Is Dr. Dagmawi Woubshet the first openly gay Ethiopian?

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Dr. Dagmawi Woubshet looks like the first openly gay Ethiopian. Here are information we found about him from his own article and other multiple online sources.

FYI: Dr. Dagmawi is a professor at Cornell English department. He received his PhD from Harvard University, where he specialized in African-American, comparative African Diaspora, and contemporary American literature and culture.

Tizita
Dagmawi Woubshet

I write in sutured tongue. English, I learned after Amharic had shaped my tongue’s first memories. But to both Amharic and English, I am a stranger. It’s an insight I learned a few years back, in tongue collapse, as I came out to my mother who could not register gay or homosexual; I could not translate either term into Amharic, nor make real approximations. Open, word-lives don’t exist in my mother’s tongue. Though epithets do, I’d come too far to return to the dregs for resource: to name something root. (Epithets, it turns out, are not what a writer hyped them up to be: “the root that attaches us most deeply to our homeland.”)

His name and picture are listed on two websites

WHO’S WHO IN THE BLACK LGBT(Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) COMMUNITY

sebaspace.wordpress.com

BET

His name is also listed among faculty members who are part of Cornell’s university Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies.

Current project: Looking for the Dead: Black Queer Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (book manuscript)

Meet ETV Interview with Dr. Dagmawi Woubshet (language and literature professor) on August 5,2013 (VIDEO)