But she barely seems conscious as she sits in the doorway, her lace like a pile of used tissues, a cloud. The study protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Boards at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (New York, New York, USA) and the University of Pretoria Faculty of Humanities (Pretoria, South Africa). For many, socializing with family or community members who were gay, or encountering media depictions of same-sex relationships, helped them to identify what they were experiencing.

For example, one respondent shared his process of learning what it meant to be gay, and after telling his sister that they felt something was wrong with them, his sister responded “ there is nothing wrong with you, it’s just that you do things differently. It was filthy: a cluttered office with a kitchen in the back, sticky tiles, one oily window overlooking the market.Even with these improvements, hate crimes against LGBTQ+ individuals continue to persist in South Africa [ 72, 73]. These are very candid stories so some were very heart breaking, particularly the accounts of sexual abuse. There, through the brush, in the Boys’ Quarters courtyard beneath the one shower: there was Francis, soaking wet. Uncle bought the washer on his last trip to London, along with the blue jeans you’ve cut into shorts.

Beneath it a soukous band shows off the latest from Congo, the lead singer wailing in French and Lingala. Due to socio-structural factors, African Americans (AAs) have higher rates of STIs compared to other racial groups and are more likely to engage in sexually concurrent (SC) relationships. There has also been a ten-fold increase in the proportion of South Africans who strongly agree with continuing to allow same-sex marriage (from 1 to 10%) over the past 10 years [ 71].Sekyiamah does an excellent job of reminding us of the complexity of sex and relationships, and how these are affected by an ever-shifting interplay of personality, religion, family dynamics, cultural background, personal finances and life stages.