I'll never forget the day the package came in the mail. I tore through the Peace Corps envelope marked "Urgent Correspondence Enclosed" and pulled out the folder. "You are invited to serve in Burkina Faso," it read.

Having attended several international film festivals, I was one of few Americans who know that Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) was a land-locked country in West Africa, just north of the Ivory Coast and Ghana, that happened to produce some fine films. I also knew it was one of the least developed countries in the world, and that it was about as culturally far away as you could get from the United States.

That was my intention in joining the Peace Corps, after all, to experience life in a culture as different from my own as possible--not as a tourist, but as an honorary citizen of the host country. Hopefully, I would be able to give something back to my hosts while I gained from them in the way of knowledge and experience. I'd been asked to teach English at the University level. Would that be of any help to the Burkinabe (pronounced bur-KEE-nah-be)?

I was excited and more than a little nervous. I'd be learning the local dialect of French and at least one African language, along with the country's local customs (like eating rice and sauce with my right hand while saving my left hand for bodily functions). I'd be meeting people with lots of questions about America, and I'd be understanding things about my own culture that I'd never even thought about back home. That was the exciting part.

There were mainly two things that made me nervous. First was my health. Oh sure, the Peace Corps assured me of my safety. I'd be taking the latest treatment against malaria, after all, and I'd be immunized against every virus known to humanity. Still, I'd probably get intestinal parasites at least once during my stay.

The wonder drug against malaria, mefloquine, had been banned in England due to intense psychological side effects reported by many users. One option involved taking a less effective malaria drug while living in a region ravaged by more strains of the parasite than any other spot on the planet. It was possible that I'd be stationed out in the bush, a day or two from the capital of Burkina Faso and even further from a good hospital. Well, if I really got sick, they could always "med-e-vac" me home on an airplane. I'd just cross my fingers and hope for the best.

My second issue was harder to resolve and ultimately riskier: how would my homosexuality affect my experience? I'd been out of the closet and sexually active since I was 15 years old. Everything I read before leaving for Burkina Faso seemed to suggest that homosexuality was "non-existent" according to most West Africans. At best it was viewed as just another European perversion not present on the African continent. Though I'd experienced many examples of anti-Gay discrimination in the 15 years that followed my coming out, I'd never been in a purely homophobic environment, far from my friends, for longer than a few hours.

Despite the possible danger, I was very curious to have the unique opportunity to live in a culture where people hadn't already found heavily politicized labels for their sexuality. I understood that in non-Western countries, the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual" were practically non-existent. In our more "modern" society, had we not pinned ourselves in by such terms? I'd been out as a Gay militant and AIDS activist for my entire adult life, but was my "Gay" identity as important as I'd assumed it to be for so long? Maybe it was time to see what life was like before Stonewall, and what better way than to go to a country that hadn't yet heard of the Gay rights movement?

This would involve many risks. Would people be as hostile to Gays in West Africa as literature suggested? Did West Africa have anything resembling a Gay scene at all? Would people's ignorance about homosexuality prove to be fatal to me and to locals who couldn't hide their orientation?

I planned to go into the closet during the first part of my stay (for the first time since my adolescence) to test the waters. This would probably involve a long period of celibacy, and that was no easy challenge for someone who'd spent his entire adult life enjoying major Gay centers of the U.S. and Europe! If I wasn't killed for being a fag, would I die of sexual starvation? Or maybe sex would take a new shape. Perhaps it wouldn't be talked about, but would be in a different, more discreet context.

Soon there was no more time for questions. Boom. I found myself getting off the plane in the middle of the arid West African savanna. "It's like a Sally Struthers' Save The Children commercial," joked another volunteer. The U.S. Ambassador shook each of our hands personally and welcomed us. We were each handed our first bottle of Laafi mineral water to combat the instant dehydration our bodies were experiencing in the 110-degree-plus heat.

During our first three months in the country, volunteers were put through a rigorous training program while living in dorm-style accommodations in a tiny village outside the city of Bobo-Dioulasso. We were four to a room with cold showers in an adjoining building. I shared my room with a straight Burkinabe, a straight U.S. man, and, surprise, another Gay U.S. man.

