Meet Bisi Alimi: “The First Nigerian Gay” To Come Out On CNN

So the rave
continues, days after the bill was passed against gay rights in
Nigeria, seems like Nigerians are beginning to become more open
with the gay issues.

Bisi Alimi the first Nigerian man to openly declare he was gay on TV
was on CNN to talk about his experience and the Nigerian anti-gay
law.

Read Excerpts below: -

In 2004, Bisi Alimi did an extraordinary thing.He went on national
television and told his fellow Nigerians that he was gay.
“There were so many things we don’t talk about,” Alimi told CNN’s
Christiane Amanpour on Thursday. “My career was on the line, I was
going to be outed by the media.”
It was better, he decided, to come out of the closet on his own
terms……

“I have a responsibility to stand up for the community, to give a face
to the community, to demystify the old arguments that there are no
homosexuals in Nigeria,” People were not ready to educate
themselves. And this created a lot of problems for the LGBT
community in Nigeria.”I couldn’t get a job, I left university, nobody
was going to employ me, my life was constantly in danger, I was
always beaten, arrested by the police, discharged.Parliament passed
the bill last year, so why did the president sign it now?
“He has been boxed to a corner,” Alimi said, who believes President
Jonathan is increasingly politically alienated.

I know, like so many other Nigerians know, that this is a
distraction.As for those fellow countrymen, Alimi believes that for
many, their intolerant views are bolstered by religion.How many
Nigerians know…what this law means? Or how many Nigerians have
an understanding outside of religion what exactly we talk about when
we talk about se*uality?”“Why then should religion be the basis of
putting a law in place in a secular state?”

He would eventually seek asylum in the UK, where he now lives.He
became the first Nigerian to declare his homosexuality on
television.In that same year, 2004, Alimi had been diagnosed with
HIV. He had been working for years as an activist with the gay
community in Nigeria, and was programing director for an HIV-
advocacy group.