Young LGBT Jamaicans are chased out of their communities by family and neighbors using vigilante justice to enforce the country’s laws against homosexual conduct. Now police are trying to push them out of their shelter of last resort.
J. Lester Feder/BuzzFeed
KINGSTON, Jamaica — Around 11 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 1, police officers led by Cmdr. Christopher Murdock lowered a ladder into an open sewer in New Kingston, the Jamaican capital's financial district. The sewer, damp and strewn with trash, flowed out of the business district housing several banks, large hotels, and shopping arcades. And it was home to a group of youths Murdock wanted gone.
Their alleged crime: stealing. Murdock said he had received more than 30 reports of theft and robbery since the group, ranging in age from teens to early twenties, had moved into the sewer several months before, and he was becoming concerned that the stretch of Trafalgar Road that runs over their makeshift home was becoming unsafe for people to walk.
But Murdock's televised remarks following the Sunday raid left the impression the kids were unwanted for an entirely different reason: "The aim of this operation was to remove men of diverse sexual orientation who continue to plague the New Kingston area."
Jamaica has long been one of the most hostile countries in the Americas for LGBT people. But in recent months, the murders of LGBT people and mob attacks — including fire bombings — on the houses where they live have made headlines with increasing frequency. Activists are not entirely sure what's caused the surge in violence, though it may be due in part to the debate over possibly repealing the country's colonial-era sodomy law, an idea that Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller floated during her 2011 campaign. Her government has not yet taken any action on the proposal, but pro-family groups have mounted a campaign to ensure it never does.
An editorial cartoon from the Jamaica Observer, published Dec. 25, 2012. (The image appears to have since been removed from the Observer’s site.)
For years, the media in Jamaica have hyped stories about the crimes of "rowdy gays," crafting a distorted image of the LGBT community at large, local activists say. Television stations have refused to run ads promoting tolerance for LGBT people — on Nov. 16, the country's Supreme Court tossed out a lawsuit challenging their decision last spring to reject an ad put together by the organization AIDS-Free World promoting tolerance for LGBT people. The ad featured a gay lawyer named Maurice Tomlinson who left Jamaica in 2012 following several death threats. Many out gay public figures have also gone into exile, while several others have been murdered in the past 15 years; the number of out gay public figures still living in the country can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
The headlines that ran the day after the sewer raid were typical: "Gay robbery suspects arrested in [New Kingston] raid," said the Jamaica Observer in a 660-word feature that focused on the youths' cross-dressing and exhaustion from "partying all night."
Even the group's advocates say the youths are not blameless: They have turned on people who have tried to help them and admitted to some criminal activity — they largely survive on prostitution. But the youths are convinced there is something else motivating the police raids against them.
"They are trying to pin something on us," said one, who gave his name as Michael. (To protect their safety, BuzzFeed is referring to them by aliases they chose themselves.) The police and the press, Michael said, were going after the group for the same reasons the group took shelter in the sewer in the first place: Homosexual conduct is against the law, and Jamaicans are willing to take enforcement into their own hands.
"Because I am gay and it's not legalized in the country, they want to get rid of us," he said.
The situation for LGBT people in Jamaica has been deteriorating since July, when a 16-year-old named Dwayne Jones was hacked to death by a mob in the northern city of Montego Bay after he was outed while dancing with a man who did not know Jones had been born male. Since then, there have been multiple incidents when mobs descended on the houses of people perceived to be gay, including a firebomb attack in October, also in the area of Montego Bay.
It wasn't always this way. "I can remember things were not this bad when I was coming up and coming out," said Lewis, who is 38 and came out to his family at 18, though he only felt safe enough to allow his face to be shown in press reports starting in 2013.
Between 2009 and 2012, the Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG), the country's oldest LGBT rights group, counted 231 reports of discrimination and violence. But the worsening violence could be a response to greater visibility by LGBT people, a terrible backlash against modest progress. It has taken its toll on gay and trans youth. (For reasons LGBT activists don't entirely understand, there aren't many known cases of homeless lesbian girls.) "People are coming out younger and younger and being pushed out younger and younger," Lewis said.