It's not exactly Brokeback Mountain. They look like they're having more fun, for starters – one guy bent over a deluxe sofa getting rogered by his mate: "Yeah! You know I'm a bad boy!"

It's no tearjerking "I wish I knew how to quit you", but it is a tiny piece of history: one of Nollywood's handful of gay sex scenes. It kicks off the film Pregnant Hawkers in typically unapologetic Nollywood style; surprisingly explicit for a country where homosexual sex is still illegal and punishable by death in some states.

Reactions have been, shall we say, mixed. "I'm speechless – are we supposed to accept this trend?" said one blogger. A forum commenter: "This is not good for Nollywood – salt in the wound." Another: "It's time for sympathetically and affirmatively drawn gay characters in Nollywood. That would only elevate Nollywood and its international audience."

You couldn't call Pregnant Hawkers, which came out earlier this year, sympathetic. Popping a gay sex scene up front in the first scene is pure exploitation tactics on the part of the producers, in line with a recent strain of more sexually frank Nollywood some deem to be pornography. After mum walks in on the pair – to much shrieking and doomy percussion claps on the soundtrack – they only reappear to bookend the film, which is a series of vignettes about exploitative relationships. One poisons the other, when he refuses to give up on his girlfriend. Annie Proulx would be proud.

This animosity and moralising is the story of LGBT characters so far in Nollywood. It's produced a small body of "gay cinema" – examined in detail in this excellent essay by Lindsey Green-Simms and Unoma Azuah – in which homosexuals are almost always under the influence of witchcraft, mentally ill, or just plain wrong 'uns.

The first Nollywood depiction of a gay relationship was in 2003's Emotional Crack – which meanders round to the subject after spending its first hour pondering domestic violence. Having rejected a wifebeater and hooked up with his victim, Dakore Egbuson-Akande's free spirit is transformed into a kind of Single White Female harpy after eventually getting the cold-shoulder from her lover. She ends up stabbing herself. Things hadn't moved on by 2010's Men in Love, in which the lead couple's affair is explained away by a "strong Satanic bond".

That kind of snide audience manipulation isn't totally dissimilar to what Hollywood did to the LGBT community under the Hays Code. It took until the 1990s for things to really start changing in America. Clearly, the Brokeback breakthrough could be a while away in Nigeria. It's difficult to get Nollywood stars – many of whom are happy to air the anti-gay views that much of the country's devout population share – to play gay, which is sometimes left to Ghanaian actors further out on the fringe of the industry.

Some commentators see it as positive that homosexuality is getting depicted at all. After 10 years, Emotional Crack is still a well-known title – quite a feat considering the Nigerian industry's ferocious turnover. The continued production of gay-themed titles shows that they're hitting a nerve of tangible prejudice, fear and even curiosity. But is there a Nigerian director ready to go a step further and empathise?

• Next week's After Hollywood will look at Hollywood's local-language film productions. Which global cinematic stories would you like to see covered in the column? Let us know in the comments below.