Queer Nigerians still struggle with housing discrimination and homelessness
In Nigeria, the pursuit to secure a safe and comfortable home is often fraught with challenges for many, but for the LGBTQ community — especially those who are openly gay — these challenges are often insurmountable.
Some two years ago, Fola Francis, a popular transgender woman who has since passed away, had to leave her home in Ibadan and fled to Lagos due to transphobia.
A now deleted video of her had gone viral on TikTok, and it got to the hands of her transphobic landlord and neighbors. They held a rally to make her leave the house, breaking into it many times. “I got death threats from my neighbors due to them finding out I’m a trans woman on social media when my videos went viral,” she said to the BBC.
Francis’s experience doesn’t exist in isolation. “For me, all I had to do was be visibly effeminate before my neighbors began to clamp down on and force me to move out,” Damian Okpara, a student at the University of Nigeria, told the Washington Blade.