Homophobia & Gay Bashing in Jamaica:

TOPIC: Vilify Jamaicans for attitudes that Britain created:
Decca Aitkenhead Wednesday January 5, 2005
The Guardian

The prime minister of Jamaica recently cleared a week to show an American travel show round his island. He danced for the cameras and tasted national dishes with a smile to sell his country to tourist dollars. During a break in filming, he gave the Guardian an interview.

How did PJ Patterson plan to remedy the damage Jamaica's gay rights record was doing to its image? The smile vanished. "Let me make it very clear," he said. "The laws of Jamaica must be determined by the parliament of Jamaica, and that right we will maintain. We will never - never - compromise." He is perfectly aware that his country's homophobia has become a fashionable British liberal cause and that the Home Office has refused entry to reggae stars known for homophobic lyrics.

So why would a PM so desperate for foreign favour that he will dance on demand flatly refuse to contemplate reform? Patterson was born nearly 30 before Jamaica became fully independent, in 1962. Imperialism is living memory, and his message is plainly legitimate: if you really believe in postcolonial independence, don't tell us what to do with it.

But the vilification of Jamaican homophobia implies more than a failure to accept postcolonial politics. It's a failure to recognise 400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation. Slavery laid the foundations of homophobia, and its legacy is still unmistakable in the precarious, overexaggerated masculinity of many men in Jamaica. Jamaica was one of the most scandalously misgoverned of Britain's colonies, and since independence we've been helping ourselves to its workforce, while stigmatising it for exporting drugs and yardies.

This has left an emasculating sense in many men thatthe only life that counts is lived abroad. Jamaica today is very poor. The schools are bad, the healthcare atrocious and the police widely mistrusted, and for many the only support comes from churches, many of which dispense a fire-and-brimstone religion that is not merely homophobic, but designed to discourage independent thought. The government doesn't have enough money to make real change, and the reason is simple. This year 69.9% of its budget went on servicing debt. For education, there was less than 10%.

Many Jamaicans are not homophobic, but the prevailing attitude to gays is ignorant and sometimes violent. But the fact remains that of all Jamaica's injustices and deprivations, homophobia cannot be singled out as uniquely intolerable. Although activists are right to campaign about it, it's wrong for public opinion to seize on the issue with no thought for political context. A better emotion would be culpability.

Every ingredient of Jamaica's homophobia implicates Britain, whose role has maintained the conditions conducive to homophobia, from slavery through to the debt that makes education unaffordable. For us to vilify Jamaicans for an attitude of which we were the architects is shameful.

To do so in the name of liberal values is meaningless. Real liberal values would demand debt relief, fair trade, investment - all the boring, complicated features required for a functional and just society. If that happened, homophobia would soon organically dissolve. Jamaicans weren't the architects of their ideas about homosexuality; we were.

The idea that shouting at them will change their minds is no less ignorant and irrational than homophobia itself.

mimbari2003@yahoo.com wrote:

Topic:
Homophobia In Jamaica!

If there are Laws that specifically discriminates against (consensual same sexual relations) between adults, then it is incumbent upon the Jamaican commonweal to agitate against such laws. Let there be a referendum from the general population on the pros & cons of this law, it's genesis, the rational behind it becoming Statute, and whether or not, THE PEOPLE feel that is must be abolished!

If Jamaica's Constitution subscribes to theprinciples of Democracy, then the commonweal has the right to advocate for any change in laws that separate, discriminate or castigate any group, individual or race, because of their sexual identity or orientation.

I call upon the people of Jamaica to continue agitating for the revamping of any law/s that discriminate against anyone, on the grounds of "Same Sex Affection or Orientation." Ultimately the voice of the commons must be heard, and taken into account by the political administration in power.

Because that is the way political & administrative changes are made in Democracies!

Om Shanti.
Derryck S. Griffith.
Political Educator & Advocate.
http://profiles.yahoo.com/derryck_mimbari