Mattthew Kopka, Contributor
MY FATHER was a gay man. He was born that way, he came to believe, though nothing his very conventional mother or father identified in his early behaviour would have helped them guess his sexual orientation.
Robert Kopka was one of the most likeable people you could ever meet. He was decades ahead of his time, too, a civil rights worker, a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War who organised a teach-in and protests against it; he even for a time published his own magazine, Ethical Impact. He was a marvellous father and raised three heterosexual sons who are all tolerant of gay people and working to increase acceptance of homosexuality.
But here's the thing about my father: he spent much of his life in misery over the fact that he was gay, years and a great deal of money trying to "cure" himself of it. If he hadn't suffered at the hands of a culture that utterly failed to understand him, his family's lives would have involved a lot less agony.
I write this, then, as a United States citizen with a very personal stake in the acceptance of gay people as human beings, as one who knows that persecution of gay people hurts their friends and loved ones, ultimately damaging the wider community. While some Jamaicans feel they are being pressured by outsiders on the issue I think that the question of who is pressuring whom, and for what reasons, wants careful examination. I also think that the harassment of gays is hurting Jamaica far more economically and in terms of its hard-won international prestige than has to now been realised.
JAMAICAN ATTITUDES ABOUT GAYNESS
I've been talking to Jamaicans, eager to understand their attitudes toward homosexuality. Three ideas stand out.
The first is that homosexuals make people uncomfortable, a complaint more valid than is often acknowledged. For it's true that while homosexuality has always existed in the Caribbean it has been slower to emerge as a political issue here (for reasons having in part to do with class) than in Europe and the U.S. Many people are only beginning to come to grips with the idea of homosexuality, let alone how it should be handled in Jamaica.
But hostility toward homosexuals though different from racial hostility is predicated in part on a similar ignorance, on a good old-fashioned fear of the other which can, with understanding and dialogue, be overcome.
The second reason given for hostility toward homosexuals is that, somehow, homosexuality is "un-African," an assertion which is predicated on bad information. Sweeping generalisations about Africa a continent of 700 million people and hundreds of cultures and languages often fall wide of the mark anyway. But I have known a number of gay African men; homosexuality exists in Africa as everywhere else in the world, right across the continent. A growing body of research documents the activities of gay people in Africa long before European colonisation.
There is a contradictory connection, however, between the question of Blackness and homosexuality and the other major reason Jamaicans give as to why homosexuality is unacceptable because it is forbidden by the Bible. Never mind that fornication and adultery are also forbidden by the Bible but tend to be mischievously celebrated in Jamaican culture. Never mind that hundreds of millions of Bible-reading Christians don't condemn homosexuality.
What is most contradictory is that such biblical teachings were introduced to Africa and to slaves in the New World by Europeans. The point must be made clear: Gayness is as natural to Africa and Black people as it is to the rest of humanity.
There is much more reason to say that intolerance of homosexuals especially in its current ideological manifestation is an imposition of white culture on African culture and the cultures of the African diaspora than that Europeans or Americans are somehow (suddenly) demanding practices foreign to Black people.
Homophobia, much more than any love of gay people, is the Euro-American export. (Does it need to be added that many of the Jamaican religious organisations now mounting an assault on the "alien culture" of homosexuality receive religious materials and other aid from white "bredren" in the U.S.?). Those who condemn homosexuality for religious reasons should consider the company they keep and the contradictions in the Biblical justification.
The Taliban also persecute homosexuals; they draw on the same elements of the Old Testament (Genesis, Mosaic Law) that some Jamaican churches and the Republican right do in the U.S. The same Mosaic code that forbids homosexuality permits slavery (Leviticus 25:44). Some influential elements of the Christian right in the U.S. advocate a return to stoning for adultery and other "offences," including homosexuality. Where, one wonders, might such fundamentalist madness stop?
If the last best defence of homophobia is "We are a Christian country", it should be pointed out that Jamaica is not unique in this either. The same is increasingly asserted in the U.S. by people who would make the country a theocracy, who would do away with the country's constitutional separation of church and state. Will the day come when Jamaica expands the category and number of those whose practices it won't tolerate, from the victimless exercise of sexuality to religious practices, as is happening in the U.S.? This is more than an empty academic question.
