Death follows the love that dares to txt a name

Love in the digital age means you can whisper sweet nothings via text, tweet, Facebook, email, or any of the dozen digital methods of communication colonised by teenagers.

What a delight to have all those different ways of sending and receiving ‘I love you’— it makes teenagers of us all.

Spare a thought then for Roger Mbede, who texted: “I’m very much in love w/u.” The text resulted in his death. He died in Cameroon last month, aged 34, ostracised from his family, his community, the medical and legal system, everything. His death happened three years after he sent the text expressing his love for another human being. Another man.

Even Roger’s lawyer Alice Nkom isn’t sure about the exact circumstances of his death – since his arrest for sending the text, he was sentenced to three years incarceration. He became ill in jail, and was allowed out on medical grounds, but, says Nkom: “His family said he was a curse for them and that we should let him die.” He did die, isolated and cast out, for expressing love via text.

There are 76 countries worldwide where homosexuality remains illegal — ten of these countries can impose either a life sentence or the death penalty. For expressing love, or sexual desire, or both. You might shudder with relief that you don’t live in Cameroon or Iran but it was only a few days ago that the leading body of Christian therapists in the UK finally instructed its members to stop trying to talk clients out of being gay via something called “conversion therapy”.

This “therapy” believes that homosexuality is “caused” by some or all of the following — abuse, bullying, having a domineering mother, having a distant father. As in, my mother made me a queer. That being gay is a “condition” that can be “cured”. You might think this sort of thing is confined to particularly evangelical corners of the US, but no – it’s still happening over the border in Northern Ireland, via a group calling itself the Core Issues Trust.

In 2012, these people tried to get an advert placed on the sides of London buses to counteract the Stonewall messages of “Some people are gay – get over it” with their own slogan: “Not gay! Ex-gay, Post-gay and Proud. Get over it!”

Yikes. The ads didn’t happen – London buses refused – but conversion therapy is still a thing.

Perhaps what needs to happen is some reversion therapy. Let’s ask these advocates of conversion therapy how long they have been heterosexual, and when they first realised they might be heterosexual? And could it just be a phase? Because for Roger Mdebe it was not a phase. It was his life, and his death.