Reverend
Rowland Jide Macaulay used to run a secret gay church in Ojodu Berger
Lagos called House of Rainbow Fellowship. He relocated abroad some years
back after a major newspaper did a story on his homosexual church and
he started to get threats. He's still running his gay church in the UK
and has been speaking out publicly against the recently passed anti-gay
law in Nigeria.
Rev. Jide Macaulay recently penned an emotional
article about being rejected by his father (pictured above with him)
when he came out as a homosexual in 1994 and his acceptance of his
lifestyle many years later.
Towards Full Acceptance - By Rowland Jide Macaulay
I
am writing this article to share my story with people who want to
reconcile sexuality, faith, and family. It is a sequel to “My Father, My
Faith and My Sexuality: The Dialogue” (in Q-zine’s first issue).
Readers of that article will understand how much I have looked forward
to visiting Nigeria again after years of estrangement. That
long-postponed visit finally took place in January 2011, after a three
year absence. This is the experience I want to share with you now.
Some
background first. I came out as gay in 1994 after a troubled
heterosexual life. My coming out was a disaster of, you might say,
Biblical proportions. I was hated and denounced on mainly religious
grounds, called a sinner, a defiler, an abomination, etc.
When my
family found out I was gay, many of my siblings stopped speaking with
me. My mother was the only one who comforted me. With my father, it was
three years of hell. I had to face the fact that I could lose him. I
wondered, as a person of faith, what my “heavenly Father” would do if my
earthly father could react with such hatred.
Many people at the
House Of Rainbow Fellowship in Nigeria (and a few more outside Nigeria)
have met my Dad. He is a wonderful, typical Yoruba man, but when my “gay
church” hit the headlines in 2008, he was caught unawares in a Nigerian
media frenzy that nearly crippled his reputation as a high-profile
pioneer of African Theology.
I believed that I was wonderfully
made, created in the image of God. My only answer was prayer and more
prayer. “My Father, My Faith and My Sexuality: The Dialogue” gives an
account of the long healing process between my father and me,
culminating in our reconciliation at a conference on faith and
sexualities in South Africa in November 2009.
By 2011 we were
ready to see each other in Nigeria again. As we sat down for lunch on
Victoria Island in Lagos at the beginning of the year, my father
announced, “I am pleased that I am having lunch with my gay son.” Even
though I knew we were father and son again, I almost fell out of my
chair. This is what we all need to hear as we struggle with our
relationships, especially with parents and families. If we are not loved
at home, we can never find love abroad. But my experience shows that
even if being LGBTI is poorly understood in Nigeria, one day those who
reject us will accept and celebrate us.
As far as I can remember,
I have always been gay, but my first awareness of it was at about the
age of seven. I was interested in being female. All the roles girls
played were of great interest to me. I wanted a boy to cuddle me in
games such as Father/Mother or Husband/Wife. I had no names to describe
these feelings, but they were deeply rooted in my understanding and
feelings.
At 14, I experienced my first same-sex love, but with
my upbringing, I could only react with confusion, guilt and personal
rejection, feelings that followed me well into adulthood. Growing up in
the 1980s in Nigeria, there were no visible gay role models to provide
assurance or comfort.
Still, I am grateful for my upbringing in a
traditional African Christian family with no shortage either of love or
strict parenting. My only heartache was my sexuality, which, sadly, I
could not share with anyone in my family or religious community. I was
forced to carry the burden alone for most of my young adult life.
In
the mid 1980s, I went to the United Kingdom and plunged into a new
environment with a strange culture, but I made my home in the Nigerian
expat community. With strong Nigerian social customs, ethics, traditions
and religious focus, it was like a replica of Nigeria. Except, of
course, that we were in the UK, surrounded by a much more diverse
approach to both private and public lives that I could not ignore. I was
a very confused young man. I spent most of my time praying for healing
and deliverance from my homosexual feelings, yet the more I prayed the
more confused I became.
In 1987, I met the woman who was to become
my wife and bear me a son. In all this obscurity, I decided that I
should marry this woman I had fallen in love with. I hoped my gayness
would be cured when I married, and so in 1991 I stood at the marriage
registry taking my wedding vows. I had no one to talk with. I could not
approach the Nigerian community on such a delicate and, as I thought,
shameful matter.
Marriage, even fatherhood, needless to say, did
not dissipate my feelings for other men. Nothing changed. I had only
managed to join the hierarchy of married Africans. I had promised to
satisfy, honour and cherish my wife, but married life soon became a
nightmare. It took just three years before the relationship broke down. I
hated myself more than anyone hated me. I had done what no one should
ever do.
My life felt like a bad dream and a plague on society,
but all I could do was leave my community and religion behind and go in
search of who I was, all the while with responsibility for a young life I
had helped to create. At the time of my divorce, my son was just two
years old.
