Fake curricature sends gay reader running after me

By BENSON RIUNGU

Let’s finish off with Brian Tetley quickly before we begin on the unfolding story of a retired journalist trying to reintegrate into a rural community he left for the ‘city of many lights’ many years ago.

Growing up at Igoji on the eastern slopes of Mt Kenya, homosexuality was virtually an unknown concept. True, it was whispered that if you went to places like Mombasa and had a sexual itch, you had to be careful that the bui-bui-clad companion you took to bed was indeed female. But beyond that, the concept was foreign.

I, however, came face to face with homosexuality while editing Off The Wall, a wacky daily column in The Standard that Brian started before handing it over to me.  In the mid-1990s when the venture kicked off, journalism was largely straitlaced and matters to do with sex were handled with euphemisms. TV news presenters were prim and dressed in such a way as not to offend social decorum by exposing even a suggestion of cleavage.

When Catherine Kasavuli or Lydia Manyasi, for instance, read the news, you only saw the head and shoulders. A similar ethic governed the choice and cropping of pictures for the newspapers.

Tabloid

You can imagine the shock to a God-fearing nation, therefore, when The Standard borrowed liberally from Britain’s tabloid press and started carrying a page-length pin-up of scantily dressed women accompanied by racy, often lurid editorial copy.

It was the height of the female lib movement, and Mambo, as Brian styled himself, I became a favourite and regular target. One day a particularly suggestive pin-up provoked such female wrath that demonstrations were held by feminists in Nairobi. At one meeting, an angry speaker suggested that if we were men enough, we should also publish full length pictures of ourselves.

Brian had one of his brainwaves. His idea was that I use my head, but instead of my pint-sized body, we get a graphics designer to join it to the body of Mikey Ragos, the reigning body building champion at the time.

His head would likewise be joined to the body of Silvester Stallone, the actor. The hare-brained scheme worked unexpected wonders. The day I appeared on page nine with the body of Mikey Ragos, I received a flurry of baffled telephone calls from friends and acquaintances with the common theme, ‘What has happened?

One call stood out though; it came from someone with an Asian accent who wanted an urgent meeting to discuss matters that would interest me.

I asked him to come over to the office for a chat the next day. He was directed to my desk, where he insisted to see Benson Riungu, the man whose picture had appeared in the paper the previous day.

I understood his sense of confusion. He had come expecting to see a body building champion with bulging muscles only to have someone with a Joshua arap Sang body fobbed off on him. I think he also understood that a trick had been played on him for he calmed down and asked if there was somewhere we could have a drink and talk privately.

Seduction

Over sodas at the staff canteen, he gave me a long winded story about gays and their networks in Nairobi. He said he could give me details that would make riveting reading for Off The Wall. Almost as an afterthought, he asked if I had received any suggestive calls from men after my so-called picture appeared in the paper.

That’s when the pin dropped, and I realised I had just flunked as a candidate for seduction. Some months later, I was to be introduced to Ragos. And instead of making a smear of me on the floor for daring to desecrate his body, the man often convulsed with laughter when he sized me up from head to toe.

Nobody, man or women, has approached me with anything, but honest interest since I retreated to Igoji to enjoy my well earned retirement with a horn of local brew. But who knows, the place has changed greatly I had a free run of these ridges many years ago. We’ll find out together, you and I, in the days ahead.