HOMOPHOBIA IS HERE, REAL, RUINING LIVES
If the issue of gay equality were just one of attitudes, the current argument about homosexuality might not be taking place. But tragedy is unfolding in Jamaica. I have sat and listened to the painful stories of Jamaican gay people now going back a number of years. I have met gay Jamaicans who have been terrorised, beaten, hounded from their homes.
Several UWI academics have pointed me to statistics suggesting the problem is less acute than is asserted. But actual and documented cases are plentiful enough to make one wonder at the need for denials. Jamaica, I think, protests too much and much too loudly. And there is a grave contradiction between assertions that homosexual persecution barely exists in Jamaica and assertions by people like Annette Cunningham in the December 5 Observer, that "Jamaica full a homosexuals" and "we need fi get rid a dat completely."
If crimes against Jamaican gays are minimal this should be cause for happiness. But statistics not only often lie they also hide things. If gays risk mistreatment at police hands must it not be assumed crimes against them are underreported? It's likely gay people are suffering in greatest proportion in poor communities, where police protection is often non-existent and where they are less insulated from harm than middle-class gays. They are also less likely, like all poor people, to know their rights or seek official redress from a system that, historically, has often failed to bring them justice. And while it's true that the official murder rate doesn't suggest gays are being killed because of their sexuality, how can it be assumed that a homophobic police force is not looking away from such crimes or failing to record them as such?
The notion that homosexuals are suddenly bringing up such stories to gain attention, as journalist Mark Wignall claimed in his November 21 Observer column, is false. The cry for help from Jamaican homosexuals and those seeking to help them goes back a half-decade and more. And who would possibly invite on themselves the ugliness that those who dared speak out experience?
REPERCUSSIONS GO WIDE
The repercussions affect all of Jamaica. I recently heard a devastating story, told by a Jamaican of prominence and credibility, of a man who burned his son alive in their house because he could not endure his shame that the son was gay, was unwilling to see him face the ostracism developing toward him in their poor neighbourhood.
A letter to a sexual advice columnist in The Gleaner also suggests homophobia's wider effects. A woman wrote complaining that her boyfriend was obsessed with homosexuals; he often spoke of killing them. The problem: he insisted on painful anal intercourse with her. The columnist suggested the man was likely a repressed homosexual. She pointed out the danger to the woman if the man, as sooner or later seems possible, were to engage in furtive, unprotected gay sex.
It may be seen from this story whose contours health professionals throughout the world are familiar with how repression of homosexuality contributes to the HIV/AIDS crisis. HIV/AIDS is spreading faster in the Caribbean than anywhere in the world, and health workers lay some of the blame at the door of homophobia. Many who engage in gay sex fear they will expose themselves or their partners to reprisal if they confess to such relations fail to submit to examination, notify affected partners, etcetera.
Jamaica's situation can't be talked away or simply blamed on foreign intrusion. The failure of Jamaica's leaders, who could long ago have gone to work changing public perceptions, must for want of better explanation be ascribed to political cowardice.
PRESS FAILING TO
GET THE STORY
The Jamaican press, which often carries on a far more sophisticated dialogue about societal problems than can be found in the U.S., has much to answer for in the homosexuality debate. Lead stories with three inch headlines like the recent 'Lesbians Stalk Schools,' featured in one edition of The Star, are reprehensible, and beg the question whether the press seeks to mitigate the crisis or arouse it.
But the press is also abdicating its responsibility to get the story to establish the actual extent of the attacks and the veracity of assertions regarding them. Where are they happening? Among what sectors of the population? What is triggering them? If the problem doesn't exist in certain quarters or is being lessened by education and understanding, that should be reported too, because panic and finger-pointing the tenor of much recent coverage is less helpful, most Jamaicans would agree, than careful investigation.
There is no end, meanwhile, of posturing and careless attempts to minimise the problem by pundits. I've seen several columnists complain, for example, that there is no evidence that Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (JFLAG) leader Brian Williamson's recent murder was hate-motivated. But of the people singing in celebration around Williamson's house afterward, the jeering at his bereaved friends, the chants of "one by one" that filled the air? Not a word. Do such acts themselves not bespeak a grave, grave problem?
