Battyboy must die! Dancehall,class and religion in Jamaican homophobia

Introduction

Antigay bias has arguably reached crisis levels in Jamaica over the last several decades. In the first national, comprehensive polling of Jamaicans about homosexuality, Boxill et al. (2011) found a strong negative perception toward homosexuals, called batty boys. (‘Batty’ is a Jamaican term for one’s behind, and a ‘batty man’ is therefore a derogatory reference to gay men (Thomas, 2004: 114).) The survey points out that ‘[h]omosexuals in Jamaica face severe discrimination that often leads to violence and even death from members of the public’ (p. 6). In 2014, Human Rights Watch issued a booklet titled Not Safe at Home, which states that

LGBT citizens in Jamaica are often driven from their communities by neighbors and sometimes even family. Some health professionals stigmatize them by casting judgment on their sexuality when they seek care. Police protection against bias and physical attacks is generally poor. (McFadden, 2014)

There are signs that antigay sentiment is relenting slightly in Jamaica, but such signs are very preliminary. The Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-Flag) organized its first Pride event in Kingston’s Emancipation Park in 2015, and by 2018 that gathering had drawn over a thousand participants. In 2017, J-Flag expressed concerns about homophobic laws in an address to the Jamaican parliament, which listened to the group respectfully, unlike in 2001 when parliament openly disrespected such speakers (Faber, 2018). Yet this show of respect has not transformed actual policy. Under the country’s colonial-era ‘buggery law’, anal sex is criminalized, along with intimate acts between two men. The last decade of Jamaican history features numerous instances of antigay violence. J-Flag has documented ‘verbal abuse by work colleagues; vicious beatings by police, relatives, and community members, some of which have resulted in death; and homelessness after being driven from their communities by angry neighbours’ (White and Carr, 2005: 349). Just this year, a gay man was dragged from a public bus and beaten publicly; people watched but did not intervene (Thomlinson, 2020). Many similar cases have been documented (CNN-iReport, 2012; Homos at risk, 2001; J-FLAG condemns mob killing of alleged MoBay cross-dresser, 2013; Nelson, 2013; Padgett, 2006; Roberts, 2013; Utech in damage control after guard beats student, 2012). Homophobia remains a profound problem in Jamaica.

The uneven progress of antidiscrimination efforts in Jamaican culture is mirrored by the uneven progress in Jamaican politics. Bruce Golding, Jamaican Prime Minister from 2007 through 2011, was infamous for his homophobic rhetoric, publicly stating that homosexuals would not be permitted to serve in his cabinet (Golding talks about policing gays on BBC, 2008). Consequently, the gay community expressed great hope when Portia Simpson-Miller, during the 2011 election for Prime Minister, announced her support for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights. Yet that hope diminished during the course for her term, as Simpson-Miller’s administration did nothing to repeal Jamaica’s antigay buggery laws, nor did her 2011 reelection platform express any specific support for the gay community. As mentioned, those laws are still on the books. Noting these facts, the 2019 Amnesty International report on Jamaica states that ‘The NGO J-FLAG continued to receive reports of discrimination, exclusion, violent attacks, displacement and police abuse targeted against LGBTI people. Transgender people remained unable to legally change their gender markers and name’ (Jamaica 2019, 2019).

Social scientists have sought to study and quantify the expression of antigay attitudes and behaviors among Jamaicans. Boxill et al. carried out two groundbreaking surveys of such attitudes in 2011 and 2012, and West and Cowell (2015) conducted a reanalysis of these surveys with the goal of identifying the predictors of both homophobic attitudes and antigay behaviors. The results of this important reanalysis demonstrate a complex interaction of factors, but three predictors stand out: Jamaicans are more likely to express antigay sentiments if they are male, if they hold strong religious beliefs and if they like dancehall music. Although West and Cowell (2015) caution against drawing ‘causal conclusions’ (p. 303), their study makes clear that gender, church and dancehall are highly correlated with homophobic attitudes in Jamaica. The authors conclude by saying, ‘this research offers important insights into strategies for creating a more egalitarian Jamaican society; the more we know about the causes and predictors of antigay prejudice in Jamaica, the more effective prejudice-reducing strategies are likely to be’ (p. 304).

