Click on image to view gallery (4 photos).

Last week, we were sitting around, discussing the next Homophobe of the Week. As a young queer magazine (two weeks old, exactly), there are so many choices. So far, we’ve only covered two (Michael Corin from The National Post, and the Pope). At that moment, we got our reliable Google Alert, that tells us somewhere, out there, in cyber-land, someone typed and published the word gay, lesbian, queer, or transgender (and other selected words), and that we need to pay attention.

And it came as a letter to the editor, in the Jamaica Gleaner, titled, “Standing firm vs gay pressure.” In it, one Elaine M. says, ”Some parents have themselves to blame, boys should look like boys and girls look like girls. I once saw a mother with her son at a very young age playing with a doll; she thought it was ok for him to have a doll to play with…. The children should know that they are different, so they should look different… Multiply and replenish was a command given by God and since, like most Jamaicans, I believe that the principles laid down by God are right, I certainly hope that the Government does not buckle under the pressure of foreign governments and change the law of the country. God has never made a mistake but men always do.” 

Sadly, a thorough search through the Jamaica Gleaner reveals many more articles such as Elaine M.’s, compared to articles supporting queer people. There were, of course, numerous articles supporting gay people, and even an interview with a gay man.

We considered Jamaica as Homophobe of the Week. 

The next day, we got another Google Alert, this time alerting us to a column in the Canadian queer magazine, Xtra. In the most recent issue, they discuss a Canadian call for a boycott of Jamaica and the ongoing attempts to ban homophobic dancehall music. Stop Murder Music Canada (SMMC) — a coalition that includes Egale Canada and the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto — is calling for a boycott of Jamaica if the country’s government does not take action on homophobic violence by Mon, May 12.You’ve probably heard about the controversy surrounding some dancehall and reggae music and the blatantly homophobic lyrics that support hurting and killing queer people. Across the world, Jamaican singers have been banned from entering countries and spouting their anti-queer hatred. Buju Banton and Elephant Man are considered two of the worst perpetrators of such vitriolic language. Elephant Man declares in one song, “When you hear a lesbian getting raped/ It’s not our fault … Two women in bed/ That’s two Sodomites who should be dead.”

We were certain Jamaica was the Homophobe of the Week.

We’re not alone in considering this issue. In 2006, Time Magazine reported in “The Most Homophobic Place on Earth?” that, in the previous two years, “two of the island’s most prominent gay activists, Brian Williamson and Steve Harvey, have been murdered — and a crowd even celebrated over Williamson’s mutilated body.”    

You can find many stories on the Internet, all of which include angry mobs of men and women, and boys and girls, attacking queer men and women, beating them, and putting them in hospital and possibly killing them (see photo gallery). A recent article from February, 2008, in Bet.com, mentions three such stories, with ears ripped off, arms broken, people running themselves off cliffs and dying to avoid mobs. 

What are the reasons for such hate? In the British newspaper, The Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead wrote, ”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,” wrote Aitkenhead.

Boycotts are not the answer. They simply make the public poorer, hungrier, more desperate, and then angrier, and possibly more homophobic. 

There was hope in 2006 that the nation’s first female Prime Minister, Portia Simpson Miller, a progressive would eventually move to decriminalize homosexuality. But, it hasn’t happened yet. And she has been replaced by Bruce Golding, who unequivocally said in the last week that there will be no loosening of the laws against queer sex. Jamaica remains a country with numerous queer-related murders each year, and continued arrests and imprisonment of queers.

Of course, not all Jamaicans are homophobic, and of course, homophobia exists everywhere. There are many supporters of queer folk in Jamaica. Many Jamaicans rally behind their queer family members and friends, horrified by the anger and violence.

At present, there is only one human rights/queer group in Jamaica, called Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG). J-FLAG has recently called on Stop Murder Music Canada to remove their call for a Jamaica ban. J-FLAG’s website is www.jflag.org. If you are looking to support Jamaican queers, you can learn about donating here… www.jflag.org/misc/donate.htm. 

Jamaica remains Homophobe of the Week, for now, and we will hopefully and gladly, some day, call it Homophile of the Week.