He tried to counsel them to wear condoms, and if they contracted HIV/AIDS, to take the medicine doctors gave them. Okporo decides to pursue a degree in food science, and while doing so, he finds work at Family Health International, working on with AIDS services. How many lovers did he have? How long did they last? Was Okporo in love with any of them? Did anyone ever break his heart? How did the sexual experiences make him feel? We sense Okporo has trouble wading into such intimate waters, and still carries the shame with which his society has anointed him. Perhaps for the first time in my life.” But he never devotes any of the book’s pages to the nature of these relationships. He later moved to Ajuba where he found his first gay community and recalls “I felt seen: I felt welcomed. He tried to cover this up by becoming a minister at the church, hoping that God would relieve him of the evil spirits overtaking him. When he entered his teens, Okporo began having his first sexual encounters. He speaks of the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act in Nigeria which punishes, with a 14-year jail sentence, anyone who displays homosexual affection on the street, or in a private gathering. Heterosexuality is a non-negotiable phenomenon, and the country condemns it harshly. He understands that his home country has hopelessly woven hatred of homosexuality into its social fabric. You are forever hunted and hurt.īut while Oriogun permits himself to express anger and rage, Okporo is more reticent and seems to address his exciting story of escape and renewal to a predominantly heterosexual audience. Oriugun also struggled with his homosexual yearnings, and his voice is filled with melancholy reckonings about what it feels like to live in a country that has no place for you. But as fellow Nigerian gay writer Romeo Oriogun has made clear in his bitter poetry and angry prose, there simply is no place to hide there. Religious man throughout his arduous journey escaping Nigeria and running for his life and subsequent freedom which he chronicles in his thought-provoking book, “Asylum: A Memoir & Manifesto.” We believe that if Okporo had found a way to remain in Nigeria, hidden between the cracks, he would have chosen to do so. He has remained a very Asylum, by Edafe Okporo. One suspects Okporo is a traditionalist of sorts, whose sexual leanings threw him off-course. I would not understand this part of myself for years to come.” The reader senses Edafe Okporo is a sweet and forgiving man still somewhat confused by his own inclinations: “I did not know what it meant to be gay. His mother encouraged him to study, perhaps sensing this might provide a pathway for him. He joined the debate team at school, and enjoyed participating in conversations about the history of Nigeria, but concedes “I wasn’t a true Warri boy….In Nigeria, gender stereotypes and roles were strongly adhered to-a boy who was too close to girls in the classroom and spend a lot of time with his mother was an atypical picture of masculinity.”
He loved his childhood friend Gloria who walked to school with him, and he cherished his family despite his father and elder brother’s disdain. Somehow all this tyranny didn’t destroy his spirit. They beat him senseless for his effeminate ways. Okporo admits “This was just one of the many times I found myself stuck in the parade of masculinity and intimidation that was so common for Warri boys, but that I could not bring myself to be a part of.” Later on, his peers mocked him for the unisex bag he carried to school. He knew this sort of behavior made him a target. He loved to accompany his mother to the market clinging to the hems of her skirt. Even as a young Nigerian boy, Edafe Okporo knew he was different.