One of my last reads of 2023 was a memoir by a gay black South African. I enjoyed the book. Khumalo has a sharp mind and sharp tongue.
Here’s the passage where he comes out to his mother:
[O]ne week after my thirteenth birthday, I decided to tell my mother [I was gay]. … One of the magazines in the house had a story about a gender non-conforming man. I took it to her and said, ‘I’m like him.’ I couldn’t say, ‘I’m gay.’ She replied, ‘I know.’
‘How? Since when?’
‘I’ve known about you since you were two. A mother just knows.’
‘When were you planning on saying something?’ I asked, absurdly wanting to say, ‘You’ve kept my attraction to guys a secret from me for ten years?’
Her view was that God had sent me to shake up … the world.
Mom goes on to call her son a blessing. If by some magic he turns het, that’s okay, but it’s not something to wish for, she says.
I wondered … whether her openness to loving a gay kid was what had let me slip into actually being gay. Had she never been that open to the possibility, I realised, I’d have never felt safe enough to discover the truth. Wait. Did reality scare me so much that I was willing to resent Mom for loving me and hate myself for facing the truth?
Yeah, Mom. If you weren’t such a good person I wouldn’t be gay! You needed to be meaner!
Fortunately, our hero gets over that toxic mindset.
source:
You Have to Be Gay to Know God
Siya Khumalo
2018. Kwela Books, Cape Town, South Africa
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