I was able to come out almost immediately to all the other Peace Corps volunteers, and that served as a support mechanism. I found I couldn't be in the closet to my compatriots even if I tried, and speaking to them was like being back home. Most of the volunteers, however straight, were familiar enough with Gay culture to slip an affectionate "Hey, girlfriend!" into the conversation from time to time. This came as an unexpected source of comfort so far from the Castro.

On the other hand, coming out to a Burkinabe trainer was no simple task. Everyone I met assumed you had to be heterosexual if you didn't have horns growing out of your head, so they never even toyed with the idea that someone they knew could be Gay. It just wasn't possible. They were constantly "setting me up" with African women, and I was offered more than one man's wife: "You are my brother. My wife is your wife. Do you understand? She's yours. Take her." Nudge, nudge. They took my refusal as the "typical white man's" reaction to African culture and had a hearty chuckle over the whole thing.

Burkina Faso has an 18-percent literacy rate, the lowest in the world. Even those who manage to master French and their own local language (there are 70 African languages spoken in the country and over 200 dialects) seldom have enough schooling in English to speak it fluently, so I was able to chat to my U.S. colleagues freely about issues of sexual frustration and cultural confusion without our African trainers understanding.

My Burkinabe roommate would ask the three of us (in French) about our girlfriends, and for the first time in 15 years I heard myself reply, "Oh, I left someone back home," not specifying his gender. In the next breath, I'd switch to English to compare notes with my Gay roommate: "John's cute, don't you think?" But the two of us didn't have a great deal in common besides our sexuality, and it was with my straight U.S. roommate that I bonded. We confided our deepest secrets to each other and became best of friends.

Friendships did little to relieve the sexual tension mounting in the dormitories. Torrid trysts were reported, some involving two volunteers, others involving Burkinabe trainers and volunteers (breaking the Peace Corps' comical rules about trainers and volunteers waiting Ôtil the end of the training to get it on). None of these encounters involved same-sex couples and, more disturbingly, none involved me.

In my spare time, I began to work on developing a purely platonic dialogue with my Burkinabe roommate. Since I had lived in Paris for nearly three years, I spoke fluent French before arriving in Africa, and I was able to communicate with him comfortably. This gave us an immediate channel of communication he didn't have with other volunteers. They were still taking baby steps in French. After a month, we moved from small talk about general cultural differences into more intimate areas such as lifelong goals and desires. Naturally, this led us into conversations about sex. I tried on numerous occasions to come out to him. After all, he shared his deepest secrets about the women he'd loved and lost and about those he desired today: some of them Burkinabe and some of them American....But I just couldn't tell him.

In my first month in the country, a thief had been caught in the streets of nearby Bobo-Dioulasso, the second largest city in Burkina Faso. The crowd had beaten him to death and left his body in an open sewer to be eaten by the vultures. The newspapers ran an editorial: "Killing people is not the best way to deal with theft. When we have rotting bodies littering our streets, it's not a pleasant sight, and besides, it smells terrible." What would have been the local reaction to homo sex, I wondered?

I bravely asked my new Burkinabe friend if he thought homosexuality existed in Africa. "I've heard of fags before," he said, "but you don't really see that here." He wasn't very forthcoming with his opinion of "fags," but the choice of language was a disturbing indication. He didn't seem to have a clue that I might be one, too. Later he mentioned that he'd "seen one around" at the University. I asked how the guy had been treated. "I don't know. I think people just avoided him." He seemed perplexed by my questions and we both dropped it.

In Africa, men routinely hold each other's hands and even rub up against each other on the dance floor. These are considered friendly gestures and nothing more. Holding hands or dirty dancing with a woman in public, however, is a sure sign that she's loose or even a prostitute. What would my friend have thought if he knew that every time he'd taken my hand during one of our discussions over the past weeks that he'd been holding the hand of a faggot? Would I move from "friend" status into "traitor/whore" territory?

I felt I was getting in deeper. I hadn't told him right away that I was Gay, so now I was lying to him by not telling him. I kept trying to drop him clues over the months to follow, but he never seemed to get it, and he never picked up on any of the discussions I had with my other roommates about sex, even when we made fairly obvious references to our desires in French.

