By Jean-Cosme Delaloye

Kingston. Janice has been beaten up for being a lesbian. Sitting in the small windowless room in an anonymous house in uptown Kingston, the 31-year old Jamaican shows a scar above her left eye. She says she never leaves her house without her knife nowadays. She claims she used it “a couple of times for self-defense”. When she speaks about her life as a lesbian in Jamaica, one can feel the pain in her angry eyes. She left home as a teenager because her family never approved her sexuality. : " I was 14, she says. My sisters had boyfriends, and I didn’t want any. So, I told my mom I was not going to have any boyfriend and any kids because I was different. She did not accept it ".

At the time, Janice moved in with a friend. " When I left home it was quite ok for a while until I was on my own on the streets, she adds. I left my friend’s place when I was 17. It was just hell for me because I could not just walk to a person and say “hey I am gay, but it’s ok” because Jamaicans are so much against it”.

Jamaica has anti-sodomy laws and gay sex is punishable with up to 10 years in jail. Sexual acts between women are not mentioned in the law and are therefore legal but are not tolerated by most Jamaicans. At the same time, the crime rate is skyrocketing on the Caribbean island. Over 1440 people have been killed since the beginning of 2007 and the country could match its record of nearly 1,700 murders in 2005.

In this context, violence against gay people is a common occurrence. In June 2004, Brian Williamson, a gay rights activist, was brutally murdered. A 25-year old man is currently serving a life sentence for the murder, whose motive was officially given as robbery. But supporters of Mr Williamson, 59, say he has been stabbed with a machete at least 70 times and in the neck and talk about a hate crime.

In 2004, a gay teenager survived a lynching at school by a mob invited by the father of the boy. In December 2005, Lenford Harvey, a gay activist who ran Jamaica AIDS Support for Life, was also killed. In April 2007, a cross-dresser, was beaten up in broad daylight by a mob at a bus stop in Falmouth, a town in Western Jamaica. Janice tells of a similar story. “ One day, I met a girl I knew at a bus stop, she says. We were talking and when two guys came up and called me a lesbian. They liked the girl and beat me up".

Janice is a 31-year old Jamaican lesbian. Because of her sexuality, she had to leave her place when she was a teenager.

In Jamaica, gay sex is illegal and is punishable with up to 10 years in jail.

Two gay activists have been murdered in the last few years.

Jay describes herself as a tomboy. She wears a wide white t-shirt, straight jeans and white Reebok shoes. She also a large silver cross necklace. Her voice is deep when she speaks about her daily struggle. " To survive here when you are gay, you have to decide what you are living for and what you are hoping, she says. I am hoping that one day I will be able to walk on the streets and be who I am. But instead, I have to fight for that. I have to fight very hard. (…) This is Jamaica : once you are gay, you have no rights".

Garymary is gay. The 26-year old Jamaican AIDS activist from Kingston says he is not trying to hide his sexuality but does not talk about it outside homosexuals circles. " Being openly gay here is a risk. Groups of men will tell me things. They will call me a “battyman” (n.d.l.r.: an abusive term for a gay man) I look a bit different. I talk a bit different. I walk with a flair, with a swing. They look at me as if I am strange. But for my own comfort, I try not to think about what they are thinking. I want to be me".

The situation is not about to improve for gay people in Jamaica. Last October, the Education Minister Andrew Holness reacted to the mention of same-sex unions in a textbook: " We want to make it absolutely clear that the Ministry of Education does not endorse or support the teaching of homosexual relationships as the accepted standard of family, Mr Holness told the Jamaican Observer. We don’t teach it and we don’t recommend it”.

Last July, the former leader of opposition and now Jamaican Prime minister Bruce Golding, addressed the matter of homosexuality on the campaign trail: “We don’t believe that the state should be pushing down people’s bedroom doors to find what they do there, because, if you push it down today to enforce laws that relate to sexual activity, you will push it down tomorrow for some other purpose, Mr Golding told the Sunday Observer. But in so far as providing official sanction to that kind of [homosexual] activity, we are not going there”.

In the windowless room of uptown Kingston, Janice says she dreams of a day when she will be able to come out as a lesbian : “Everybody deserve to live their life the way they want to live it, she says You are supposed to live what you feel. This is who I am. We don’t adapt, this is in us”. She says she wants to become a clothes designer and a gay model: “I would design men’s clothes and wear them"

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