This article works from West and Cowell’s notion that the better we understand Jamaican homophobia, the better our chances of combating it become. It extends their findings through a qualitative study of the three factors – gender, religion, and dancehall – that they identify as prime predictors. Specifically, this study brings in the voices of gay Jamaicans to examine their perceptions of how these factors promote homophobic prejudice against them. Although West and Cowell’s quantitative study necessarily treated the three factors separately, this qualitative analysis reveals that they are deeply interwoven in the ways that gay Jamaicans experience bias and hostility because of their sexual identity. Dancehall music in particular, as we will see, discloses a complex, intersectional combination of homophobia, class resentment, religious conviction and the legacy of colonialism. Since dancehall culture so thoroughly implicates the other predictive factors, I use it as the primary object of analysis in this essay. Furthermore, since all three predictive factors – religiosity, dancehall music and even masculine identity – are cultural phenomena articulated through social conventions and texts, this essay examines them through a cultural studies lens.

Methodology and theory

This study used interviews and document analysis to study the three predictors of discrimination faced by homosexuals in Jamaica. It is the kind of discrimination that often leads to antigay and anti-transgender assault or murder committed by members of the public. Homosexual men in Jamaica are also at risk of being prosecuted for illegal activity. Thus, the mere involvement in this study might put participants at risk. To conduct my research, I was asking a vulnerable population to discuss a dangerous topic. I sought approval and received authorization from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Ohio University. In seeking approval, I had to account to the IRB for the very serious possible risks to my subjects. Therefore, two factors critical to the review of this study are (1) how the subjects came to be in the study, and (2) how their participation is kept confidential.

I selected participants through snowball sampling (a revised version, per IRB). My goal was to protect the confidentiality of potential participants. Thus, I did not follow the conventional method of having participants provide me with the contact information of other potential participants. Instead, participants gave other potential participants my contact information. Thus, the potential respondents contacted me if they were interested in participating. Only with prior consent did I contact any of the interviewees. I reached out as soon as possible to people who had called me, telling them not to reveal identifying information (although some did). Furthermore, the IRB recommended that no consent forms should be used. Their hope was to protect the privacy of participants and to avoid any confidentiality breach. With IRB approval, I audiotaped some of the interviews. All of the participants indicated that they did not wish to see the interview transcripts; I assured those who had shared their legal names that these would not appear in my report, although two of them requested that I use their names. For obvious reasons, biographical information will not be listed in this article. The gay males interviewed in Jamaica are listed from H1 through H26; the three granted asylum are listed as A1, A2 and A3; and the lesbian participant is denoted as L1.

The interviews took place in 2013–2014, and I interviewed 30 participants from Kingston and Montego Bay. All but one subject self-identified as gay male (there was one lesbian). Chrissy and Sidonne, who encouraged me to use their names because they already had activist public personas, were among those describing themselves as gay men, but they also referred to themselves as girls, dressing as women when they went out socially at night. Of the 30 subjects, 3 men had sought and received asylum in the United States: they were living there, and I communicated with them via telephone. In fact, many of the participants indicated to me that they intended to seek asylum or had already begun that process. In age, they spanned the spectrum from middle age to young adult (and four were still teenagers). They were from a variety of economic backgrounds – 12 were professional class, 8 were working class and 10 were sex workers from impoverished backgrounds. Of the 30, only 3 were ‘out’ (meaning that they had told their families that they were gay). I interviewed all of the participants in English. The Jamaican dialect (patois) was also frequently used.

I cannot say for certain why men felt more comfortable reaching out to me for these interviews than women did, but this distribution (29 men and 1 woman) does mean that the results I present are indicative primarily of the perceptions of gay males. This emphasis also particularly shapes my primary example in this essay – dancehall culture – because men are perceived to be the central producers and consumers of this culture. I believe that the results discussed in this essay will encourage future research on Jamaican discriminatory attitudes that focus on women, trans people and other members of the LGBTQA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer and asexual) community.

