This is our “Excerpts from a Dairy” series. We publish excerpts of thoughts and reflections from emails, dairies and journals of people from the queer community. These excerpts could be complete entries or uncompleted and unstructured excerpts that show our personal thoughts and reflections about our lived experience.
We welcome submissions and they can be sent to etqueerfamily@gmail.com.
The below excerpt is taken from a conversation about the risks of being queer in Ethiopia.
“I remember [what happened] to my best friend. He was discovered to be gay. And I remember the amount of backlash that he received when we were in school. And they constantly beat him up, and we were like in the eighth grade when they found out that he was gay. And when he would walk to lunch and other places in school, the older kids would beat him up. So he ended up having to switch schools. And then they would try to find people from the other school to say, “Yeah, he’s gay”. The other school didn’t catch on, and he graduated, and now he’s living as a gay man [outside Ethiopia], which is insane. The place where he is might not be completely safe, but he’s living his best life now. And he’s about to get married. It’s great. But I still remember that. And even though I didn’t experience it myself, I know it could have been me if I had been discovered.”
