Queer and Habesha: Finding Your Place Between Two Cultures
There is a particular kind of silence reserved for queer Habesha people. It is not the silence of absence — it is the silence of presence without acknowledgment. You are at the melsi. You are serving coffee. You are kissing aunties on both cheeks. And the person you love, the one who makes your life make sense, is referred to as “your friend” or, more often, not referred to at all.
This is not a story about rejection. It could be, and for many it is. But for a growing number of queer Eritreans in the diaspora, it is a story about architecture — about building spaces that did not exist before, about finding your people in the gaps between cultures, about the quiet, ongoing work of being wholly yourself in communities that were not designed to hold all of you.
Coming out, Habesha-style
In a Western context, coming out is often framed as a singular event — one conversation, one revelation, one before-and-after. In a Habesha family, it is rarely that clean. It is a series of moments stretched across years: the deliberate silences, the carefully worded introductions, the slow process of letting your mother see your partner not as a concept but as a person who makes tea the way you like it, who remembers your father’s birthday, who shows up.
“I did not come out to my parents,” says one contributor who asked to remain anonymous. “I let them come to me. It took four years. My mother cried, not because she was ashamed — she was afraid. Afraid of what the community would say, what the church would say, what it would mean for my brother’s marriage prospects. That is what people do not understand: the fear is often not about you. It is about the entire social ecosystem your family lives inside.”
Finding your people
The internet has been a lifeline for queer Habesha people. Private Facebook groups, WhatsApp communities with names that sound generic enough to not raise suspicion, Instagram accounts that post in Tigrinya about identity and acceptance. These digital spaces are the first place many queer Eritreans ever hear someone who sounds like them, using words from their language, talking about a life they recognise.
“I found a group chat called something completely innocuous,” says another contributor. “It had forty Habesha queer women in it, across six countries. I was twenty-three and I had never met another Habesha person who was gay. I cried for an hour. Then I typed hello.”
Chosen family, Habesha edition
The concept of chosen family is well-established in queer communities, but it takes on a specific texture in diaspora contexts. Your chosen Habesha family is not just the people who love you unconditionally — it is the people who will make shiro for you when you are homesick, who know the Orthodox fasting calendar, who can translate the aunties’ WhatsApp messages, who understand that your identity is not a rejection of your culture but an expansion of it.
There are no clean endings to this story because the story is still being written. But there is something happening, quietly, across the diaspora: Habesha queer people are finding each other. They are building the spaces they were told did not exist. They are choosing to stay connected to a culture that has not always known what to do with them, not out of obligation, but because it is theirs too.
Untouched Heritage holds space for the conversations that matter, especially the ones our communities find difficult. If you have a story to share, we are listening.
