Digital Confessions

Binyavanga Wainaina's Online Coming Out and the Poetics of Queer Desire

Abstract

Recent studies on ‘coming out’ stories among the queer increasingly show that the internet and new forms of online and digital media play significant roles in defining gender nonconforming sexualities and identities in modern societies. This article examines the late Binyavanga Wainaina’s online stories I Am a Homosexual, Mum and Alien Taste within the genre of ‘coming out’ narratives that are mediated, staged and performed as a ritual of ‘queer politics’ within local and global spaces. It examines the author’s use of the confessional storytelling mode to intertextually reference his earlier memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place to reenact a deliberate ‘gay visibility’ agenda while in the same instance performing new forms of queer sexuality and desires in a virtual space. The article also analyses the implications of online media participation in the process of gay self-disclosure in order to show how new media influences visibility and agency in homophobic African cultural spaces. Because of the reaction that his disclosure elicited in multiple publics, the article argues that the three texts represent a process and continuum of media formats within the milieu of storytelling, ritualized ‘coming out’ and a staging of queer identities and desires. Ultimately the article unravels how online self-disclosure narratives perform new forms of queer desires in virtual spaces.