THE QUEST FOR EXPOSURE AND THE DIGNITY OF QUEER PERSONS

When Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) was signed into law in 2014, there were speculations from scholars, activists and most importantly, from the queer community itself, about how the new legislation would violently impact queer life in Nigeria. A decade later, it is easy to point to the concrete ways in which it has indeed created not just violent encounters between state actors and queer individuals but also an economy of violence where the dignities of these individuals are thoroughly diminished in their everyday lives. This is what the scholar of feminist and queer studies, Sokari Ekine (2013)[i], meant when she described anti-homosexuality legislations as a “heterosexulisation project of nation building”. She used this expression to gesture at the ways in which the State consolidates sexual and social deviancy – in this case, the practices of LGBTQ+ persons – as the antithesis to proper citizenship.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of this drive to expose the sexual other has been the spate of mass arrests at queer gatherings across the country. As many have already noted, while the name of the law suggests a focus on marriage, marriage serves more as a metaphor for all forms of social organizing and public expression that reveal LGBTQ+ life (Nyeck, 2016; Oguntola-Laguda & van Klinken, 2016)[ii]. In this context of anxieties over the publicness of queer life then, law enforcement authorities have taken to disrupting gatherings that are seen as deviant from the heterosexual norm. These events, which are usually dubbed “gay weddings” or “gay birthdays” in police reports, have become so prevalent that over the course of 2023 alone, there have been 3 major incidences across the country that resulted in the arrest of at least 50 people each time.

There are many implications of the state-sanctioned quest to expose the sexual other. Beyond the frequent harassment by law enforcement, there is also the negative publicity that comes with it for the individuals who are exposed. If the law frowns against the public display of same-sex amorous relations or expression, the rush to expose those who perform these acts, ironically, guarantees their publicity. What this means is that in many ways, it is the very actions of law enforcement that makes queer relations a public affair. In August 2023, for instance, when the Nigerian police conducted a raid at what was a birthday party but which they described as a “gay wedding” in Delta, the real spectacle began as a result of the arrest when pictures of these young men in colorful attires flooded the media – both on national media platforms and social media. The unlawful media trials and the public parading of suspects throw them into the limelight as social/sexual deviants before they even had a chance to go before the court.

In writing about what he describes as “intimate exposures” in Kenya – another context where anti-homosexuality regulations and discourses are prevalent, George-Paul Meiu (2020)[iii], has argued that these exposures are performed to produce a binary between the bodies of (re)productive citizens and non(re)productive citizens in contexts where such distinctions are increasingly unstable. A major consequence of these exposures is that it denies people their dignity, strips them of respect and social recognition as proper citizens by performatively uncovering the imagined deviance in their sexual and social practices. As Success[iv]; a former victim of a mass arrest in 2018, tells me “my life never remained the same again. After our video went viral, everywhere I went to – church, my area, street – people avoided me because they now saw me as one of the gays. Even after the court dropped the case, I still carried the stigma with me.” Here, Success underscores how this incidence cast him into the limelight and made him a target of outrage and disgust who needed to be avoided in places that had offered him community before.

While the spectacle of mass arrests offers a major example of the indignities that queer persons are subjected to, the denial of dignity happens in everyday life even for those who are not caught in the massive raids. Everyday actors – friends, classmates, neighbours – who have some proximity to these individuals are also increasingly involved in exposing them. Many people have found justification under the terms of the law to exploit people they have access to in the LGBTQ+ community. These unlawful exposures result in violent attacks and extortions, yet law enforcement agents often are very laid back about responding to these attacks, especially when the victims are LGBTQ+ individuals. The case of Isaac, a resident of Lagos who had to move from his home because of such repeated attacks, is one such example. Isaac told me that he kept mostly to himself and largely avoided social gatherings to protect himself from exposure. Yet in 2020, two young men in his area who he had taken to be his friends and allowed access to his personal space exposed a video he had made of himself dancing without a shirt on. They took advantage of their access to his phone and arranged with other young men who ganged up to beat him in his own compound. When he reported the case, the police did not respond in a hurry and the young men attacked him a second time and took away his belongings. Isaac ultimately had to move out of this area and find a new place in another part of the city.

It is unclear how the private video of a young man dancing alone without his shirt on is any indication of sexual behaviour, but the incident is a pointer to how the society is obsessed with seeking out the body imagined to be deviant, to expose it, to punish it. It is an indication of how the obsession for exposing the queer body continues to grow regardless of how what constitutes that body continues to be incoherently defined. (The courts, for instance, have not till date, convicted anyone in any of the cases arising from the gay busts). For Isaac, like many queer persons living under SSMPA in Nigeria, he would rather not be reduced to a body and suspicions over its deviance. He would rather walk through the streets of Lagos like everyone else hustling for their daily 2k, working to secure respectable livelihoods in spite of dire economic conditions that many Nigerians are living under.

[i] Ekine, Sokari (2013). ‘Contesting Narratives of Queer Africa’, in Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas (eds.), Queer African Reader. Dakar, Nairobi and Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 78–91

[ii] Nyeck, S. N. (2016). African Religions, the Parapolitics of Discretion and Sexual Ambiguity in Oral Epics. Journal of Theology for Southern Africa.

Oguntola-Laguda, D., & van Klinken, A. (2016). Uniting a divided nation? Nigerian Muslim and Christian responses to the same-sex marriage (Prohibition) act. Public Religion and the Politics of Homosexuality in Africa, 35–48. https://doi.org/10.4324/97813156029

[iii] Meiu, G. P. (2020). UNDERLAYERS OF CITIZENSHIP: Queer Objects, Intimate Exposures, and the Rescue Rush in Kenya. Cultural Anthropology, 35(4), 575–601. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.4.04

[iv] Individual names are replaced by pseudonyms.