Popular UK television presenter Phillip Schofield has sparked a conversation online, at least on Nigerian twitter, about marriage between homosexuals and heterosexuals, in this case, a gay man and a straight woman and what it means for both parties.
For context: Phillip Schofield got married to a woman by the name Stephanie Lowe in 1993, they have been married ever since (27 years) and have two daughters. He recently came out in an emotional statement posted on Instagram and later went on to do an interview with The Sun and made an appearance on the show he co-hosts (ITV’s This Morning), to discuss the said matter. It was from these interviews that Sky News ran with the headline “Philip Schofield admits he knew he was gay when he got married in 1993”. A headline I believe is what is responsible, at least partly, for the conversations that have ensued online.
So what has Phillip Schofield said about his coming out? He said on ITV’s This Morning that he felt “guilty” about the “pain” and “upset” he had caused his family but has admitted he had tried to “suppress” his sexuality throughout his marriage. He revealed there was something ‘nagging away at him’ before his wedding and thought he “might be bisexual” until he “realized and started coming to terms” with being gay. He admitted that he has battled depression as he has struggled with his sexuality and before coming out, had suicidal thoughts and even sought therapy on his sexuality. He said that his wife had known he was gay “for a while” and she has been amazing and his “closest confidante” and also touched on the support he has gotten from his kids, mom and colleagues.
From my own reading, most of the conversations that have sprung up as a result of his announcement have been one huge projection after the other because people have ran with the headlines and not bothered to check for any possible nuances in the story. However, the reason why these conversations have gone on for as long as they have is because it is an all-familiar story, many people know of, know or even have either a Phillip Schofield or a Stephanie Lowe in their lives. This conversation is not new to social media or the world writ large, it is one that comes up every now and again. However, it has consistently lacked nuance and critical thought in many regards. Are women collateral damage? Are gay men emotionally abusing straight women – deliberately or otherwise? Are these kinds of situations a just price that straight women have to pay for their homophobia? Who has it worse? Who is left out of these conversations? How do we move forward?
A lot of people have framed straight women as collateral damage in regards to this subject and have argued that gay men and their allies are fighting for their lives and their liberation at the expense of women. It is born out of a rationale espoused by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and their friends – this idea that women ultimately lose out when they fight for anyone other than themselves and intersectional feminism is a losing game, for women at least. But to label straight women as collateral damage in this matter is to paint them as innocent of homophobia, it is to absolve them of the part that they play in enforcing a hetero-normative society and upholding the systems and structures that make life hell for homosexuals. What is often lost in these conversations is that gay men who marry straight women often do not do it willingly; they do it out for fear of physical, emotional and economic violence. They do it out of fear of living and dying lonely in a world where same-sex marriages/relationships are stigmatized at best and criminalized at worst. Most gay men, at least the ones I know are not out here drawing schemes on how to deceive women into marrying them, neither do they view heterosexual women’s bodies as something they are entitled to as some have suggested. The reverse is actually the case. Gay men spend their adult years living in fear, anxiety and depression (see: Phillip Schofield). They spend it dreading the time when family starts to ask, “Where is your wife?” “We want grand children” “Who will carry the family name?”. They spend it dreading the time when their career aspirations and their standing in society will be questioned because they have no wife or kids.
It is also interesting that the people who have framed women as collateral damage have erased lesbians and queer women from the conversation. They are the biggest collateral damages. Do their lives matter less? Or is it the lives of the straight men that they get married to that do not matter? No one seems to care as much for this dynamic. Queer women face even greater pressure to acclimatize than their male counterparts and it is well understood that while gay men are plagued with homophobia, queer women have misogyny and sexism added to theirs. Straight women broadly believe they get the shorter end of the stick when it comes to marriage so why is there no room in their fight, for queer women who will get an even shorter end of the stick for obvious reasons. Queer women are equally forced into marriages and many are raped with the intent of turning them heterosexual. Their suffering also matters and straight women must be decentered from the conversation in order to make room for queer women and actually fix this problem.