Having discussed the procedures by which I performed the interviews, let me say a few words about the theoretical assumptions underlying this study. On the one hand, this essay certainly supports West and Cowell’s call for a more egalitarian Jamaica, one in which gay people enjoy freedom from discrimination and violence. On the other hand, it supports this goal through the lens of postcolonial consciousness, keeping in mind the degree to which the legacy of Western imperialism impacts perceptions of antigay sentiment in Jamaica. Postcolonial theorists have pointed out the trickiness of ‘narratives of liberation’ in which the colonized community throws off its imperialist oppressors and embraces rational and civilized norms – tricky precisely because these norms tend to be supplied by imperialist culture in the first place. So, for example, Durban-Albrecht (2017), writing about representations of homophobia in Haiti, offers an important caution about gay rights activists and scholars:

their work ultimately produces postcolonial spaces . . . as having exceptional problems with homophobia in a way that is somehow unrelated to the legacies of imperialism . . . [T]he global LGBTQI’s work colludes with the Euro-American imperialist imperatives of erasing knowledge of colonial histories and their legacies and portraying black and brown populations as inherently and excessively violent. (p. 168)

I think that this is a valuable caution and consider it of crucial importance that the results of my study not be understood as implying that homophobia in Jamaica would just go away if its citizens simply embraced wealthy nations’ notions of civility.

Rather than a straightforward narrative of liberation, then, in this study I try to straddle both a politics of freedom and toleration, on the one hand, and a suspicion of social norms naively imported from the Global North to the Global South, on the other. Two decades ago, David Scott wrote an analysis of Jamaican dancehall culture with precisely these twin positions in mind. Focusing on the figure of the ruud bwai (rude boy) in dancehall lyrics and performance, Scott (1999) read him as a doubled figure, both a working-class refusal ‘to be a “docile body” available to be worked over by capital’ and a dangerous criminal presence that rejects ‘the circulation of normalized consensual identities in urban postcolonial Jamaica’ (p. 214). Dancehall, in this analysis, is neither a straightforward anticolonialist liberation nor an enemy to the public good, but rather an ‘internally contested’ sphere (Scott, 1999: 218). My study in this essay both relies on Scott’s analysis and complicates it, since in the decades following his book Jamaican dancehall’s rejection of ‘consensual identities’ has often taken a sinister turn, opposing the ruud bwai to the battyboy, a gay, demonized other whom the ruud bwai must banish through violence. But this sinister turn makes dancehall no less complex, and as we will see, it draws on the hopes and biases of class, religion and gender ideals to perform its cultural work.

This study also operates with the cultural studies assumption that social phenomena such as dancehall are texts. Therefore, the interviews were triangulated with documents. As Glesne and Peshkin (1992) explain (p. 54), documents can enrich what you see and hear by ‘supporting, expanding, and challenging your portrayals and perceptions’. Thus, documents can substantiate interviews and observations, increasing the trustworthiness and complexity of the conclusions. Among other documentary sources, I examined several articles from the archive of the Jamaica Gleaner, a newspaper that is also available online. This online option allowed me to continue collecting documents after I had left the field.

The literature regarding homosexuals and homophobia in Jamaica can be found mainly in magazines and newspapers. As West and Cowell (2015) mention, empirical research meant to investigate homophobia in Jamaica is sparse. These researchers tended to focus on secondary sources. I hope that my research will contribute to the literature by including the voice of homosexuals as primary sources. This is the first study that will use the voices of the gay community as a framework for understanding the findings of West and Cowell (2015). My research shows how members of the gay community, especially gay males, experience dancehall music, masculinist hegemony and religion in promoting homophobia. This is also the first study that explores the experience of gay men seeking asylum from Jamaica.

Dancehall and disenfranchisement

It is beyond the scope of this article to provide an extensive history of dancehall, but it is essential to provide a brief background of this cultural phenomenon for the reader to understand how this genre of music interacts with homophobic attitudes and behavior. It is also crucial to mention that this examination of the role of dancehall in homophobia is not meant to function from a deficit model, as if dancehall fans would simply change their attitudes if they were supplied with new facts. Rather, the aim is to develop an understanding of this complex art form and the attitudes associated with it. This article thus explores the dialectic tensions among class, religion, gender and homophobia that dancehall brings together.

