French sociologist Salima Amari claims in a new book that homosexual women growing up in migrant-heavy French suburbs are forced to hide their sexuality and many are even forced to move elsewhere if they “come out”.
Amari spent six years interviewing 52 women of primarily North African descent who live in some of the heavily migrant populated suburbs across the country and found many wanting to remain “invisible” so as not to provoke homophobic attacks or be shunned by their families, L’Express reports.
The migrant-heavy suburbs have become commonly known as no-go zones due to the high levels of crime, ghettoisation, and the prevalence of radical Islam.
Breitbart London editor in chief Raheem Kassam visited the suburbs in 2017, writing about his experiences in his book No Go Zones: How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You which is available on Amazon.
“City lesbians can look for the comfort of anonymity, refuse coming out, to keep a balance. If they become too visible, they will lose the family, the parental bond,” Amari said in an interview with L’Express.
“In the rare cases where girls come out, it often leads to the breakup of the family,” Amari said, adding that when they do “come out” they often move to an entirely different city.
While Amari denied there was a problem with physical violence toward lesbians in the migrant-populated suburbs, she said during the evenings “there are more men occupying the public space in neighbourhoods, so they are more likely to be targeted by homophobia. Often, women just go through this space.”
That was not the case for two lesbians in the Paris suburb of Val-d’Oise earlier this year who were physically attacked by a group of young men on the metro who called them “lesbian whores” and shouted other slurs at them.
Homosexual men have also been the targets of threats and harassment from migrant-background individuals as well. Last month in the Paris suburb of Hauts-de-Seine two men reported that a woman shouted at them in a supermarket calling them various slurs and said: “They deserve death. In Algeria, we would cut off their heads.”
The rising levels of homophobia in the suburbs and rising Islamic radicalism were largely credited for the surge of support for anti-mass migration former French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen last year from the gay community.
“Faced with the current threats, particularly from radical Islam, gays have realised they’ll be the first victims of these barbarians, and only Marine is proposing radical solutions,” gay artist and Paris resident Kelvin Hopper said.