I let it go and kept our relationship as it was. If my coming out to him went badly, it would have meant coming out simultaneously to his family, to all the trainers I'd worked with, and to all their friends and colleagues (some of them people I'd be working with when I started teaching at the University). In short, it could have ruined my chances for finding a better way to come out more carefully in the future.

It's hard to keep a secret in African society unless you keep it from everyone. The society is really one big extended family and word travels quickly from sister to brother to father to wife to grandmother... If you ever get on someone's bad side, they probably won't tell you. They might look at you a bit strangely then continue addressing you with the full litany of African greetings: "Good morning. How are you? How is your health? And how is your family's health? And how is your work? And how are your colleagues?" They wouldn't think of mentioning to you: "By the way, you're considered an abomination by the entire population of our village."

Or were such stories of African culture just Western hype? In one of our cross-cultural training sessions, I decided to ask a Burkinabe trainer how homosexuality was perceived. Some of the straight volunteers, having more personal distance from the issue, pushed the question further, bringing up their own positive opinions about Gay rights. This sparked a discussion between several Burkinabe trainers and several U.S. volunteers. The trainers claimed that homosexuality was fine for "whites" but that it didn't exist in Africa. When someone insisted that it must exist the trainers said that if a guy was found "sodomizing" another guy, they'd both be driven from their village and asked never to return. "Where would they go? To the capitol?" The trainers just shrugged their shoulders. They couldn't even believe anyone could be so persistent with such weird questions. Why would anyone care what happened to a bunch of freaks?

Then I asked, "What about Lesbians?" The response was hysterical laughter. "What would two women do together?" They really thought we were just teasing them with such hilarious questions. Of course, Lesbians didn't exist in Africa. "Come on and be serious," was the general attitude, "Let's get back to the discussion of the local culture." They were so good humored about the whole thing that it was obvious they meant no harm. They just didn't have a vocabulary to deal with such topics. Later, during a debate on the ethics of female circumcision with some of the trainers, we realized that two female lovers would indeed seem unimaginable to anyone born in a country in which many women were still denied the opportunity to experience any physical pleasure.

In this environment, I had to ask myself if coming out to people in Burkina Faso would do much good. This question wasn't as obvious as in Europe or the U.S. While coming out back home posed a risk, the advantages were clear, and the dangers were largely personal ones that I could control through my reactions. In Africa, I would meet with personal dangers that I wasn't necessarily equipped to respond to since I wasn't sure I knew how to interpret them. What constituted a threat to my safety and what was merely an inconvenience or chore? Would I be beaten or would I just spend time answering people's difficult and often homophobic questions?

But the biggest difference between coming out in the U.S. and coming out in Burkina Faso was that I didn't know how it would affect the life of the people in the country. Already, the effects of introducing tomorrow's technology to a continent with yesterday's education has taken a toll on the environment: the population explosion shows no signs of slowing and the food supply isn't getting any bigger. To go from complete denial of the existence of homosexuality to a direct confrontation of it could make life better for certain individuals, but initially it would almost certainly have the opposite effect. It would force people to start paying attention to certain behaviors that had gone unquestioned for centuries. Most boys double up in their beds well into adulthood. Certainly, many of them masturbate together without ever talking about it. Would increased visibility of homosexuality draw attention and condemnation to such behavior?

Questions like this left my head spinning. I joined other volunteers in brainstorming sessions entitled, "Sustainable Development: How to Make Lasting Changes in the Third World." While we talked about improving the country's economy, educational system, agriculture and general health by empowering local people with resources and knowledge, we all realized how far Africa had to go before it could even begin to pull itself out of the ditch into which it had been sunk by greed, racism and corruption.

AIDS, for example, is rampant, but prevention efforts are almost a hundred percent ineffective. For starters, condoms are too expensive and hard to come by, and they were just too damn alien to the local culture for most people to accept. Besides, AIDS is just one more in a long list of killers in Burkina Faso where the life expectancy is about 43. People die routinely, and deaths are almost always attributed to "malaria," which is sometimes the true killer and just as often a convenient cover up for something scarier.

