They knew the danger long before the world knew my name; long before I was outed to a million people on Facebook.

By then, truth was not a conversation.

It was a crisis.

But in that moment, with the two gabi in my hands, her love arrived not as a crisis, but as a quiet, knowing cloth.

It was shelter offered before the storm she knew was coming.

Sometimes I wonder:

If I had spoken earlier, would she have stopped loving me

or just stopped recognizing the son she thought she knew?

A year later, she passed. Fuck Cancer::

I didn’t go to the funeral.

I mourned with a couple of familiar faces and random Ethiopians who came only because they heard an Ethiopian had lost his mother.

For that day, I was not gay.

I was not a problem.

I was a son who had lost his mother.

And in that loss, I was fed, cared for, held.

Grief made me holy enough to belong again.

And that made me even sadder.

After everyone left, I unfolded my own gabi of her memory.

In a box I found a childhood drawing of mine a stick figure, spinning.

On the back, in her handwriting, was one word:

“ባሕር.”

The sea.

She knew I was like the sea calm on the surface, holding multitudes beneath.

The gabi was her way of saying she saw the depths, and would not ask me to make them shallow.

They say the truth hurts, and it does.

But a lie is a weight that never lifts.

The truth bleeds openly; the lie suffocates you softly,

smile by smile,

while you pretend the blanket is not growing heavy.

I have learned this: to live, even halfway, is better than to survive completely.

So now, I hum again.

Loudly.

Sometimes off-key.

Sometimes beautifully.

And I use my gabi not to hide, but to hold myself.

When I see my reflection doing something it shouldn’t, I smile.

Because my mother’s final blessing was not a demand for safety, but a gift of seeing.

The point was never to be safe.

It was to be seen.

And in the end, by her, I was

.

The lights fade.

A reel begins to hum: slow, steady, impatient.

And there I am again, in the frame I once tried to crop myself out of.

For years, I learned to edit my story to fit the screen

to trim the excess,

mute the moans,

tidy the rage.

I became fluent in the language of good intentions,

but silence has a way of dubbing itself over desire.

This space is my recovery

not from queerness, or sensuality, or the need to feel seen

but from the performance of being palatable.

I’m done with that.

Here, nothing is rated or censored.

The takes are long.

The sound is raw.

The body gets the final word.

This is where I write the director’s cut on queer sensuality

where the erotic and the political hold hands

and refuse to look away.

And now, the lens shifts — from me to you.

If you’ve ever lived in the deleted scenes,

if you’ve ever been told your joy was too loud

or your softness too suspect

you’re in the right film.

Welcome to the cutting room floor.

Make yourself comfortable.

The story begins again.

Action, love.

Bahiru 🎬

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