‘Orgasm’: The Nigerian indie film exploring the dangers of queer hookup culture

Image Description: A still from the film orgasm. Two black male presenting individuals who play certain characters from the film are on a bed in distinct sitting positions. One of them looks at the other perplexed as though asking a question. Their hair is rolled to stand singularly and they are wearing a silver necklace.  The other has a silver earring on with a mid length goatee and short cropped hair.

Ogun, Nigeria (Minority Africa) — In 2017, Godwin Harrison found out his lover was getting married a few days before the wedding to a woman despite being gay. His story is familiar to various LGBTQ+ Nigerians.

“I was in love. One day my partner woke up one morning a year into our relationship and told me, ‘I’m getting married,’” Harrison says. “The funniest thing was the marriage was scheduled for Saturday, and we were meeting on a Thursday. He wasn’t bi, but he decided to go into it just to please society and his family.” 

Sharing his experience with friends and listening to their own stories inspired Godwin’s new short film Orgasm. In Nigeria where sexual expressions outside what is considered the norm are shamed, criminalised and often met with religious and state-sponsored  pushback culminating in their being forced underground, finding love as a queer person is challenging.

“Society and its discriminatory laws have not made it easy to walk up to someone and say, ‘Oh, I like you.’ We find love in the comfort of online hookups and dating sites,” Harrison says.  

 The 28-year-old filmmaker, who is based in Abuja, Nigeria, runs Hug Media Concept, which he started three years ago. It is a movie production company dedicated to telling African LGBTQ+ stories. 

“I’ve been into filmmaking for my whole life; since 2007. I was in Asaba then. I started as a scriptwriter in 2015 before going into my films. By 2019 I started exploring the LGBTQ+ story,” Harrison says. 

Harrison believes that the story of queer people finding love online is overdue. ” I wrote [Orgasm] last year, but I started working on it this year. It is part of my own story as a person and uses a little bit of fiction to tell the world and LGBTQ community that love happens everywhere and can find you anywhere.”

Orgasm tells a story of a one-night  stand between two queer men played by Prince Barnabas and Obue Elvis, who are both looking for various things: love and a final fling before heterosexual marriage.

“Orgasm is about a queer guy trying to find balance,” says 28-year-old Prince Barnabas, who plays the lead role. “It’s a mixture of controversy, love and tragedy. The movie shows two people not deeply in love; it’s about a one-night  stand.”

Orgasm explores a familiar story for many queer Nigerians: hookup culture and navigating safety finding sex, love, and companionship online in an environment where that quest can be fatal. 

“The storyline focuses on the problems gay people face when it comes to dating,” Barnabas explains. “It portrays a story of how we can manage it and go about finding love online because most times it’s like the safest place, but to be frank, it’s no longer safe, and a lot of people use it to take advantage.”

He is correct. LGBTQ+ Nigerians using dating apps such as Grindr, Tinder or connecting through social media to find potential hookups have reported being beaten, swindled, blackmailed, and some of these encounters have even resulted in death. 

According to The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERS), in 2021 there were 110 reported cases of blackmail due to the victim’s sexual identity. LGBTQ+ Nigerians who fall victim to blackmail can’t get justice due to the 2014 Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, which is often abused by the police to carry out illegal raids and extort perceived homosexuals.

This year, a viral video showed a cross-dresser who was attacked by street thugs days after LGBTQ+ activists protested against a proposed cross-dressing bill by the National Assembly.

Within the community, this experience of going on a date or an arranged hookup and then being conned is referred to as “Kito” and being “kitoed.” It led in part to the birth of a blog that was a response to many instances of gay people being extorted. 

“One can never be too careful or careless as regards being kitoed. Based on what I’ve heard from friends, it just happens. So it boils down to the internal homophobic seed that society has planted in the hearts of queer men,” Harrison says. 

For Barnabas, working on Orgasm was an opportunity to be in the stories he always wanted to tell as an actor and put the spotlight on how the community normalises sexual assault against queer people.

“I had been sexually harassed once. It just happened, I felt like I took the wrong step. I was supposed to meet with someone but the movement didn’t go the way we planned and I met the wrong person and the guy took advantage of me,” he tells Minority Africa. 

“It wasn’t funny but living through the trauma and always thinking about it and trying to dissect that this is not you, and understand these kinds of things just happen.”

Not much is known about the hook-up culture and how it shapes not just queer relationships but also the lives of queer people. Within Orgasm’s 15 minutes runtime, the short film shows what dating is like for Nigerian gay men saddled with the heterosexual expectations of society while also navigating blatant homophobia. 

“These stories need to be told, and as an LGBTQ filmmaker, my major driving force is just to tell these stories no matter the circumstances or hindrances,” Harrison says. 

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The actors also share this driving force.

“I’ve always seen acting as a means of telling stories, mostly hidden stories,” he says and to Orgasm’s unique focus adding, “Aside from me, a lot of person’s face these problems; people taking advantage of them when it is not what they want or what they wish for, and nobody is saying anything about it, it’s just so calm.” 

Barnabas continues, “We need to let people know that there are certain things about minorities, a lot of problems we go through that people just assume that since they are not accepted in a particular place or community, they should just accept. I don’t know how people see less of minority people. Playing a role, I feel like I’m standing in for them.”

Although various filmmakers are trying to ensure LGBTQ+ Nigerians are documented and represented on screen, the National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) often bans films featuring queer characters, citing moral reasons although there are no laws to back their bans. 

Last year, the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC) banned Marvel’s Eternals from cinemas in the country due to a same-sex kissing scene, and in 2020 NFVCB threatened to track down and jail those involved in the making of Ife, a film based on a lesbian couple living in Nigeria. Despite this, Nigerian filmmakers are finding ways to ensure that their films are available to both local and international audiences. 

Orgasm was released on April 10, 2022 on GayBinge TV, which holds exclusive rights to the film.

Despite the challenges that come with finding love, Harrison hopes the film would help inspire more queer Nigerians to lead a life that is honest to them. 

“There’s an adage I always tell people; when you try to cover a flame, with time it grows into a fire that can consume an entire building. So when you try to hide your sexuality, with time it either turns into internalized homophobia or it ruins your mental health,” he says. 

“To stop all of this just live your truth if you know you can, nobody can force you to be what you’re not.”

Edited by Caleb Okereke and Uzoma Ihejirika