#QueerFro Trapped: Being Queer & Zimbabwean

Someone once told me there is no greater joy beyond knowing and staying true to whom you are, but why does it hurt so bad? Why do I feel so sad? I do not see myself as that  different from others and yet I am not like them either. I am a human who loves other  humans, is it not enough?  I guess not.

There was a time when I lived and breathed pride. Pride as a queer human and I stood tall,  fought for what I believed in. I fell in love, I woke up from love, and for a time I was happy. I  love my country and I do try to be a law-abiding citizen, however, the more I grew into the  person I know to have been born to be, the more I find myself an outlaw of love.

A legal and a holy hate that for so long I have held at bay, pervades my life. Faced each day  with the mantra “YOU SHALL BURN IN HELL” I ask myself why do I even bother holding on to  the light inside me.  Is it because I am lonely?

So full of love and yet with no one I can share it with without guilt and shame. The sun sinks,  it goes down on my unrequited love and yet with each dawn I somehow still find the  strength to hope, love, live and courage to smile.

Depression, fear, hate, lies; double standards seem to weave strongholds around so many  lives. I find my queer brothers and sisters falling under oppression not only from outside but  from within too. It is so easy for humans to fall into depravity if they are conditioned to believe they are nothing more than their sexual position.

I have swum in the cesspool of wantonness. I have been nothing more than a nameless  young man out to seek cheap thrills with the rest of the degenerates. I did not carry regrets  because I acted exactly as how society said a queer person should. I went on an unholy  crusade to prove them right.

However, when I thought I could not sink any lower, I did. As cliché as it sounds that is how  it was for me, one night, everything changed. I looked at hate in the face and saw that it was  human. A band of thieves robbed my cousin and I. One had intent to leave us dead. After  the initial shock at what was happening, I resigned myself to what at that moment, I thought was my fate, to be tied down with my own belt, have a dirty plastic bag over my head and  be strangled to death by a laughing stranger. Clearly, it was not yet my time to die but something did die that night. Even now, a few years after that night, I still cannot quite articulate what is that I left behind in that ditch. Is  it why it hurts me now, hurts me to be who I want to be and be happy, because I know that  even without wearing the so called ‘gay badge’ there will always be someone out there willing to take everything from me with a smile on his face?

This world is indeed full of hate and with enough people willing burn you alive because you are  different, with enough people willing to cast the first stone as if they themselves are free of  sin. Nonetheless, there are also enough people with the true light of heaven in them. I have  seen them, I have experienced their light and love, and they lifted me out of the dark place I had trapped myself in. I am free, I walk in the light but at times, it does hurt to be human and queer; to be queer and happy.