My family forced me to endure violent conversion therapy. So I left home & never looked back.

Would I really go to heaven, despite being gay? Growing up, this question tormented me. My earliest and most significant childhood memory is being 6 years old and learning to “accept Jesus into my heart.” Did I really understand what that meant, or was I just looking for parental love?

I was raised in a strict, fundamentalist Christian household in Lagos State, Nigeria, where my family referred to homosexuality as “a sin to God, worthy of eternal damnation in hell.” At church, school, and home, being gay was condemned and, when it was mentioned, those who took care of me described it as an abomination comparable to rape, murder, and child molestation.

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My family attended God’s Grace Christian Center in the city of Ikorodu. Temitayo Biodun was our Senior pastor for more than 15 years, and he had strong anti-gay beliefs. I remember vividly his sermon one cold Wednesday evening, during the mid-week service, when he told parents to isolate, alienate, and give over to Satan their homosexual children. 

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This information contradicted what I felt inside. I knew I was different, but I could not explain why. A lot of my male peers were interested in girls, soccer, and Power Rangers. That wasn’t the case for me. I loved drawing and playing with dolls, and I knew I was attracted to the same sex. This was confusing, and it also made me feel as though expressing what was inside me was a huge risk. I couldn’t relate to other males at school or home.

I didn’t want to be rejected by everyone around me. I didn’t want to experience the pain of eternal damnation in hell. So, I decided to pray to God every day and night, begging him to take my feelings away. I practically ate, lived, and breathed the Bible in an attempt to suppress and deny who I was. But nothing changed inside of me.

When I was 15, my mum saw self-inflicted cuts on my hands. I confessed that I was struggling with same-sex attraction and that I couldn’t grapple with God, the church, and gayness. She was devastated. She cried, called me names, shouted at my dad for being lenient and immediately sought the help of pastors and planned a deliverance session. She was concerned and wanted to help me change so that I could join her and my dad “in eternal life with God” 

One sunny Thursday as I returned home from school, my parents called me to the sitting room; a man dressed in all white whom I had never seen was present. I later learned that the man was a religious leader in a sect called The Eternal Sacred Order of Cherubim and Seraphim. This sect differs from mainstream Christianity in that it is known for its white garment dress code and maintaining that only its founder, Moses Orimolade Tunolase, received the calling to go about preaching the gospel of the Lord and healing the sick.

What followed was religiously oriented conversion therapy. My first interaction with the sect was standard. The prayers started with good grades, warding off evil eyes, and then landed on the spirit of perversion, lust, and homosexuality. It was quite a horrible experience. The following week, I was asked by my parents to go to a service at their physical worship location wearing a white garment. Toward the end of the service, I was called to the front of the altar where I was surrounded by the elders, prophets, and prophetesses as they prayed over me. 

They kept going around me in a circle, singing, jumping, slapping and hitting me. Then they requested a broom, which one of the prophets used to hit me for a long time. My heart-wrenching screams shattered the uneasy peace in the community where the church was located. By the time they were done, I felt excruciating pain all over my body. My mom refused to let me go home. Apparently, one of the Elders had asked that I stay there for three weeks. I didn’t have a choice. 

During that time, I was deprived of both food and water and was always placed in the middle of prayer circles, where I was hit as a way to “beat out the homosexual spirit.” They ignored my cries for help and mercy. To them, this sin was too abominable and required drastic steps to break me out of the shackles with which Satan had bound me. By the end of the three weeks, I had learned that the only way to survive was to make the sect feel as if they had won.

I was in pain, tired, smelly, hungry, thin, and ill. I was desperate to go home. So I went along with what was expected as my days there came to an end. 

At the end of the session, my mum suspected that nothing had changed. Even the man of God to whom my mum looked to “convert” me knew that even his God could not change my authentic self.

So she decided to take me to another prayer house to deliver me from the “Spirit of feminine mannerisms.” The prayer house reeked of incense and had various colored candles and herbs on display. I was taken to the altar, where a middle-aged man dressed in white was waiting. Out of fear, I clung to my mum, who pushed me away and told me to comply. I was stripped naked, with both of my hands bound together, and made to sit inside a red basin that contained olive oil, ashes, and water. 15 lit candles surrounded me, emanating heat into the space. I was wiped down with five live chickens before their heads were ripped off and the blood was collected in another basin.

Six hours later, the candles had melted and my body was so numb that I had to be dragged to the other side of the altar, where I was bathed with a mixture of warm water and chicken blood, accompanied by the chanting of the Book of Psalms. Afterwards, I was forcibly injected with a strange substance. I passed out only to be revived by Lagos University Teaching Hospital(LUTH). 

When I returned home upon discharge from the hospital, I packed my belongings and left quietly. I never exchanged parting words, and I never saw my family again. Walking out of our family compound that day, I felt this overwhelming sense of dread. It was like a shapeless dark cloud closing in and suffocating me. 

I had to leave the entire state. My experience there had made me grow to despise it. I needed to be somewhere safer, and Lagos was not an option. I had to find people like me, a community where I could openly be myself. The only gay friends I had at this time were folks I’d met on social media groups who all lived in large cities.

In Nigeria, the only place LGBTQ+ people can live openly in relative safety is bigger cities like Abuja. I took to message boards online and began chatting with fellow gay friends there. They said there were safe houses there for gay people like me who had left our families. So I moved to Abuja. Now that I’m here, I feel included and home among lovely friends. 

Being gay is my identity, and that’s not going to change. I have learned I can still live an upright and righteous life without fear of rejection or eternal damnation, and without the regulation of the church weighing heavily on me.