The bitterest part was that the church and the
religious community I had cherished and adored were the first to
ostracise me. Indeed, the bitterness was too foul to swallow. This was
the beginning of a love-hate relationship with Nigeria, Nigerians and
the church. My family’s discovery of my sexuality came later and was the
worst of all, when both my father and my son turned against me.
As
a person of faith, my focus was always reconciliation, first with God
and then with the people who mattered most to me. It took me several
years to come out to my close family members, friends and colleagues.
Each step bears its own mark of pain and anguish. I was psychotic at one
point. It was difficult for me to trust anyone. I was ill-treated from
one African Christian community to another whenever it was discovered
that I was gay.
Yet I knew I was a “child of the living God.” The
more strongly I held on to this belief, the more I walked towards my
healing. I also found a Christian community, the Metropolitan Community
Churches (MCC) movement, that accepted and welcomed LGBTI people of
faith. It was a joyful experience, and I revelled in this new community,
but outside of it I still had to deal with discrimination, not only
because of my sexual orientation but also due to racism.
However,
my faith only grew stronger, and I had no intention of giving up. I
knew there were many people like me, in Africa as well as in Europe. I
went for further theological training with the MCC, and in 2006 I
founded the House Of Rainbow Fellowship in my native country, the first
Christian denomination to welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual
and intersex people in a country hostile to all of these.
I spent
the next two years in Nigeria building the House of Rainbow and, by
September 2008, we were thriving. Indeed, we became a household name,
but for all the wrong reasons!
The hatred and insecurity these
harmless initiatives created were intense. Some of us were threatened
with death, and many of our members suffered rejection and violence.
Some fled the country abroad. My home was vandalised, and my entire
family were threatened for my actions. Leading religious leaders and
politicians spoke of me with hatred and incredible malice. But we had
grown a movement of LGBTI Christians in a hostile nation, and there was
no going back.
At the same time, I got more involved with my
father’s organisation, spent more time with him and introduced as many
of our LGBTI members to him as I could, so that he got to meet many
LGBTI people. I became part of his daily life again, and he was my
mentor and advisor on many issues, my first port of call when it came to
challenging conservative theological rhetoric and getting political
advice. I spent invaluable time with him, learning from his wisdom.
I
also seized this opportunity to raise the issue of homosexuality and
the church and to search for answers to the religious community’s
exclusion of LGBTI people. I studied theological texts that spoke to the
issues. I laboured intensely, debating these matters with my father,
whom I respect dearly and consider a great thinker.
However, in
2008 I was forced to flee Nigeria. My father was the first to tell me it
was time to leave the hostility behind. He even promised to clear up
any mess I had to leave behind. I was amazed he was willing to help me
in my dark moment.
Our long dialogue paid off further when he
agreed to attend the conference in South Africa that I wrote about in
the last issue of Q-zine. At the conference, to my amazement again, he
revealed a new openness to the inclusion of LGBTI people in the church.
But
I had been forced to return to England shrouded with hatred, feeling
cheated out of my mission. Back in the UK, I embarked on a long journey
to raise and address issues of discrimination based on sexual
orientation and gender identity. It is no longer a Nigerian battle but
one for the entire African continent, and I believe our persistence will
pay off in the end.
On returning back to the UK, I also focused
on rebuilding relationships with my family. It has not been easy, but
with the grace of God, I have been making progress.
I have a son
who is now a grown man. For years he struggled to understand why his
father was gay. The numerous headlines and snide remarks from the church
and the Nigerian community did not help. He was desperate to
understand, but he was surrounded by people sending messages of gloom
and doom.
Just before his 18th birthday, he told me he was
ashamed I was gay and regretted any connection with me, that he was not
proud to mention me or tell people we are related.
This hurt me
deeply, but whatever my son thought about me, I knew that to deny my
gayness was to deny God. As a person of faith, I have to believe God
will never give anyone a burden they cannot bear, yet my son’s statement
made me almost lose patience with God. Nevertheless I have managed to
stay firm in my spirituality and prayers. I believe my “investment” in
faith must one day pay off, so I have rededicated myself to bringing the
gospel of inclusion to everyone.
In 2011, my son agreed to spend
the Easter weekend with me. It was the first time we had seen each
other in months, though we had spoken over the phone and I had written
him a few letters, working towards understanding and reconciliation.
At
our Easter reunion he told me that he and his partner had discussed my
sexuality and that he no longer had a problem with it. I have pondered
what caused the sudden change of heart and must admit I was a little
confused about it and the prospect of reconciliation after all this
time. It was a shock that the most precious people in the world, my
father and son, now both accepted me as a gay man, but what a wonderful
shock!
All I am sure of now is that it is never wise to allow the
insecurity of our families to cause us to be estranged from them. Deep
down, we will always be part of these families, and everyone knows that.
Never give up on yourself or your family. Reconciliation is possible.
We just have to be willing to pay the price towards full acceptance.
#poko”
