Yes, The Reinforcement of Homophobia Does Have a Socioeconomic Basis

There seems to be this liberal delusion that you can just argue people's convictions away without fundamentally changing their material conditions.

They choose instead to blame the bigotry of the working poor on ignorance and religiousity without ever wondering what enforces these conditions?

The very idea that the current economic system is why things remain the way they are shocks them.
I've lost count of how many times I've been called a crazy Leninist by LGBT advocates of twitter for daring to suggest that Capitalism enforces the oppression not just of LGBT people but other marginalized groups such as women, Shiites, and ethnic minorities.

They want me to divorce my advocacy from my cRaZy economic lunacy(insert: Go and read some economics, and other such motherfuckeries).
I do not believe that such a thing can exist. There is no way to divorce advocacy for societal change from a political praxis.
I fundamentally believe that there is a material basis for the perpetuation of bigotry, and it doesn't take much to see it.

Let's take religion for instance.
Religious identity is a mostly holistic one, or at least that's the way it plays out for fundamentalists.
People cannot separate themselves from the value systems that these beliefs dictate.
The way this affects their views of LGBT identity is by casting it as fundamentally incompatible behavior.
It's not just that I am gay, it is that when the average religious Nigerian sees that, they feel like it stands in antagonism against their personal identity.

And now let me ask the apolitical. Who do you think is responsible for these views?

Your ruling elites constantly fuel this religious fundamentalism to hold on to allegiance from people who have more and more been exposed to stringent economic hardship.
They do not have healthcare for themselves or their children and cannot afford to send their children to good schools.
They cannot pay their rent and live under constant housing insecurity and rising commodity prices as the tiny bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie class accumulate more and more of the (comparatively small)wealth that is produced in this country.

A convenient way for the ruling class to maintain their wealth and their power is to exacerbate fundamentalist tendencies of the major religious groups.
They make public displays of going to church or mosques to seek God's blessings And God's mandate, enforcing the whole “God is still in control” trope.
They fund religious organizations, fundamentalist ones like MURIC, and are major tithers and donors to extremist Churches and Mosques.
They build churches and mosques With State funds, and sponsor religious pilgrimage to foreign countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel.
They constantly peddle fundamentalists religious rhetoric in a competition to establish themselves the chosen candidate of God.

They also actively promote dependence and blind hope in God as THE solution to the problems which their wealth accumulation creates.

Pray for the Nation.
Fast to defeat Boko Haram.
Service to save the country. Etc etc etc.

When they decided to fan the embers of anti LGBT bigotry, there was NO popular movement to get such a legislation.
Literally nobody was thinking about it. Zero people. It was not on anyone's radar.
None of them campaigned on getting bans on LGBT people during the 2011 elections. It was in THEIR class interest to make it to an issue which is why it became an issue.

But still, there remains a total blindness among liberals to see how exactly these social and cultural situations come about and persist.
They want to deal just with the surface issues and truly believe that would work. Fucking insane. In every country where LGBT rights have advanced, the working poor remain the most conservative regarding them and remain the most religious because they need that.
And to solve the problem of homophobia it is necessary to not only combat the surface arguments for it but to also oppose the material reality that necessitates and/or preserves those sentiments in the consciousness of the masses.

No matter how you look at it, the dynamics always always remain the same.
Whether you look at the cultural values that inform LGBT bigotry or the religious ones or the pseudoscientific ones, belying it are the same problem. No amount of condescending to poor uneducated people will change them.
In fact it will only serve to fester a view of Us versus Them. Culture wars, I thinks that's the term used to depict that type of pitting working people against other working people for the benefit of the ruling class.

Note too how State action reinforces these bigoted views.
Before the SSMPA was signed in by failed President Goodluck Jonathan in a desperate attempt by the PDP to cling to power, there were already a myriad of laws banning everything about queer sexual identities.

There was already a law in the penal code criminalizing crossdessing.
There was another one criminalizing male same-sex sexual activity, by death in some circumstances.

In the criminal code, there were already statutes in place criminalizing sexual activity and even the mere act of TRYING to secure a same-sex sexual partner was a criminal offence.

The entire point of the SSMPA was to stoke some sort of solidarity in terms of shared values and help the people they were oppressing economically find a way to still affiliate to them.
In its aftermath, they also arrested people in public displays and of course as is customary with the Nigerian police, paraded them before the public.

What it did was foster an environment of violence, from the general public towards LGBT people. A violence which the State happily turned a blind eye to. A violence which the state is directly culpable for, not just because they allow it but because they incite it. And they do this as a way to continue to maintain power by satisfying the cultural expectations they set.

All in all, these things are inexplicably tied and you could try to wage the culture war and win it. You could try to solve the problem of homophobia without actually advocating against any of the underlying causes which stoke and perpetuate it.
That's basically what the Western countries did and now they are confronted with a surge of far right ideology that end up disproportionately hurting the same gay people and minorities that are supposed to have been liberated.

Do not delude yourself. Oppression is inherently produced and sustained by the economically oppressive material condition of the masses, and to fight it we must be fight this economic system that sustains it.