AIDS is still thought to be spread by casual contact, and a huge stigma is attached to any household visited by the disease. (It is assumed that the husband in an "AIDS house" had been visiting "dirty prostitutes from the Ivory Coast.") Stigma, lack of treatment (affordable or otherwise), and expensive HIV tests mean no one even bothers to be tested. If you get sick with a bad fever, you just take malaria pills (if you can afford them) or grin and bear the pain (if you can't). To begin to come up with a coherent solution to this vicious cycle, all the development organizations in the country would have to put political and religious differences aside to launch a true joint effort at AIDS prevention. But with much of the development money in the hands of fundamentalists, Catholics and corporate opportunists, it seems unlikely that such an effort could ever be mounted.

In that environment, the problem of homosexual rights isn't on anyone's agenda. It is at the bottom of the mounting pile of problems, just under the problem of women's rights (which at least merit discussion and international investment). Sure, as an individual, I could come out to people. I could say that homosexuality exists and that it is okay. But would this message be heard in a society that still views producing large numbers of children as a sign of health and prosperity whether the children are healthy and well-nourished or not? And if anyone heard the message, would it help them in any way if they were the only ones listening?

By the time I began my work at the University of Ouagadougou (capital of Burkina Faso), I decided that it would be best if I waited until I understood more of the nuances of the local culture before coming out to anyone. It would take me seven months in the country before I found an appropriate and safe moment to do it. The entire University community represented less than one percent of the entire population. Many of them aspired to living in the United States, though they had no concrete plan for realizing such a dream. Many found their most meaningful contact with non-African culture through organized religion.

I made one friend during my work at the University who I was certain was Gay. He'd traveled to America once, and he spoke English better than any Burkinabe I met. He always wanted to practice his English with me. I asked him where he'd gone out while he was in the States, hoping that he'd refer to a Gay place I knew. Once we came out to each other, I'd be able to get an insider's scoop on Gay life in the country and offer my U.S. contacts to him. After a number of questions he finally said, "I went to one bar in Los Angeles. I think it was a Gay bar."

"Really! What did you think of that? That's very different from anything that exists here."

"Well, it was fine in that culture, but it could never happen here."

Shit. Still, I figured he'd been the first to use the word "Gay" for a reason, so I persisted: "Well, there must be Gay people here too. Where do they go?"

"I don't know. I think if they exist, then they must go to Abidjan [the capital of Ivory Coast] or maybe they just meet at each others' houses."

He seemed very irritated by these questions, so I stopped. Over the months to follow, I'd work very closely with this man on a project I was trying to develop to promote economic growth in the country. I found out that his biggest commitment was to the fundamentalist church he belonged to.

A popular quote about West Africa goes, "Africa is one third Catholic, one third Protestant, one third Muslim...and one hundred percent animist." Animism is the traditional religion of many African countries, and there are as many versions as there are languages in Burkina Faso, maybe more. Protestant religions in Burkina Faso include everything from the Methodist, Lutheran and Mormon churches to the Assembly of God.

Africans have a tendency to swap religions or to practice them simultaneously. Within one family, you might have a Muslim among Catholics, for example. He will celebrate Christmas with his family, but refuse to drink a toast. Together, they will sacrifice a chicken to their family totem on the occasion of a traditional village ceremony then return to the church and the mosque to ask for a blessing. People adopt new religions because they enjoy the ritual or appearance of it or because they admire the wealth or happiness of other members of the congregation. But regardless of the religion one practices, everyone in West Africa worships the same God.

My friend had me over for lunch one day and played a sixty minute cassette Casio keyboard remixes of "Just A Closer Walk With Thee" during the meal. He was trying to start up a youth group to be sure that kids were "in tune with Jesus." When I told him I was an atheist, he said angrily, "Come on, you have to believe in God." When I said I'd never been to a service at his church, he said, "But it's an American Church! Come on!" I dropped hints that I was "with" someone and even tossed in the masculine pronouns. He always found a way to turn my words around. "When are you going to find a nice African woman and settle down in Burkina?" he'd sigh.

