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    'Un-African'? Photos Challenge Notions Of LGBTQ Identity In The African Diaspora

    Mikael Owunna's new book captures the stories of LGBTQ African immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers reconciling their identity and their heritage.
    by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento Nov 02, 2019 3 minutes
    Nesma (left) and Anys are Algerian siblings who came out to each other at a party. They live in Paris, and both identify as queer. "It now makes us stronger and committed together for the queer and Algerian causes," Anys says.

    In 2005, when Mikael Chukwuma Owunna was 15 years old, he came out as gay on MySpace.

    At the time, many of his Nigerian family members deemed his sexual orientation "un-African." Owunna is a Nigerian-Swedish engineer, photographer and Fulbright Scholar born and raised in Pittsburgh, where he's still based today. But when he went home to Nigeria for the holidays as a teenager, a priestess performed several forced exorcisms to "wash the 'gay devil' out," he recounts now in the preface.

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