Plight of the Homosexual

Joel was molested at a teens camp.

We laughed and made fun of how a 13 year old boy was sexually attractive to a 28 year old, male Pastor. It was a nightmarish experience, in the sleepy village of Gikambura, in Kiambu.

He was barely out of his childhood, before he was thronged into the murky waters of sexual abuse that would forever haunt him.

That was 1991. Our Sunday school teacher had sponsored four of us to attend an annual interdenominational, weeklong teens camp. With boyish excitement, Joel, Stan, Eunice and I looked forward to meeting our peers from the other churches.

More excitement was on being away from home, which meant we won’t be looking after cows and sheep, as was customary when schools closed for April holidays. My father was a strict disciplinarian and an astute believer in hard labor (pun intended). For this, he routinely sent away our herdsman during school holidays.

Cattle and sheep grazing in the 90’s for one month was no fun for teenagers.

Being away at a teens camp was a great excuse that April. Another exciting affair was food. At these camps we were overfed, though at the price of staying up late. In those long nights, we prayed or listened to some monotonous preacher. The preachers rebuked our raging hormones and shepherded our crazy and adolescent ideas.

On this damned night, the hosting church invited some fiery youth Pastors for an extended Evening of Worship, followed by a Revival Meeting. After an awesome night of praise, prayer and preaching, it was time to sleep. Around 10:30pm Stan, Eunice and I huddled at our usual corner before turning in, but couldn’t find Joel.

We presumed he was catching up with some acquaintances among the 150 teens present at the camp. We were dead wrong. Early in the morning, we woke up at the usual 4am hour, for morning glory. This was extra prayer and petition time, at an upper room.

A real upper room. Perched on top of the church building. As devotees, mimicking the monks of the Abbey of Keur Moussa, we faithfully but competitively belted out prayers. As devout Pentecostals, we spoke in tongues of angels, for what seemed like eternity.

Walking up the wooden stairs that morning, I saw Joel sneaking into the church compound. I called him out but he sheepishly avoided me, walking away. Stan was just leaving the church hall-turned-dormitory with sleepy eyes. We both rushed towards Joel to find out where he had been that previous night.

What he told us, we couldn’t fathom. We were barely in our teens. I was 10, Stan was 12 and Joel was 13 years old. Eunice was out of this conversation.

There was no way, a boy could tell a girl about sodomy.

Regrettably, Joel had been sodomized that night. He had been threatened with death. He was silenced. Never to speak a word about the heinous act of self-gratification. A demented adult had sexually stimulated himself with a child. This was demeaning and demonic! We needed to pray more and speak in fiery tongues, or so with thought.

The devilish encounter cascaded a chain of events, like a deck of falling cards. Joel was not only teary, but angry with himself. His self confidence was chipping off. He was terribly embarrassed. Looking back, I was innocent, naïve, guilty and angry.

Unlike in today’s information age. Children are thoroughly indoctrinated on their 12 basic rights. Back then, we lived in a bush of ignorance. Not just children, adults too weren’t equipped to respond to violation of a child.

Joel had been taken advantage of. He had been coerced into a beastly act without consent. He was nursing fresh but eternal physical and emotional wounds.

Poor us, we made fun of him, turned some Kikuyu songs into absurd humor and satire.

We never reported the matter to anyone. It just felt ridiculous. We were ignorant and complacent. I can’t remember whether I walked up the rest of the stairs to pray or how fulfilling the rest of the camp was.

Joel changed. From then on, he was totally different.

Back home and in church, he retreated into oblivion. The once vibrant and scripture memorizing guru, stayed away from the limelight. In his KCPE later that year, he scored 405 out of 700. This earned him entry into Gaichanjiru High School, in Murang’a. Another dream come true. He would be away from his inquisitive friends, albeit for a while.

In Gaichanjiru , Joel immersed himself in books, reading late into the night. His academic performance wasn’t improving. He never put himself out there for anything. He stayed in the shadows and had few friends. He drifted away. Three years later, I joined the same high school.

To suck up his pain, he played rugby. A tormenting game that I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. The school rugby team woke up so early, sometimes at 2am for cross country races or regular exercises. All in an effort to build muscles and discipline. After classes, they would be in the pitch sweating out teen hormones and masking courage.

Before his final year in Gaichanjiru , Joel was among five boys expelled from the school, for what the Deputy Principal termed as ‘indecent behavior’. Whispers among the students claimed it was homosexuality. In my naïve world, this was the second time I was hearing about same sex attraction and intimacy.

Though we were neighbors at home, Joel and I didn’t nurture any meaningful relationship in or out of school. We were familiar strangers. He stayed aloof. I was tormented. At his expulsion, I had no grounds to reach out to him. He thereafter joined a day secondary school near home, where he sat for his KCSE.

We lost touch for about 4 years. During that time, he studied Diploma in Digital Animation in Malaysia. This was in Johor, a vibrant economic corridor, south of peninsular Malaysia. A cosmopolitan city of contrasts. He jetted back in 1999.

His first gig was a Graphics Animator at Webuye Paper Mills, in Bungoma.

Two years into the job, I visited him. This was just after my KCSE. My father believed that Joel would steer me into the right career path, now that he was our village intelligentsia.

Talk of village heroism. My father’s postal address was the only connection between our village and the rest of the world! We were the ISP or Wi-Fi hotspot of the town! This meant, anyone receiving or sending letters would use his postal address and would drop by our house.

As a result, we learnt about college applications, job offers, communication with far flung relatives and friends, or anything that needed letter writing or postal services.

When Joel got his letter of admission to study in University Teknologi Malaysia, my father was the first to know. Later when Joel started working, his letter volumes increased as he had contacts in Malaysia and other parts of the world, now that he had been ‘out there’.

