LGBT Rights in Jamaica - Political Activism

Political Activism

The first gay organization in Jamaica was the Gay Freedom Movement (GFM), founded around 1974 by five Jamaicans and an American Jesuit then working in the island. It focused on consciousness-raising within the LGBT community and professional organizations, issued a newsletter, Jamaica Gaily News, and ran a Gay Youth Program, Prison Outreach Program and a free STD clinic. General Secretary, Larry Chang, who was also publisher and editor of JGN, was the first Jamaican to come out publicly, being interviewed on radio and JBC-TV and through his letters to the press. Before he fled to the US in 2000 where he was granted political asylum in 2004, he had helped found Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG), which is today the only LGBT rights organization in Jamaica.

The organization was created in 1998, and operates underground and anonymously. In June 2004 founding member and the public face of J-FLAG and Jamaica's leading gay-rights activist, Brian Williamson, was stabbed to death in his home. Police ruled that the murder was the result of a robbery, but J-FLAG believes his murder was a hate crime. Human Rights Watch researcher Rebecca Schleifer had a meeting with Williamson that day, and arrived at his home not long after his body had been discovered:

She found a small crowd singing and dancing. One man called out, "Battyman he get killed." Others were celebrating, laughing and shouting "Let's get them one at a time", "That's what you get for sin". Others sang "Boom bye bye", a line from a well-known dancehall song by Jamaican star Buju Banton about shooting and burning gay men. "It was like a parade", says Schleifer. "They were basically partying."

Human Rights Watch also reports that police helped a suspect evade identification, and consistently refused to consider the possibility of a homophobic motive for the killing, with the senior officer responsible for the investigation claiming “most of the violence against homosexuals is internal. We never have cases of gay men being beaten up .”

A friend of Williamson's, Lenford "Steve" Harvey, who worked in Targeted Interventions at Jamaica AIDS Support for Life, was shot to death on the eve of World AIDS Day the following year. Gunmen reportedly burst into his home and demanded money, demanding to know "Are you battymen?" "I think his silence, his refusal to answer that question sealed it", said Yvonne McCalla Sobers, the head of Families Against State Terrorism. "Then they opened his laptop and saw a photograph of him with his partner in some kind of embrace that showed they were together. So they took him out and killed him." Four people have been charged with the killing.

Since 2008, a political news/blog site, Gay Jamaica Watch, with its related social network, has moved to the forefront of day to day civil rights commentary in Jamaica, whilst J-FLAG is involved with other activities.

The current UN Declaration on Human Rights does not have any language pertaining to the protection of sexual orientation. When it was written after World War II, no countries had a gay rights movement, so its inclusion was not even a point of contention. Over the past century, LGBTQ advocates worldwide have begun the struggle for equal protection using the framework of human rights, but there is currently no international consensus. Many countries have extended the same rights and protection from discrimination, but many others, like Jamaica, feel that acceptance of homosexuality is not socially acceptable, nor something that should be protected by the state. In his discussion on the nature of human rights laws as they concern sexual minorities, Jack Donnelly begins by saying that it is impossible to be completely protected from discrimination, but it is a right to be protected from discrimination that “tends to ill will or causes unjustifiable harm”. He argues that excluding people of alternative sexual orientation from “equal rights for all” contradicts central ideas on the nature of human rights. This relates back to his idea on the indivisibility of human rights; in order for any rights to be completely enacted, they must all be extended to their fullest potential. This requirements an acknowledgement of the effect that economic and social rights have on the ability of citizens to enact their political rights. In the face of state sanctioned violence against homosexuals, the very foundation of human rights in Jamaica is threatened.

A discussion on human rights, as they concern sexual orientation, could facilitate the prevention of AIDS and homophobic violence in Jamaica. However, many see the inclusion of sexual orientation as a human right to be a form of cultural imperialism. Acceptance of homosexuality is seen as against the conservative Christian values that most citizens hold. In Jamaica, not only is there is no legal protection for people of alternative sexual orientation, but there also are many laws that prohibit and condemn homosexual acts. Legally, anal sex is defined as an “abominable act of buggery” and is punishable with up to ten years hard labor. Violence against gay and positive people is commonplace, but legal repercussions for the aggressor are rare. UNAIDS representatives for Jamaica, describe these laws and repeated blind-eye towards homophobic violence as “legalized discrimination” and points out how they have driven the epidemic further underground, making access to treatment and outreach more difficult.