“She said she feared for my own physical safety because she said there were people in Minneapolis who were ready and willing to kill me,” Mr. Olad recounted. “She went on and on about religion and culture and how this was unacceptable in our religious values.”

The next day, he learned, he was to meet with a group of men who would take him to a “conversion camp.” Mr. Olad was told that they would make him straight, and bring him back into the faith. To buy time, he agreed to go, but that same night escaped with his passport to the United States Consulate in Nairobi. The organization Ex-Muslims of North America paid for his ticket back to Ithaca. He has not seen his family since.

Mr. Olad said he felt people in his family had no qualms about his being killed. “They had moral or ethical debates about if it was right or wrong to kill me for being gay.”

Another gay Somali-American man in Minneapolis, who asked to be identified only as Farah, said that Mr. Olad was not the first L.G.B.T.Q. Somali-American to end up in a situation like this. “There are serious consequences for coming out,” he said.

While extreme, Mr. Olad’s story illustrates the paradox L.G.B.T.Q. Somali-Americans face in finding sanctuary in Minneapolis, which has notably large Somali and L.G.B.T.Q. communities. On the one hand, those interviewed for this article say that homophobic attitudes are the norm in their Somali community. But they also say that Minneapolis’s larger L.G.B.T.Q. community, which is mostly white, feels foreign and exclusionary to them.

The resulting feeling of isolation is a common refrain: “I didn’t even think it was possible, or that other queer Somali people existed,” said Hafsa Guled, who uses a gender-neutral honorific and the gender-neutral pronouns they and them. They came out as queer in their early 20s in Minneapolis, but now live in Chicago. “There’s kind of a gap between white queers and Somalis,” Mx. Guled said.

Farah said mental health remains a challenge for many Somali-Americans, especially those who fled war and came to the United States as refugees. But it is even more challenging for L.G.B.T.Q. Somalis because of the isolation they feel from both communities.