Thank you so much for this beautiful story. Humans are human everywhere, and dehumanization is a problem for queer people pretty much everywhere.

While you wrote this story about Ghana today, I lived through very similar experiences in the U.S. only a few decades ago. The coming-out conversations you describe at your university are very similar to conversations I had in my youth, one with my own roommate.

The U.S. wasn't 10 out of 10 homophobic all those decades ago, perhaps "only" 8 out of 10, and those conversations felt really daring and difficult.

How things have changed since! Now, probably in response to hundreds of thousands of other humanizing conversations like that, we're down to maybe only 3 or 4 out of 10, depending on where you live.

Courageous storytellers like you can bring that humanization to Ghana and other parts of Africa to, I'm sure of it.

Happy Pride! I wish you all the peace, joy, and love you so richly deserve.