Many male African writers deem that their ‘homosexuality’, a word they themselves use, needs to be buttressed by African myths about the creation of the Universe out of a fleshly severance, which is often perceived, after Guinean Saïdou Bokoum in Chaîne (1974), as a ‘humongous reaming’. Surprisingly, as if to corroborate various theses such as those of Cheikh Anta Diop around the Egyptian origins of Sub-Saharan Africa, male African writers have evoked Egyptian myths around Osiris and Horus or around the Mout-Itef or primordial Mother-Father to justify their attraction to men. Others have evoked African phallic cults or creation myths around the original gemelleity, that is the androgyny of the child's soul. Others still have resorted to some elements common to ancestor-worship, such as the myth of the amputated ancestor, which is also inherent in Aristophanes' tale on the origins of the sexes.

Also of use, especially among African female writers, is the myth of the dominant ancestor guiding a person's sexual preference or ‘sexual orientation’, a phrase which, however, continues to meet with resistance in an African context. This annexation of myths reveals a certain level of insecurity in dealing with male and female same-sex desire, as if these writers wished to demonstrate that their culture is ancestrally hospitable to gender variance, while it points to larger issues such as the African range of sexualities and the link between homosexuality and spirituality.