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In Sunyani, I would go to the market for produce, sometimes with my mom and sometimes alone, and women selling their wares behind stalls would call out as I passed, offering to marry their daughters off to me. Not every gay boy is into these things, but I was. I used to bake cakes to throw her birthday parties. I actually had a doll that was the best dressed doll in the town because I used to make clothes for her. And so through that I learned to sew because this gay kid loved to sew dresses. Her clients would bring their kaba and slits that they liked from other people, and cloth so that she’d sew that for them. When I was a kid, my mom sewed clothes as a business. I don’t want to paint a false picture of a childhood Ghana that was fully accepting of my sexuality, but I want to talk about the drastic rise in homophobia that has gotten us to this place and the forces behind it. That emergency also requires everyone to come out as an ally of LGBTQ+ Ghanaians. I make this statement publicly because an emergency in Ghana has made it necessary for me to come out as loudly as possible. Already they are not safe, as there have been increased reports of violence being meted out on queer people, following the bill’s introduction to parliament. Queer Ghanaians, our friends, and our families would not be safe. If this bill passes, I would not be able to go home. The bill prescribes up to 10 years for anyone who advocates for LGBTQ+ people, forced medical procedures for intersex children, a requirement for families and teachers to report queer relatives and students or be subject to jail time, and even an extradition clause to allow the bill to nab Ghanaian activists abroad. The continent’s first country to gain independence, the birthplace of the pioneering Yaa Asantewaa and Kwame Nkrumah, a country that is trying to address slavery’s injustices, by inviting African-Americans to come home, now has a bill making its way through Ghana’s parliament that, among other horrors, prescribes up to five years in prison and torture in the form of “conversion therapy” (a debunked practice) for LGBTQ+ Ghanaians. I am telling my story now as my beloved Ghana is at an inflection point. Ghana’s proposed law criminalizes not only the community, but those who show compassion And that is the love that every person, Ghanaian or otherwise, queer or straight, deserves. And I say this because that’s how loved I am, as a queer Ghanaian, as a Ghanaian child. My dad heard my screams and he came out running to save me.
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It was dusk, and my cousin decided to spring out of the corn and jump out at me as a prank. I remember a moment when we had corn growing taller than any adult. When I was a child in Bolga, my father taught us the traditions of his childhood in Hian, where people raised livestock and farmed crops. That’s how loved I am, as a queer Ghanaian, as a Ghanaian child.