**6. Conclusion**

This study demonstrates the identities LGBT people in Nigeria construct for themselves in their tweets in the bid to resist the status quo, given the opportunity social media offers to marginalized groups such as the LGBT community. Different discourse and linguistic strategies were used to tactically foreground their identities contesting the identities portrayed in the mainstream media. The tweets present sexual minorities as humans who should enjoy their fundamental human rights like other humans, a community, suggesting cooperation numerical strength and power, resilient fighters, not criminals, fearful, and helpless in determining their sexual orientation. The tweets construct the identities of sexual minorities as normative as other sexualities. Generally, these identities are constructed to resist the existing ideological presuppositions that produce homophobia in the Nigerian context.

This study argues that queer visibilities may be strategically utilized as an attempt to liberate sexual minorities from societal structures and their norms. Social media presents an opportunity for the creation of community-based safe spaces, which may increase queer visibilities. However, attempts to create such visibilities may paradoxically result in situations of abuse, violence, human rights violations, discrimination, and stigma against LGBT communities [48]. This suggests that caution must be taken when utilizing queer safe spaces, especially in places that are characterized as heteronormative such as Nigeria [49].

One of the contributions of this study is that it addresses a missing element from the extant literature on the role of social media in the identity construction of the LGBT people as an organizational strategy to resist subsisting homophobia in Nigeria, via the use of certain discursive and linguistic strategies. Again, this article contributes to an understanding of some of the challenges that Nigerian sexual minorities encounter. Lastly, this study provides valuable insights into how Social Identity Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Systemic Functional Linguistics are valuable approaches to the study of identity.

*LGBT+ Communities – Creating Spaces of Identity*