In the week that the recent Human Rights Watch report condemning the Jamaican government's handling of the homosexual question emerged with its harrowing story of a gay man being murdered by a Montego Bay crowd with police encouragement Mark Wignall's column, instead of coming to grips with the report, was filled with jokes about how uncomfortable he is around gay people.
Even less satisfying was the columnist's attempt to lay the issue to rest, to insist that it is Jamaica's issue to deal with. Even if Jamaicans are uncomfortable with homosexuality, one came away thinking, do they really want to be twisted into a pretzel-posture that says, in effect: "We reserve our sovereign right to persecute (or prosecute) homosexuals?" Or to declare: "We'll stop persecuting gay people on our own time, when the international rights groups go home?"
GAYNESS AND THE RISE OF SEXUAL ASSERTIVENESS
Open assertions of sexuality may make people uneasy. Sex is disruptive, the motive force of books, plays, and stories from Adam and Eve on down. Musical performers build their notoriety on sexual displays, and it's easy to worry that the world may crumble under an (increasingly commoditised) obsession with sexuality. This is a problem that involves both homo and heterosexuality. Aggressive male heterosexual behaviour toward gay men and women in both Jamaica and the U.S. is in fact a far bigger problem than homosexuality will ever be, with a rape crisis ongoing in both countries.
But homosexuality, despite its raised profile, is not just a fashion. It has existed forever (the Old Testament proves it, and if it didn't exist in Jamaica this debate wouldn't be taking place.) It is found not only among the birds and bees but animals and flowers. Studies document it on every continent, with investigations suggesting the numbers of gay people remain fairly constant from five to 10 people per hundred with the numbers rising to as many as 15 in big cities. (One wonders, under such circumstances, how religious opponents of homosexuality can presume their God doesn't want such people here).
Wignall is right about one thing, however. The problem is on the table and Jamaica's to deal with. I don't see how it can be avoided. The failure to acknowledge homosexuality has become more disruptive to Jamaica than the disruption to be caused in getting over it, which could happen quickly.
CRITICISM OF JAMAICAN TREATMENT OF HOMOSEXUALS: 'FOREIGN INTERVENTION?'
There are many contradictions in the charge that those who challenge homophobia in Jamaica are interfering in the nation's business. The same people now demanding the international rights agencies butt out of Jamaican affairs feel no compunction, week in week out, about weighing in on events everywhere on earth. These same people feel quite comfortable quoting from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reports when other countries' conduct is in question. (Good journalists couldn't survive without such reports, since they shed light on countries and situations largely ignored by the mainstream media).
I have my own problems with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch they persistently fail to get at the economic and historical reasons for injustices they identify. But there's little denying they are equal-opportunity critics who receive respect from thinking people the world over, in part because they consistently go after the powers now being accused of trying to run Jamaica's affairs the U.S. and Britain. One must wonder at how Human Rights Watch has suddenly become "the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch" in Jamaican news stories as if the homosexual-hating government of George Bush doesn't disdain that organisation and its "meddling" in U.S. affairs regarding the torture regimes at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons, for example.
Jamaicans rightly feel antagonism and ambivalence toward the U.S. and Britain. But I would rather see them fight against the brain drain that draws the country's brightest people to work as teachers in New York or the brawn drain that takes its young men to fight as soldiers (U.S. citizenship the lure) in an illegal and unjust war in Iraq. I'd rather see Jamaica mount a concerted fight against historic patterns of economic and cultural dependency from which Britain and the U.S. still profit than be manipulated into a crusade against homosexuality.
AN UGLY LEGACY
The issue of interference proponents of homosexual equality must acknowledge touches the deepest places in the psyche of citizens in a former slave colony. At a recent UWI forum anthropologist Herbert Gayle suggested that negativity toward homosexuality had its genesis in the sodomisation of black men by slave masters who simultaneously controlled black women. There is no doubt such activity took place, more routinely than has until recently been understood. But many Jamaican women relive this trauma in literal ways daily forced into prostitution in Jamaica's resorts, places where, in more than one way, the plantation economy remains alive. Should the fight not be waged here instead?
And what conclusion should we really draw from Professor Gayle's remarks? That the Jamaican black man's self-concept is too fragile to allow homosexual men to exist in peace? I would submit that this both underestimates and insults the Jamaican male Jamaican people in general whose most persistent gift to the world has been, in the face of 400 years of barbarism, a dignified humanity.
