Abuja, Nigeria — (Minority Africa) When I first spoke to Richard on Grindr in July, his bio had displayed his political view for months. It was simple: sex is available only for registered voters. If you want to hook up, you must show proof that you are eligible to vote. “I put it up on the day Peter Obi declared he would be running for presidency under the Labour Party,” he says. “I updated it because the number of active and reactive interactions on Grindr is way higher than that of conventional social media platforms. The urgency people come to Grindr with makes it easier to stop them in their tracks and have just about any discussion with them.” Nigeria has appeared third in the list of highest users of Grindr in the world yet homophobia is ubiquitous. In 2014, then president Goodluck Jonathan passed a bill into law criminalizing same sex marriage in the country with up to 14 years in prison. Online and offline; Nigeria is currently brimming with political discourse centered on the general elections in February 2023. On Twitter, a presidential candidate, Peter Obi, and the name of his political party have dominated the discussion for months. Obi has been at the forefront of a social media rave that has inspired many young first-time voters to register to vote and also campaign. A former governor of Anambra State, the Labour Party presidential candidate, sits at the centre as the people’s favorite, with followership determined to upturn the Nigerian duo-political party system that has recycled the same politicians for decades. Richard was in Abuja when we interacted. He had been to two other states with that bio on his Grindr profile. It made people laugh, and it made them talk about politics, he says. By the time he took a break from Grindr four months later, he had discussed politics and Peter Obi with over two hundred people. “I decided to do something to help Obi gain more popularity because I agree with his plans to improve the education and tech sector here in Nigeria,” he says. “I also did it because I think we are our problem – as much as our government is – and as such, can do a great deal in fixing this problem by just voting the right candidate into office.” After watching the value of the Naira fall and the steady rise of insecurity, unemployment, and inflation, Nigerian youths — forced out of school, without jobs, and massacred by the current regime of President Muhammadu Buhari — have seen a glint of hope in Peter Obi. When Obi was governor, he made many unprecedented achievements across sectors in his state and has since captured the hearts of Nigerians by discussing the country’s principal problems today. He has also laid out how he plans to solve these problems, a choice that has set him apart from the other candidates. In the months since he made his intention to run for office known, Obi, once mocked as Twitter President because of his popularity on Twitter, has grown to have popularity offline as well. His supporters embarked on a named “one million march” earlier in October. However, his followership has not only crossed the borders of Twitter into the streets but also traversed into the ‘dark alleys’ of gay dating and hookup apps in the country. Igwe Charles lives in Lagos and uses Tinder as his primary hookup app. He has a picture of Obi among his own images on display on his profile. Charles, who should be rounding off his studies in the university but is still in his penultimate year because of university strikes, speaks of encountering similar accounts with pictures and fliers of Obi and the Labour Party. “I saw other accounts like mine with pictures of Peter Obi. And the rest generally start with some small talk about politics and supporting Obi in the chats,” he says. On what inspired the decision to upload a picture of Peter Obi on his profile, Charles says, “Having photos of Obi alongside my own on my Tinder profile stems largely from how dearly I need him to win this election.” “Recently, I started chatting with a man who is also an ardent Obi campaigner. He has pictures of Obi on his profile. He sends me so many updates on everything Obi, his travels, speeches, interviews, videos, everything. The hope that Obi wins was one of the things we had in common.” Nnadi Chukwukalidibia is another person who was not in school because of the strike at the time of our conversation in September. If universities were open, Chukwukalidibia would have defended his thesis for a postgraduate degree in clinical linguistics and be charting his next course in life. Instead, he worked as a manager in a fast-food outlet in Delta State until the recent call-off of the strike. “As a queer person, I cannot thrive where things do not work.