Independence in 1962 ignited indigenous Jamaican music. Jamaica’s culture is deeply rooted in Africa by way of slavery; as a result, Pocamania and Kuminia (forms of African religion) were very prevalent. These religions encompass extensive use of the drum, and the various forms of popular music that emerged in independent Jamaica – calypso, mento, ska – all prominently featured this instrument (Mento Music, 2007). Later, Rastafari music used drumming to continue these rich musical traditions, as did reggae, which become a popular means by which Jamaicans expressed their newfound nationalism (Bradley, 2002). In the 1980s, roots reggae entered the market, especially with Bob Marley, and reggae became universal (Bradley, 2002). It was a time of rampant unemployment, poverty, violence and crime. The Rastafarians in particular lived in unimaginable squalor, and one way they coped was to use music as an outlet for their frustration with the conditions gripping the island. In sum, Jamaican indigenous music, as it evolved in the 1960s and 1970s, regularly featured a quality of social protest and economic complaint, often with explicit reference to the legacy of colonialism (Cooper, 1995; Thomas, 2004).

The origins of dancehall music are generally associated with a form of reggae enhanced by digital instrumentation, emerging in the 1980s. The music was characterized by fast rhythms played on local sound systems, featuring lyrics celebrating sex, masculine vigor and violence, with tracks often overlaid with the deejay’s lyrics or commentary. Dancehall music was nearly always open air, a venue understood as bringing music to people on the streets who might otherwise have trouble accessing it. According to Stanley-Niaah (2004), the name dancehall music is ‘derived from the exclusive space, or “halls,” in which dance events were held’ (p. 103). Through the 1990s and into the present day, dancehall has become highly popular, impacting many aspects of Jamaican culture, including ‘space, music, song, dance, fashion, language, art, embodied meanings, performance practice, attitude, politics, economy/industry, and style’ (Stanley-Niaah, 2004: 104).

The ‘space’ of dancehall says something about its economic associations: the dancehall sphere is concentrated in the ghettoes (inner-city), centralized in Jamaica’s capital city, Kingston (Stolzoff, 2000). Decades of poverty in Jamaica has led to a significant sense of disillusionment among the poor. Income distribution in Jamaica is vastly unequal. Outside of tourism, the country does not have a significant manufacturing base (Thomas, 2004). With the decline of the banana and sugar industries, many people were forced to move to the city of Kingston to find employment. Instead of gaining employment, they found themselves in slums (socially and economically isolated communities), which are plagued by violence and overcrowding.

Jamaica’s population is about 2.7 million people, and the nation occupies 4244 sq mi. The population of Kingston is estimated at over 900,000. Kingston occupies 45 sq mi, and the ghettoes – located primarily to south of Kingston – occupy about 8 sq mi. In 2004, Stanley-Niaah estimated that about 230,000 people occupied those 8 sq mi. However, she suggests that most of the other >2 million Jamaicans are ‘unaware of the day-to-day experiences of this select citizenry’ (Stanley-Niaah, 2004: 105). Despite its widespread popularity, the production of dancehall is deeply specific: ‘The innercity is considered by polite society as the “underworld,” and this is where dancehall life/style is largely generated’ (Stanley-Niaah, 2004: 105).

Various dancehall scholars and cultural critics have described this music as the people’s cries of pain and suffering, in their anger and frustration, while attempting to resist socio-economic oppression (Chang, 2010; Cooper, 1994; Hope, 2006; Stanley-Niaah, 2004; Stolzoff, 2000). In both its lyrics and attitudes, dancehall protests economic injustice, the long-standing legacy of colonialism and the complicity of the Jamaican government in failing to address this injustice. Pinnock (2007) defines dancehall as a populist intention aimed at subverting traditional Jamaican governance of society (pp. 74–75). Simply put, the people who had no voice now had the microphone.

To link this social context to my interview data, it is important to note nearly all of the 18 interviewees from impoverished or working-class backgrounds confirmed the identification between their attraction to dancehall and underclass resentment. Dancehall offered an outlet by which they could express and perform their frustration with economic injustice in Jamaica. Yet it is also important to note that the 12 professional-class interviewees also described themselves as fans of dancehall music and culture, attending events at least occasionally, or in some cases regularly. While some of them appreciated the social-economic content of dancehall culture, others enjoyed the music simply as a form of fun. The difference between wealthy and poor dancehall fans most clearly was seen in terms of the space of performance. Professionals dance to the music in affluent clubs or parties, where the chance of physical violence is low (but not, as we will see, zero). Working-class and low-class fans, by contrast, often do dancehall in locations where the chance of violence is high.

