In the summer of 2018, I found myself enraptured by the television show Pose, a first-of-its-kind drama that featured a cast of Black and brown transgender performers. Much of the press around the series—nearly all of it, actually—highlighted this fact, and I approached the show with some trepidation, expecting it to feature gauzy, conventional storylines in an attempt to attract a mainstream audience. Indeed, amid its gritty sequences of emotional turmoil was a focus on the most conventional television theme of all—the obligations and joys of family life. But this turned out to be Pose’s most interesting asset, because what distinguished its kitchen-table scenes from others, and its family from my own, was that each member had chosen to be there.
Pose presents the concept of chosen family as both a necessary lifeline for trans people and an enthralling and recurrent act of love. These characters, and the real people whose lives served as inspiration for them, choose one another continually, though their bonds are often not recognized by external authorities. Those of us seeking to build meaningful connections to people with whom we share little but our common humanity might have something to learn from them.
I thought of Pose a great deal while reading Necessary Fiction, the Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde’s second novel. The book follows a group of queer Nigerian characters who fit awkwardly within their biological communities and who, as a result, must form new ones. Families are the driving force of this novel, and Osunde depicts them in various forms: families falling apart as they bicker and grow in different directions, families that have all but ceased to function, and newly formed families, fragile and delicately wrought. Osunde’s characters pursue degrees and jobs, and they seek self-actualization, but their understanding of life is filtered almost entirely through their closest relationships.
Osunde has published this novel amid a flood of LGBTQ literature from Africa, and specifically Nigeria, that is perhaps a reaction to the sorry state of gay rights across the continent. Yet Necessary Fiction is singular because it subtly transposes an idea that recurs in queer media—that families are both essential and malleable—to a broader tapestry of human lives, the billions of us around the globe who find ourselves isolated despite our reliance on tools that promise connection. By unbinding family from biological duty, the novel imagines connection as an act of sustained intention, not inherited obligation. It offers not only a story about queer life in Nigeria, but also a vision of how kinship might evolve for everyone in a world of increasing mobility, urbanization, and atomization.
Necessary Fiction includes a sprawling cast of characters whose connections vary in depth and intensity—Osunde helpfully provides a list at the beginning of the book—and throughout the novel we meet small clusters of them, observing as they attract or repel one another. Yet the most vital and arresting moment occurs 19 pages in, well before Osunde has formally introduced most of the novel’s players. In a chapter titled “Truth Circle,” a group of queer friends discuss their lives, relationships, and regrets in a 10-page scene that unfolds entirely in dialogue.
They remember the tragic 2020 Lekki massacre in Lagos State, when soldiers opened fire on unarmed protestors; they share stories of estrangement from their direct kin; they reflect on the overwhelming burden of projecting strength even as they unravel internally; they explore the shifting definitions of what it means to be “normal.”
Threaded through all this heaviness, however, is a palpable joy, a kind of luminous gratitude for having found one another, despite their presence in a country that routinely shuns them. One character, reflecting on the recent loss of a loved one, says that they “also feel thanks, because who wouldn’t have reasons to, with people like you as fam? You guys are that for me.”
The “truth circle” in this scene is a space of confession and free expression, but it is also a crucible in which the characters create and affirm their bonds to one another. Over the course of these pages, the reader begins to discern the outlines of their relationships through hints about how they came to know and care for one another. But most important, Osunde introduces them immediately as a family, inviting readers to think of people they don’t yet know as parts of a coherent whole, one they have forged in order to survive.
Osunde also reminds the reader how deeply vulnerable, and deeply restorative, conversations among family members can be when they’re sustained through loyalty and mutual respect. Though grounded in queer experience, the scene’s emotional resonance extends beyond it. Osunde seems to be proposing a model of kinship that could serve anyone navigating alienation or rupture.
As the book progresses, we learn more about the people who were present at the truth circle, and eventually one character, a DJ named May, takes center stage. Osunde describes May as a “free” person, someone “even rebels look up to and say, Wow, you’re so brave.” She has a tense relationship with her father, a man of “unending charisma and gaslighting,” and recognizes “that something about her mother was different, that she had an askewness to her that her friends’ mothers did not have.” One point of friction between mother and daughter is May’s gender identity; as May grows older, her mother begins to understand that “May was not the daughter she was raising. May was something else beyond that—something more manly than a daughter, more feminine than a son—an inbetweener.”
One day May calls home and learns that her mother is in the hospital after her father insisted on “yet another psychiatric hold.” May falls into despair and confides in her roommates, twins who were present at the truth circle. She confesses that she longs for a motherly presence, and the twins introduce her to their aunt, who goes by “Aunty G” (we eventually learn the “G” stands for “Gladness”). What follows is one of the most quietly transformative relationships in the book. May eventually tells Aunty G about her love life, something she never felt comfortable doing with her own mother. Osunde captures the poignancy of this connection:
It wasn’t that Aunty G was a replacement mother or anything. Aunty G was just the elder of her dreams, someone who had seen enough life to not be fazed by her choices. May thought often about what a difference it would have made if she was known (or loved) by a woman like Gladness when she was stumbling around in the dark. And now here she was.
Through the twins’ intervention, May gains the mother figure she was looking for, someone who offers the kind of counsel her own parents never could. Osunde’s depiction of this bond—its gradual deepening, its subtle healing—reinforces the novel’s central insight: that family is not a fixed inheritance but an evolving architecture.
In recent years, there has been much talk about people spending more and more time alone. According to a 2023 analysis by the U.S. Surgeon General, “half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness.” Medical professionals and social scientists have proposed a few potential causes, including the disappearance of “third places” and the increasing ubiquity of the internet and social media, which may facilitate connections, but at the expense of meaningful—and essential—in-person interactions.
In Necessary Fiction and other stories revolving around LGBTQ lives, we can glimpse the kind of community the internet once promised. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, it is not a replacement for the rituals that make us human, such as gathering around a dinner table after a long day apart, and telling honest and vulnerable stories as your family sits close, listens, and remains.
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