Based on a life story interview with Kyle (22 September 2019)

My name is Kyle and I stay in Nairobi, in The Nature Network house, which is in Matasia, in Ngong. I’m 37 years old. I’m the Aunt of the refugees here, and I’m the welfare officer of The Nature Network. I am gay but a feminine gay. I treat myself as a woman.

I knew I was gay from a very young age. I think for me it was God who discovered me. When I was with my cousins, because we were age-mates and young, whenever we were at home alone we would just do some, let me call it, stupid stuff, like touching each other. We were all boys and I was the ring-leader who used to tell them what to do: like touch their small dicks to see if they can become big. So, after some years, my mum died in 2002 and I went to stay with my brother in Ndeeba. He used to go on safaris for a very long time without coming back home. He had CDs of porn for heterosexuals. I was in Primary Five and I had a lot of friends from school that came to visit me. Some days I used to watch those porn CDs with them and they touched their penises; I enjoyed watching their penises getting hard. So, I didn’t really have any person that I can say helped me find myself: it was all me.

It’s certainly not white people who taught me to be homosexual. I was born in a very deep village, and I didn’t see any white person in my young age coming home or near my home. It was only when we went to town for something that we used to see them. I have just started interacting and actively seeing white people these days. And I dropped out of school early, so there’s no way I could talk to a white person. I disagree with that saying about white people teaching homosexuality, because I grew up differently.

At home we had two beliefs: my mum was very much into cultural norms and my dad was a Catholic.