Cabrel Ngounous, a 19-year-old, fled his native Cameroon after neighbors caught the teenager with his boyfriend. A crowd surrounded his boyfriend’s house and beat him, Ngounou said. His own family learned of the relationship and threw him out.
After a dangerous, four-year journey through at least five countries and a sexual assault in a Libyan prison, Ngounou caught the attention of U.N. officials when he joined a protest outside the refugee agency’s Tunisia office. He arrived in San Francisco in March and has been resettled thanks to a small U.S. State Department program that is tackling the nuts-and-bolts issue of getting political refugees in the U.S. settled, LGBTQ+ asylum seekers among them.
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
“LGBTQ refugees are forced to flee their homes due to persecution and violence, not unlike other people,” Jeremy Haldeman, deputy executive director of the Community Sponsorship Hub, told The Los Angeles Times.
Hademan is in charge of implementing the Biden administration’s Welcome Corps on behalf of the State Department.
LGBTQ+ refugees are particularly vulnerable, he said, because they’re coming from places “where their identities are criminalized and they are at risk of imprisonment or even death.”
Speaking about the mob that attacked his boyfriend, Ngounous said, “The worst thing was that they caught us. So it was not easy for my family. My sisters told me I need to get out of the house because my place is not there. So that’s what really pushed me to leave my country.”
He found refuge in San Francisco with the help of Welcome Corps.
The small nonprofit pairs newly arrived refugees with sponsors who take on their charges for at least three months after they arrive. The resettlement program has connected 3,500 sponsors with 1,800 refugees. Over 100,000 Americans have volunteered to help in the effort.
Ngounou’s team of seven sponsors included a lesbian couple, Anne Raeff and Lori Ostlund, who hosted Ngounou and connected him with LGBTQ+ resources and a work training program. The San Francisco residents also served as tour guides on a visit to the city’s Castro District, where Raeff said Ngounou stopped to read every plaque honoring famous gay people.
“Cabrel was just very, very moved by that. Just kind of started crying. We all did,” she recalled.
Now Ngounou is taking college courses with the goal of becoming a social worker, and he’s supporting himself with work at a coffee shop. He hopes a boyfriend he met in Tunisia can come visit one day and will enjoy the freedom to love that Ngounou has found in his new home.
“Here I’m really me … I feel free,” he said with a laugh. “I feel free to have my boyfriend and walk with him in the street. I feel free, you know, to enjoy myself with him wherever we want to enjoy ourselves. But in Tunisia or anywhere else, in Cameroon, you have to hide such things.”
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nationnewsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