I could see that if he was Gay, he wasn't comfortable expressing it, probably not even to himself. He had found a church to take up his time, he wouldn't have to think about his frustrated desires. Maybe he was developing a friendship with me because he sensed that I was Gay and hoped (consciously or not) that I'd trigger something in him, giving him the permission to be himself. But I never figured out how to do that.

That was around the time I met my one and only Burkinabe lover whom I'll call Jean. A contact of a contact gave me his number, suggesting I call him regarding my project. From the moment I met Jean, I was sure he was Gay. He was a big African queen. I wasn't immediately attracted, but I wanted to come out to someone and compare our life experiences. I made numerous efforts to see him again, and after two months of hinting around, we finally came out to each other.

It turned out that he'd lived in Europe for some time which is where he'd come out to himself and to others. Back home, as flamboyant and effeminate as he was, he was still closeted and even engaged to be married! Nevertheless, he organized little parties at different friends' homes from time to time. Eventually, he introduced me to the entire Gay community of Burkina Faso: about twelve guys. He said he knew my fundamentalist friend and was as sure as i was that he was Gay. Jean was so sure, in fact, that he'd made the mistake of coming out to him. After that, they'd never spoken again.

At my first Gay party in Africa (in the home of a celebrity who ran a great personal risk by hosting such a group) we sat around a coffee table and snacked on chips Ôtil someone put on some music and everyone began pairing off to dance. The Souk is an African dance during which you press up next to your partner and dry hump on the dance floor. It's the dance that girls aren't supposed to dance with guys (but sometimes do) and that frustrated straight guys dance with each other (never passing the boundaries of "brotherly affection"). Here, in the privacy of an exclusive Gay event, guys were free to be themselves and as campy or romantic as they wanted to be. A fireman caressed his date in time to West Africa's top pop song (in which an Ivoirian woman sings, "Men have nothing in their heads, it's all in their pants.") Two army boys practiced modeling techniques, while other guys sat on the sofa and kept a running commentary going on the dancers: "Oh, look at him go for it! Oooohhhh!" After seven months of life in the African closet, this was just an unbelievable sight, something I'd grown to believe I'd never see.

Several guys asked to dance with me. I tried twice, and on each occasion my dance partner began whispering in my ear within five seconds that he loved me and couldn't I take him back to the USA? Suddenly I had the sinking feeling that having discovered a Gay African scene made me no closer to really communicating with a Burkinabe on an equal level than I'd been before. Our cultures were so different, and it was going to take a long time to break through these barriers. What was the difference between someone offering me his wife and offering me himself if he was only doing it because he thought I'd take him home in my suitcase?

To avoid the others, I asked Jean to dance. That's when I realized that we'd actually gotten to know each other pretty well over the last couple of months. His time in Europe had familiarized him with Western culture, so we could actually communicate on a fairly equal and complete level. I'd overlooked his handsomeness because I'd been too distracted by his flamboyant manner. Suddenly, his "queeny" gestures had become familiar to me, and I took comfort in them. We ended up making out on the dance floor. The others stomped back to the couch. They slouched down in it and pouted. "Well, the evening's over now," shouted someone. "Just look at them!" Since I was the only new meat, I was the prize of the night. Making out with Jean meant I'd already made my choice. They were cut out.

Jean invited me home. "Let's wait Ôtil another night when everyone doesn't know," I said. Good thing too. Jean called the next morning at 9:00 a.m.: "Don, they've all been here to see where you are! It's hilarious. They pretended they were stopping by to see what I was up to, but they were practically scouring the place for signs of your presence!"

Shortly after that, we found a way to be alone, but it wasn't easy. Jean lived with his family and the Peace Corps had hired a nighttime guard to watch over my house after a series of armed burglaries had shaken up our neighborhood. The guardian knew everyone who came in and out of the place and I had to make small talk with him every time I came or went. After Jean stayed over, I felt the guardian looking at me differently. Had he heard strange sounds coming from my window? Or was I just being paranoid?

Around that time a group of guys from the Gay group came by my house and hung out on the patio. We camped it up with a lot of Gay slang, imported to Burkinabe French from Paris. Were the neighbors familiar with this vocabulary? Did they look at me strangely when I passed them? Every time I was around my new Gay friends, I just had to cut loose, but I worried I was creating a scandal. Was everyone saying that the American in house number 232 was a fag?

