The Pink Line by Mark Gevisser

Author:Mark Gevisser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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OF ALL THE PLACES I VISITED, Lagos seemed to be the place where this dissonance was most intense. The Nigerian megacity was the West African hub to dozens of multinational corporations, in a country where the mere implication of homosexuality, or any perceived advocacy of it, was punishable by fourteen years in jail. A Pride parade was unimaginable.

One evening in October 2014, I went to the stylish Lagos offices of a man I will call Teddy, who had started a gay Facebook group. Teddy was in his late thirties, worldly and well traveled, with the kind of gym body and knowing look you would find in Chelsea or Soho but also, increasingly, in the shopping malls and fancy clubs of Lagos’s Victoria Island. Sitting with me around his boardroom table over pizza and red wine were about fifteen members of the Facebook group, men and women: lawyers, entrepreneurs, actuaries, senior managers. Many of them had the resources to shuttle between double lives. Some were married with kids in Nigeria, but had long-term same-sex lovers abroad: “Wheels up, hair down!” was the way one described the plane ride between Lagos and London.

Several members of the group worked for multinational corporations that trumpeted their LGBT diversity policies, and yet not one of them was out of the closet, at work or at home. Lagos was the wealthiest place on the African continent, with a huge middle-class population that was literate, worldly, and wired. Why, I asked my fellow diners, did they think that Lagos was not following the globalizing, urbanizing trend when it came to sexual mores?

One of the women present—I will call her Ife—worked for a multinational corporation with a strong diversity profile. Had she come out at work? She snorted in derision: “Are you crazy? My boss is in my church!” Without exception, every person at the pizza evening went to church, mainly to one or another of the Pentecostal congregations mushrooming across Africa. “It’s not just about religion,” Ife said. “It’s about society, and culture, and about networking. You have to go to church to belong—and to move up in the world. I just shut my ears when I need to—and work hard to save for my next trip abroad.”

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