The idea of this book launch moves beyond the conventions of a literary unveiling. It is conceived as an experience, an encounter that invites the audience to cross thresholds and inhabit the multiple realities of queer life in Nigeria. Western media has long captured queer Africans through a singular, flattened lens of victimhood, one marked by violence, exile, and loss. These narratives, though rooted in truth, often obscure another equally urgent reality: that of survival as celebration, of community as resistance, of dreaming as a political act.

Drawing from the book The Shit and the Sunrise and the wider body of work emerging from Obodo Nigeria, this event is an act of testimony and celebration. This event marks the beginning of a continuing series of cross-geographical dialogues between Lagos and Berlin, exploring queer futurity, artistic freedom, and cultural memory.

The Queer Nigerian Counterpublic is an offering—a gesture of love, defiance, and kinship. It invites participants to move beyond witnessing into feeling; beyond seeing into sensing. It is not simply a launch, but a living archive of what queer life in Nigeria continues to mean: the insistence to dance, to dream, and to exist, together.