Trinidad Tobago the worst of the Caribbean Homophobic Isles
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| Ajamu, the Huddersfield-born British son of black Jamaican immigrants, adopted his African name in 1991.
“It was given to me by one of my mentors,” he says. He won’t reveal his former name. “That has no bearing,” he says, then laughs loudly, saying, “only to my family.”
“A lot of black men and women were embracing a pan-African perspective in the 80s and 90s,” he explains, “getting rid of eurocentric names. Ajamu means He fights for what he believes.”
http://arcthemagazine.com/ |
What is it like to be gay in the Caribbean? The Travelling Trini occasionally gets emails from young gay Trinidadians who “have the burning desire to go abroad, travel, and see the world”. She deduces that this wanderlust stems from the fact that “the Caribbean is a incredibly homophobic place with a raging macho-man culture, and coming out is an incredibly difficult, and often dangerous, thing to do.”
The post goes on to list several songs that promoted homophobia and gay violence back in the nineties: Buju Banton's Boom Bye Bye was unsurprisingly at the top of the heap, but the blogger describes them all as “dark, violent and downright disgusting.” She asks:
Why is it not considered hate speech? Why are radio stations allowed to play it? [...] The question is, why is it okay to still be so violently anti-gay in 2015?
She connects this constricted reality with the desire many gay Caribbean people have to migrate and testifies that the Far East, where she currently resides, “is a very gay friendly place, indeed”:
There are thriving gay scenes in every country, from the liberal far east to the conservative Middle East and everywhere in between.The whole world is not straight. It never has been, and it never will be. [...]Unfortunately these liberal lifestyles are not tolerated in the Caribbean, and are in fact still criminalised under law. There is no legal protection for LGBT citizens [...] just as people fought for equal rights based on race, and equal rights based on gender, the next step in our human evolution is equal rights for all people regardless of their sexual orientation.
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