The Trump Effect: Elections at home and abroad dampen Liberia’s gay-rights revival

erik (hash) hersman

MONROVIA, Liberia—Friday nights at Sajj House, a Lebanese restaurant here, have, for several years now, been a draw for expats and upper-class Liberians alike. For a few hours each week, a place that typically offers little more than shawarma and bland pizza served beneath overhead fans transforms into an ad hoc dance club, loud and sweaty, with a DJ in an elevated booth mixing the Hot 100 with a dash of Trace Africa’s Top 10.

On one of these nights not long ago, a Liberian woman in her early 20s named Fatu headed out to Sajj with three friends, including a younger girl, a high school student, with whom she had been flirting for several weeks. As recently as 2014, Fatu concealed her attraction to women from everyone except close friends, but she has become more open lately, a process facilitated by her job at one of the country’s most prominent nongovernmental organizations working with sexual minorities.

When she has a few drinks, any lingering reservations melt away, and on this particular night she began, in the middle of the crowd, to dance closely with her crush. Before long, she noticed she had attracted the attention of several people nearby, including a man who appeared to be filming her with his phone.

Emboldened by beer, Fatu, whose full name is being withheld because her family is not aware of her sexual orientation, confronted the man. “I said, ‘Do you know me? Why would you take a video of me? We’re not even friends!’” she recalled. The man denied recording anything, but Fatu snatched the phone out of his hand and immediately opened Snapchat, where she found two clips of herself from just moments earlier. One of them had already been posted. The second was still a draft. For a caption, the man had written, “This is what is happening in our country.”

Now Fatu was angry. Taking the man’s phone with her, she stalked over to the Sajj security guards and played the clip for them. The guards approached the man. “I had the feeling to, you know, break his phone or even seize it,” Fatu said, “but then they talked to me and they told me to just delete it and give it back to him, and they would put him outside.” Sure enough, the guards, invoking a rule against filming other customers, threw the man out on the street. No mention was made of the fact that Fatu had been dancing with another woman.

In bird’s-eye surveys of LGBT liberation movements, individual acts of defiance such as Fatu’s don’t generally merit a mention. These narratives instead foreground high-profile showdowns: police raids, attacks on prominent activists, courtroom victories. Yet when stories like Fatu’s multiply and build upon each other, they can signify momentous change. They capture the hostility people face living in a society that has long privileged anti-gay views—and, more importantly, how that hostility can sometimes be countered effectively with a little resistance.

In the context of Liberian activism, Fatu’s dance-floor altercation was remarkable for another reason: Just five years earlier, amid Liberia’s first proper nationwide gay panic, it would have been practically unthinkable. As Liberian lawmakers debated anti-gay bills and homophobic groups issued threats against people supporting rights for LGBT Liberians—even distributing a hit list in one Monrovia neighborhood—security concerns mandated that people like Fatu maintain low profiles, at least for a time.

Once the worst of the panic subsided, however, LGBT Liberians emerged from this defensive crouch and set about trying to change public opinion, an undertaking that has required countless confrontations, large and small, day after day. As the reaction to Fatu’s dance-floor outburst shows, those fighting for LBGT rights are starting to make progress. But over the past year, the durability of these gains has been called into question by the shifting political winds on display during two presidential races: at...