Description

About Lives of Great Men Living and Loving as an African Gay Man

From Victoria Island, Lagos to Brooklyn, U.S.A. to Accra, Ghana to Paris, France; from across the Diaspora to the heart of the African continent. In this memoir Nigerian journalist Chike Frankie Edozien offers a highly personal series of contemporary snapshots of same gender loving Africans. Unsung Great Men living their lives, triumphing and finding joy in the face of great adversity.

On his travels and sojourns Edozien explores the worsening legal climate for gay men and women on the continent. The impact homophobic evangelical American pastors are having in many countries. And its toxic intersection with political populism. And experiences the pressures placed on those living under harshly oppressive laws that are themselves the legacy of colonial rule – pressures that sometimes lead to seeking asylum in the West.

Yet he remains hopeful, and this memoir, which is pacy, romantic and funny by turns. It’s also a love-letter to Africa, above all to Nigeria and the megalopolis that is Lagos.

Additional information

Chike Frankie Edozien is a Nigerian-American writer and journalist.^[1] A journalist for the New York Post and a professor of journalism at New York University, he is most noted for his 2017 memoir Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man, which won the Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Memoir/Biography category at the 30th Lambda Literary Awards in 2018. Originally published in the UK and US by Rikki Beadle-Blair and John R Gordon’s Team Angelica Press, in July 2018 it was brought out in South Africa by Jacana Books.