This article explores how, in talk about sex, Nigerian Hausa men who self‐identify as homosexual or womanlike and a Euro‐American gay male ethnographer reified racially distinct sexualities against a backdrop of perceived sexual similarity. These discursive transformations indexed and (reconstructed prototypes of ethnic, racial and national identities, and articulated speakers' claims to, or denials of, those identities. Such claims are connected to the global workings of wealth and power, and the discourses of desire and difference that inform and sustain them.