In June 2023, after receiving approval to conduct participant-observation field research from Wesleyan University's Institutional Review Board (IRB), I conducted ethnography with SOGI asylees and volunteers at Secret Garden. This ethnographic study looked at the ways truth, (in)authenticity, and imagined LGBTI futurity were affectively experienced among myself and my interlocutors.

This thesis critiques the Dutch SOGI asylum apparatus as a 'straightening device" (a conceptual framework derived from Sara Ahmed's 2006 Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others) By functioning as a 'straightening device," the system enacts necropolitical violence, foreclosing the possibility of asylum status (and, in some cases, literal life) for those individuals least-oriented toward Dutch homonormativity, while simultaneously biopolitically reproducing the homonormative figure that sustains this hierarchical geopolitical order. I offer a discursive critique, arguing that the organizing logic of the Dutch SOGI asylum apparatus obfuscates the way that SOGI asylee subject formation does occur along (un)straightened lines, rendered as such because of and despite the state. In this thesis, I attend to the narration of asylum stories (Chapter One), the determination of (in)authenticity, (Chapter Two), and the imagining of LGBTI futures (Chapter Three) as crucial sites for the SOGI asylum seekers at the center of this ethnography, who face an asylum apparatus that simultaneously enables and forecloses their lives.