Hermann, Ivory Coast
Identifying as an LGBTQ person in the Ivory Coast is not easy or really normal. You have to hide a lot of the time. We have a few LGBTQ organizations here but they have to hide and stay in their corner and if you try and associate with this community publicly, you’ll get beat up. Sometimes you can tell your family that you feel different, that you like men, and the family will often just feel like something is wrong with you and throw you out on the street. I met a man in the Ivory Coast and we started a relationship but we had to keep it hidden. My family even thought it was just a good friendship. It wasn’t until the both of us got a scholarship to go to school in the US together that we finally felt at ease. We could be ourselves, and be affectionate in public together. We were there together in the US for one year. When I got back to the Ivory Coast, I couldn’t hide it anymore and decided to tell my family. My mom was okay with it but my uncles and the rest of my family said I couldn’t stay with them anymore. They started threatening me, telling me that they’d kill me and make me disappear. It was very frightening. The Ivory Coast is a very small country and news travels very far so I didn’t really feel safe anywhere. I could only deal with that for three months before I’d had enough. Thankfully I had a Canadian visa in my passport from when I was in the US and I made the decision to come to Toronto. I arrived here on September 6, 2018 with my partner too. We became members of the 519 and we really feel comfortable here. Nobody stares at us or thinks we’re weird when we walk hand-in-hand in public. We both applied for refugee status and our hearings are coming up soon.
PhotoGRAPHED by
Richmond Uy
Richmond is a photographer, poet and aspiring filmmaker. His photography tends to focus on portraitures and street photography, including personal tales of family, friends and emotional maturity as a Filipinx immigrant in Scarborough. Outside of his creative endeavours, he is a New Media student at the University of Toronto.