Around this time, I had a big fight with an African American Peace Corps volunteer. Until then, she'd always been friendly to me and had even told me stories of going out with her Gay friends in New York City. One day, we bumped into each other in front of the Peace Corps office, and I mentioned to her that I'd come in contact with a local group of Gays. "It breaks my heart to see brothers sleeping with each other," she said. "It just saddens me." Naturally, I was stunned. It turned out that while she felt whites could "break whatever laws of nature and god they had to," but when it came to her "black brothers," it was another matter. The "perverse white European culture gave birth to homosexuality" and it had no place in either African or African American culture. "It's killing the sisters," she said. "Our brothers go off and sleep with some guy, and then they bring AIDS back home."

"So you think black people should remain separate from whites and then they'd be saved from disease?" I asked, stunned. I pointed out that in Africa, AIDS was spread by heterosexual transmission. Even if there were a few active Gay Africans, they certainly didn't spread the virus to all the infected people of Burkina Faso.

"Prostitution spreads it here," she countered. Oh, okay, so blame it on the prostitutes now, I thought. We went round for round. The ensuing conversation filled me with despair. Why the hell was the US government sending religious bigots to a developing nation? To teach local people that AIDS had been brought to their country by homosexuality?

"If you're so worried about getting AIDS from your man," I told her, "maybe the problem is with your relationship. You should talk about it with him or make him wear a condom instead of misinforming people you could be helping to prevent AIDS."

After that conversation, I realized that my safety net of fellow volunteers was not as safe as I'd thought. Were there other homophobes among them? Had some of them told locals that I was a homosexual and not to be trusted? If I'd have been back in the USA or in France, I could have brushed off the whole issue like nothing. Who cared if people liked me or accepted my homosexuality? I had other friends I could turn to, and I had a certain amount of rights, even if the government didn't fully protect me.

But here in Burkina Faso, I couldn't count on any protection. Certainly the dominant culture had no record of being supportive, and if my own colleagues were homophobes, I was on my own.

Jean had enough problems of his own. He had to spend time with his fiance and hide me from her. If coming out was dangerous for me, for him it was a life and death issue. He couldn't just fly back to his country when the waters got too hot. He was already in his country. When we were together, he was reminded of the way he'd live his homosexuality in Europe, so he became more open and affectionate. He'd take my hand in public, then we'd remember we were in Burkina Faso and look around to see if anyone had seen us. Had they noticed we'd taken each other's hands like lovers, not like friends? Europeans, everyone knew, didn't hold hands.

I cared too much about Jean to want to jeopardize his safety by keeping my presence in his life, and that's what it came down to. I'd left someone back in the States and planned to return to him. The more time I spent with Jean, the harder it was for him to continue living the lie he'd been living until now, and unlike me, he didn't have the option of not living it.

I'd been in Africa eight months now. The weekly mefloquine treatments against malaria has been giving me technicolor nightmares, daily mood swings and panic attacks. I couldn't quite separate what was coming from my reaction to the environment and what was coming from the drug, though there were definite side effects from both sources. I was supposed to be roughing it out in Africa to "help out," but there wasn't much point in subjecting my body to more mefloquine and parasites if my presence only drew hostile attention to Gays who'd been perfectly capable of eeking out an existence without me up until then. I had just finished teaching my first semester at the University and had turned in my grades. I decided I'd return to the States a year and a half early.

And so, I came "home." Since I've been back, I've received letters from the fundamentalist friend who is eternally searching for U.S. contacts, convinced I'm holding out on setting up with rich Americans interested in his business schemes. I've received many letters from fellow volunteers. I've had no correspondence from Jean, however. I pray that he is well and happy and is still organizing those monthly Gay events. I have this corny dream that we'll meet again in a couple of years or a couple of decades in a world which has forgotten all these boundaries of race, class, sex, sexuality, nationality, health, privilege, language, culture and religion. And then I wake up to the very real memories of my brief stay in West Africa and realize that it's only a corny dream that could bridge two worlds that are so very far apart.