There are other contradictions in the charges of interference. Jamaica has accepted obligations to its citizens regarding their freedom, sexual freedom included, as signatory to several international rights accords, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like the U.S. with Iraq, or Israel with its repeated violations of UN resolutions concerning Palestine, Jamaica must answer to charges of hypocrisy if it repudiates its responsibilities.
But here is the central issue, in my opinion: The charges about persecution of gay people for years have been coming from Jamaicans, a fact press and critics wilfully ignore. While OutRage! (with its provocative name and in-your-face politics) gets the headlines it is organisations like JFLAG, Jamaicans for Justice, and the local Amnesty International chapter that have desperately worked to get your attention, Jamaica. The Human Rights Watch report was endorsed by five Jamaican human rights organisations. The emphasis on foreign intrusion evades the fact it's Jamaicans who are being harmed.
LASTING HARM TO JA'S IMAGE AND ECONOMY
Jamaicans protesting against foreign intrusion in the nation's affairs underestimate the economic consequences for their country. Jamaica's anti-gay hysteria has penetrated the consciousness of young people in the U.S. and Europe. In recent travels in North America and Great Britain I've been asked about it often. And it's the most conscious young people those who have come to cherish Jamaican culture who are most cognisant of, and disturbed by, what's happening here.
Jamaicans, including some dancehall artistes, may fail to understand the degree to which, among progressives in the U.S. and Europe, acceptance of gays is all but universal. The Jamaican Government and tourist board need to do the math: If one in five to 10 people is gay then most people have family or friends who would be vulnerable here. And if straight foreigners are being accused of being "batty boys" as they travel around Jamaica (as a recent Gleaner column suggested) is tourism not bound to suffer?
According to the Honolulu Weekly (Hawaii is working to attract gay vacationers), "Gays and lesbians travel a lot. They spend a lot, relative to other tourists... on food, entertainment and gifts. In the U.S., gay and lesbian tourism is said to be worth more than US$54 billion annually."
According to a 2001 survey by Community Marketing magazine, 83 per cent of gays have household incomes above the national average (US$40,000+); 34 per cent have household incomes of US$100,000 or more; and 33 per cent budget US$5,000+ per person a year for vacations.
Because they tend to be far better educated than the average U.S. citizen, they are much more interested in local culture than the average American, which means under other circumstances they would be precisely the kind of people most likely to stray outside the confines of all-inclusive resorts to discover Jamaica. Seventy-two per cent of U.S. gays reported they have taken one or more international vacations while the U.S. national average is an abysmal nine per cent. This statistic suggests that gays constitute a very large percentage of U.S. citizens going "a farrin," much higher than has previously been assumed.
I am a critic of the Jamaican Government's emphasis on tourism, especially resort tourism, over needs like food security. But clearly, awareness of the persecution of gays is hurting Jamaican tourism and the economy. And violence toward homosexuals, inevitably, is lumped with perceptions of the country as a violent place.
WIDER ECONOMIC QUESTIONS
Some Jamaicans will tell you that tolerance of Jamaican gay people is increasing; few gays believe it. The hostile reaction to the Human Rights Watch report makes for pessimism that that's the case. Still, it's possible to imagine that a public campaign for tolerance by a bipartisan assemblage of Jamaican leadership could make big inroads.
But a big part of the problem must be traced to economics. Throughout the world, researchers point out, it is young men who tend to harass homosexuals, who participate in violence against them. Jamaica has thousands of unemployed and under-employed young men many of them angry on its streets. There's little doubt that gays are sometimes scapegoats for their frustration, that at this stage such scapegoating is often seen to have official sanction.
Without an extraordinary attempt to address their need for dignified, decent-paying work, for purposive education; without open defiance of the neo-liberal principles long forced on Jamaica, which have prevented the country from furnishing those needs; without a principled uprising against the worst real foreign intervention that modern Jamaica has suffered - it's hard to imagine that anger disappearing. Where it will be directed next is the only question.
Matthew Kopka wrote his thesis on land distribution in Jamaica, and has lived in the country during three separate periods. He teaches at Florida State University.
