“I didn’t want to portray them as victims or otherwise extraordinary, but individually complex like everyone else” – Tom Maguire
As the founder of Solidarité des MSM Madagascar, one of the only NGOs on the island working to reach and support the country’s LGBT community, Balou is a prominent figure of Madagascar's LGBT underground. In 2017, Maguire lived and worked closely with the commune for a month, spending most of his time with the first woman to come out publicly in Madagascar as transgender, Balou Chabart Rasoana. Telling the photographer that no journalists had been there before, they asked him to come back and document their lives. After spending time working with an NGO in Madagascar in 2016, Maguire met a group of LGBT Malagasies living in a queer commune in the neighbourhood of Antananarivo. Understanding the severity that all this has had on queer life in Madagascar is British photographer Tom Maguire. Alongside this, unlike other Eastern-African countries who have found their voice in the international media-scape, queer life in Madagascar remains largely underreported: something that sets off a domino effect for LGBT awareness and acceptance across the state. Oppressed by the weight of far-right wing politics, societal discrimination, and a lack of international media coverage, many queer Malagasies live in silence, only able to truly live out their identity in the incubation of LGBT safe spaces. Being gay in Madagascar doesn’t echo the loud and proud essence of queer communities in the west.