Strangely, he also picked some letters addressed to Joelyne Mutheu. He told my father that Joelyne was a female work colleague.

On this first visit to him for mentorship, I carried some letters addressed to Joelyne.

The trip to Webuye was superb. I loved the Eldoret Express ride. They were the famous buses plying that Western Kenya route. This was way before Modern Coast Bus and Matunda Express, entered the fray.

Joel received me at the bus terminus with ambivalence. I was too tired to notice. It had been a tiring 9 hour trip. My stay was to be a two-night affair. I presumed we would tolerate each other between those 48 hours, like typical unfriendly siblings.

I didn’t expect him to have company, but he did. He was sharing his all-in-one room with a guy whose name I can’t recall. I quickly, put my rucksack on the solo bed I saw. All the while trying to figure out how the three of us would share the solo bed.

That evening, a few friends of Joel came to visit from the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton . They left before I could make sense of their relationship with Joel. I guess, my curious nature needed time to interrogate them a little.

At 9pm, Joel excused himself, saying he would spend the night at the neighbor’s house. This left the two us to share the bed for the night.

For the love of reading, I stayed up a little, catching up with a storybook I had carried with me. Joel was an avid reader too. He had a stack of magazines, which I planned to read. An hour into the night, I picked one of them. Apparently, it was Playboy magazine. It displayed female nudity and sexually oriented content.

As if on cue, a letter dropped from the magazine. It was addressed to Joelyne Mutheu. For a moment, my sleepy self was slapped back to wakefulness. Why would Joelyne’s opened letter be in Joel’s house. Were they having a relationship.

It took another minute to find a heap of opened envelopes with letters addressed to Joelyne. Curiosity or stupidity led me to read the letters. I couldn’t ask the guy in the room anything. He was deep asleep. He needed to be up early, for his morning shift.

Letters to Joelyne were sexually explicit.

Joelyne received letters from a couple of men, who spoke of deep love for her and relished their past moments together. I was confused. I didn’t know what to think. I switched off the lights. Spellbound and half-crying, I covered myself to sleep.

The magazines and letters weren’t representative of the Joel I knew.

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An hour into the sleep, Joel rushed in and closed the door with a thud. This was too dramatic. We didn’t talk but the three of us squeezed into that solo bed. It felt weird.

Before the birds started singing, Joel and his roommate hit the road, leaving me with a thousand questions. I was new to Webuye town. I knew no one apart from Joel.

Later in the day, Joel called to check on how I was doing and inform me that he won’t be returning in the evening. After telling me where to buy foodstuff, he gave me instructions to be careful with the neighbor. My intrigued mind wanted more than food.

I needed to understand what was going on.

Before dusk, an enraged man showed up at our room asking for Joel. Telling him that Joel was at work and won’t be returning made him even more furious. That gave me the opportunity to burst the bubble. I pestered him to unravel the issue. He obliged half-heartedly.

This was a depressing story. I wasn’t fully prepared. Apparently, the enraged man was the neighbor where Joel spent half of the previous night. According to his version, Joel made sexual advances towards him, in the dark of the night. His discomfort prompted a confrontation between them, with the man asking Joel if he was homosexual.

Under a knife threat, Joel said everything he needed to save his skin. He swiftly fled for dear life. That is how he rushed back to our room, that night. The dots connecting Joel and Joelyne were in plain-sight.

It was a disguise of the same person.

To his conservative Christian family, he was Joel, but to his liberal LGBTQIA community, she was Joelyne. A contrasts of sorts. An identity crisis. A woman trapped inside a man’s body.

I was homophobic. I had no reason to be distraught and angry. Simply, I wasn’t accepting, open-minded or non-judgmental. That wasn’t me.

At the time, there was a worldwide scare, that homosexuals were at risk of HIV and AIDS. For the third time now, I was staring at sexual diversity. Joel had chosen the alternative lifestyle. He hadn’t taken the narrow path.

He wasn’t straight, according to his knife-wielding neighbor.

Later, the neighbor pursued Joel to his workplace. Seeking to lynch him. In his world, the perverse should be exterminated. This was too much drama for a form 4 leaver. I hopped onto the next Eldoret Express and returned home, without mentorship.

A few years later, Joel’s father summoned him, but for a different reason. Of course, he wasn’t privy to his alternative lifestyle. His only concern was why Joel wasn’t married, yet he was in the marriageable age bracket and had ‘everything needed to start a family’. He needed to propagate the family line.

In the summon, he asked with a straight-face, if all his body parts were functional. This was his guised way of asking for grandchildren. A man of a different generation.

To save face or otherwise, Joel married a woman. After a year they brought forth an offspring.

Joel remains contradicted. His same sex affairs are muted. His work trips abroad present him/her the obscurity to lead a double life of his/her choice. Is this triumph or defeat?

In 2015, President Kenyatta said to President Obama, “Gay rights is a non issue“.

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Did Joel turn out gay, before or after attending the teens camp in Gikambura?

Is sexuality a product of Nurture or Nature?

June is Pride month. An annual festivity when the LGBTQIA community takes stock of their progress, milestones and challenges in the journey towards a free and inclusive world.

For this liberal movement, it’s been an elusive American journey since 1969. They seek equal justice and opportunity for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning/Queer, Intersex and Asexual community.

If such rights and freedoms are granted, would the authentic Joel(yne) ‘come out’ of the closet, to bask in the sunshine of his family or boil in their tribulations?

Will they embrace and help him/her fly the rainbow flag? On the contrary, they might force him/her to seek cure to the perceived disease. Or exorcise the demons, out of God’s creation.

This is a true story. Names and details have been changed to protect family privacy. Views expressed on this article are my own

Joseph N. Mungai is inspired by people’s life experiences. Do you have an intriguing life story and need a ghost writer? Email: j.mungai@hotmail.co.uk