Bisexuals and pansexuals are another set of people who are erased from this conversation. Especially because they often have their attraction to the opposite sex questioned once there is even a sniff that they have been involved in same-sex relations in the past. We forget that sexuality is fluid and people might think of themselves as straight today but bisexual tomorrow, bisexual today but gay tomorrow. We are not born with our sexuality made completely clear to us on the first day, for many people it is a continuous journey of figuring it out and we need to take things like that into account when we hear stories like that of Schofields’.
Often times behind a gay man deceitfully getting married to a straight woman is another straight woman in the form of his mother exerting some of the pressure I pointed above, behind a gay man getting married to a straight woman are other straight women who have championed anti-LGBTQ+ politics, voiced homophobic rhetoric, turned a blind eye to anti-LGBTQ+ violence and done nothing to further advance gay liberation. All of this is not to say that this is an excuse to put these women through deceit and emotional torture because even non-homophobic women go through the same, rather it is to say that framing one party as victims over the other or chastising gay men for their choices will do nothing to fix the problem if we do not change the system as it is. We should be less interested in criticizing the choice gay men make to marry straight women (without endorsing it or making a mockery of straight women’s plight) and more interested in critiquing and challenging the systems and conditions that make such a choice possible in the first place.
One of the rather funny (read: stupid) comments laced in the form of advice that I saw regarding this topic was “If you are a closeted gay man in Nigeria and you are being pressured to marry, please, please and please, do not rope in an unknowing woman. There are women out there, ready and willing to come to an agreement. You can actively seek those out.” Outside of the impracticality of this ‘advice’, the lack of self-awareness was what I found most hilarious. The failure to interrogate their own words “being pressured to marry” is very instructive. There is no desire to question whom or where the pressure is coming from exactly, why it is coming and how to stop it. This problem is not going to stop when gay men merely seek out women ready and willing to come to an agreement because Nigeria is a deeply homophobic country. Lest we forget, The Gay Times reported Nigeria to be the most dangerous country in the world to be LGBTQ, and for gay men to seek out such women they will have to put themselves in harms way by coming out to a ton of potentially homophobic people in search of this one person. It is not as though they have “ready and willing to come to an agreement” pasted on their foreheads. Then think of it through numbers, how many gay men are under this pressure to marry and how many of these women who are ready to come to an agreement really exist in homophobic Nigeria and how accessible are they? Is this sort of advice predicated on the notion that LGBTQ+ folks are all just gathered in one big Whatsapp group chat? Hint: We are not. And while this might be slightly achievable for upper-class homosexuals who have been able to form small communities here and there, it is practically impossible for a million others across the country that barely even know any other homosexuals other than themselves.
This problem will not stop through rebuke, condemnation, half-baked advice and attempts to shame individual choices. It can only stop when we all come together to change the system and its current incentives by pursuing the normalization, decriminalization and eventual legalization of same-sex relationships and marriages. We do this by donating time, money and resources to the people doing the work on the ground, we do this by lending our voices on social media when needed and standing up for the abused, we do this by demanding better from our leaders to the degree that we can and we do this by advocating for a more inclusive media that shows gay people all over the country that they are not alone and that there is life for them outside a heterosexual marriage. Ultimately the LGBTQ+ community and straight women alike face a common enemy – an oppressive patriarchal society reinforced through homophobia and hetero-normativity. “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free” might sometimes sound passé or over flogged but it rings true today and always. Like Twitter user @aghanaiangirl smartly put it “it is less women are collateral damage and more homophobia is ruining every ones lives”. We are all losing in different ways, we are all collateral damage and we can either play a game of who is losing more or play a game of why are we losing and how can we start winning?
Ibrahim Bello is a young Nigerian passionate about the rights of LGBT+ people in the country.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this Op-Ed by the Writer are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Rustin Times.
