PLACES WHERE GAY LOVE IS ILLEGAL

                                                                              “We should round up all the gays and send them to Uganda to be shot!”

This was a friend of mine speaking, an educated entrepreneur in his 30s, a devout Christian from Nigeria. A homophobe.

We need to protect the children, families and the culture of Nigeria, he continued. Handing out the harshest punishments to homosexuals, he said, would be an important deterrent to the younger generation.

My friend is not alone in his views. These opinions are sadly common not only in Nigeria, but also in the rest of Africa. Having spent most of my career there, I’ve noticed an increasing homophobia on the continent.

Almost 2.8 billion people live in countries where identifying as lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual and intersex could lead to imprisonment, corporal punishment or even death.

I had read about homophobia, heard opinions like those of my friend’s that are shocking and far too familiar. But rarely had I come across work that captured the feelings and voices of the persecuted.

For this project, I wanted to give those individuals a chance to say what they wanted to say, and be seen how they wanted to be seen, by collaborating with them in their portrait’s creation and allowing them to write their own stories. The results were often unexpected, insightful and almost always deeply moving.

The project took me to seven countries where persecution of L.G.B.T.I. people is widespread, and in each place local activists introduced me to the survivors of discrimination.

Shooting with a large camera and using Polaroid-type film, I gave my subjects, many of whom were scared of being identified, the right to destroy the photo if they thought it threatened their safety.

Letting them have the power over the process not only made them feel more secure, but it also changed our relationship.

I traveled first to Nigeria, where last year in the north of the country I talked to five young men in hiding.

Because they were gay, they had been arrested and faced the death penalty. The cases were dismissed, but not before the men were flogged.

They hid because their families had rejected them, and their community, disappointed with the verdict, was ready to hand out the punishment that it felt the court neglected to provide.

Hearing of the arrest and torture was harrowing. But what really broke my heart was the evident pain the men felt from being ostracized by their families. One of them recalled a moment after his prison stay, when he was too ill to move, that a family member said to him: “God should take your life so we will have peace. You have caused so much dishonor.”