Jamaica. Even the sweet, cool sound of the island rolls easily off your tongue like iced coconut. What an idyllic place to visit. Twenty-four hour party people reggae-dancing long into the night. Short-shorted, coconut-oiled beach boys and beautiful, brown, bikinied babes playing cricket on the beach and serving pina coladas from sundown to sunrise in a rum-soaked ganja haze. All beautiful smiles and laid-back, open-hearted friendliness. No worries rastaman, right? Not quite.

Not if you’re gay or lesbian, especially not if you’re a gay man, and definitely not if you’re a gay Jamaican man.

Though Jamaicans have long held a reputation as being happy-go-lucky, music-loving beach layabouts, the island of Jamaica has a history steeped in oppression and sadness.

The original inhabitants of the islands, the Arawak Indians, died out shortly after European contact. Legend has it that on watching European slave drivers and their African slaves, the proud Arawaks decided they would rather die than become slaves themselves, and by an extraordinary act of will, secluded themselves in the hills and simply stopped reproducing until they ceased to exist.

The history of slavery in Jamaica was long and bloody. The West Indies formed part of the dreaded ‘Middle Passage’ of the Atlantic slave trade, and Jamaican plantations were notoriously harsh. While slavery officially ended in 1838, and independence reached Jamaica in 1971, many British laws which have since been repealed throughout all, or parts, of the United Kingdom - such as those relating to homosexuality - still exist in Jamaica today, and are reinforced by the prejudices of the general populus.

Under Jamaican law, sex between men is punishable by up to ten years in jail. While sex between two women is not specifically prohibited (as a former British Colony, and as is generally the case in English law, lesbian sex simply doesn’t rate a mention), it is almost equally abhorred.

Far from this being a symbolic prohibition bearing little relation to the actual treatment of GLBTI Jamaicans, ongoing incidents of extreme violence against gays and lesbians, and the attitudes of authority figures demonstrate that homophobia is alive and thriving in this ‘paradise’.

On January 29 this year, a group of some 20 men beat down the door of a house in Mandeville, in central Jamaica, to attack four gay men. One man escaped from the house, was chased by the mob, and remains missing, presumed dead. The others were wounded, one with an arm broken in two places and an ear severed. Police reportedly arrived at the scene some 90 minutes after the initial call for help.

This attack came as no great surprise to Jamaica’s gay community. After all, on Easter Sunday last year in the very same town, mourners at a gay man’s funeral were confronted by an angry mob of over 90 men protesting at a gay man being buried in Mandeville. Three police officers were sent to the scene, but refused to intervene as mourners were pelted with rocks and verbally abused.

Similarly, on Valentines Day last year, a group of gay men took refuge inside a plaza in the Jamaican capital, Kingston, pursued by a chanting crowd of 200 men who were out for their blood.

In 2004, Jamaica’s leading gay rights activist, Brian Williamson, was brutally stabbed in his home. Williamson was the figurehead of J-FLAG, founded in 1998 in an attempt to overthrow Jamaica’s sodomy laws. This vicious hate crime occurred just days after Amnesty International published a report which staunchly criticised Jamaica’s approach to sexual diversity.

Jamaica has been dubbed ‘the most homophobic country on earth’ by US-based organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“Jamaica is the worst any of us has ever seen,” HRW spokesperson Rebecca Schleifer, the author of a scathing report on the island’s anti-gay hostility, told Time magazine in 2006.

And what of reggae, Jamaica’s bastion of free speech and vehicle of expression for the oppressed?

Bob Marley and Peter Tosh’s famous reggae anthem, ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ (“Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights...don’t give up the fight) is certainly not indicative of attitudes towards GLBT people in contemporary Jamaican music. Indeed, in the genre known as dancehall (an offshoot of reggae) some artists actually advocate the killing of gays and lesbians.

In the early 1990s, Buju Banton had a Jamaican hit with ‘Boom Bye-Bye’, a song which declared gays “haffi dead” (“have to die”). Other dancehall musicians, including Elephant Man and Beenie Man, have described shooting and killing ‘battybwoy’ (gay men) in their songs, and incite fans to do the same.

As a consequence, the ‘Stop Murder Music Campaign’ was established, spearheaded by the British gay rights group, OutRage!

The campaign, a collaboration between reggae music promoters and gay rights activists, has been an unprecedented success, resulting in the cancellation of tours and loss of sponsorship deals for unsupportive artists, and generating significant interest in the rights of Jamaican gay and lesbian people.

In August 2007, Buju Banton became the fourth person to sign the Reggae Compassionate Act, declaring that he ‘hereby present(s)....a symbol of...dedication to the guiding principles of Reggae’s enduring foundation ONE LOVE...an agent of positive social change...and uphold(s) the rights of all individuals to live without fear of hatred and violence due to their religion, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity or gender…’.

Jamaica. Maybe one day, the sweet, cool sound of this island will roll easily off the tongues of the gay and lesbian community like iced coconut. But it will be some time before the bitter memories of violence and hatred fade.

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