My interviewee’s sense of the danger of physical violence is important. Dancehall’s voice of protest has had a different tone from musical voices in Jamaica’s past. Reggae, for example, included plenty of angry social criticism, but it usually balanced this anger with hopes for future peace and justice. Dancehall has been more willing to rely on anger and masculine swagger. Hope (2006) notes that ‘[a]s social and economic pressures heightened in Jamaica in the 1990s, dancehall culture comparatively intensified its reliance on violent imagery and symbols’ (p. 117). This assessment recalls Scott’s (1999) interpretation, mentioned earlier, of dancehall’s ruud bwai who rejects ‘normalized consensual identities’ (p. 214) in the process of protesting economic injustice. Without a clearly articulated positive version of society to strive for, dancehall politics tend toward destructive criticism. To some degree, dancehall does not care whom it hurts as it voices its anger, and one of its victims in the last several decades has been the population of gay men living in Jamaica.

Dancehall lyrics as hate speech

In their national survey of attitudes toward same-sex relationships, Boxill et al. (2011) found that homophobic beliefs were greatest ‘among males, non-university–educated persons, those who listen mostly to dancehall and reggae music and those in lower socio-economic groups’ (p. 3). Yet the data from my interviews provide a more fine-grained qualitative interpretation of these results. All the 12 professionals, and a few of the working-class interviewees, agreed that dancehall music is the central factor in the promotion of homophobia in Jamaica and that dancehall fans tend to cluster at the lower socio-economic levels. They noted that the music industry uses these songs to sanction the use of the derogatory term ‘battyman’, and H1 observed that dancehall celebrates violence in general: ‘Dancehall artists are seduced by war and gore, and this [message] sells to their community’. The study participants from professional backgrounds believed that the dancehall artists are speaking to the artists’ ‘own’ community (meaning to inner-city people). Yet the 10 study participants from impoverished backgrounds were less unanimous in their association of dancehall with antigay violence. Three of them went so far as to deny the association, and the others qualified their comments by saying that they felt dancehall music was, to some degree, speaking to people of their class.

Yet none of my interviewees denied the presence of homophobic lyrics in the music. Antigay rhetoric can be traced back to deejay ‘Shabba Ranks’ (Rexton Rawlson Fernando Gordon), who became popular in the early 1990s. In one of his songs, ‘Wicked in Bed’, Shabba calls for the death of homosexuals:

Inna fi mi bed mi don’t waan Alfred, Don’t waan Tony, mi don’t waan Ted . . . all maamaman fi dead BAM BAM!!! Lick a shot inna a maamaman head [In my bed I do not want Alfred, do not want Tony, I do not want Ted . . . all homosexuals must die. Put a gunshot in the head of a homosexual]. (Shabba Ranks, 1991)

In his defense, Shabba said he wrote the lyrics to please God, and that he was quoting from the Bible, which says man should multiply (Gopal and Julien, 1994). Usually the biblical quote that is referenced is Leviticus 20:13: ‘If a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a women, both . . . shall surely be put to death’. (As we will see, the reference to the Bible here hints at an unexpected kinship between highly violent dancehall lyrics and religious conviction.)

However, it was the infamous ‘Boom Bye Bye’ in 1992 that spurred international outrage. Performed by deejay ‘Buju Banton’ (Mark Anthony Myrie), the song declares, ‘Boom bye bye inna batty bwoy head rude bwoy nuh support nuh batty bwoy dem affi dead [batty boy (homosexual) should die, with a prominent feature of a gun]’ (Buju Banton, [1992] 2001). Hope (2006) has observed that it was in the 1990s that the dancehall culture became permeated with violent symbols; ‘the cold steel of the knife’ was replaced by the ‘warm lead of the gun’ (p. 117). In Banton’s defense, Cooper (1994: 438) stresses that those people who oppose Banton’s song are doing so based on a literal reading of the word ‘gun’. Instead, she suggests that the gun in the song is a ‘lyrical gun’, which represents a ‘symbolic penis’, and should be understood as the celebration of the heterosexual man’s ability to satisfy his woman. However, Chin (2005) posits that critics such as Cooper ‘missed a crucial opportunity to challenge the deeply rooted homophobia that is unmistakably reflected in Banton’s lyrics’ (p. 382).

It is a sad truth that homophobic content does not appear to diminish the popularity of dancehall songs. Some of the most explicit antigay songs have remained at the top of the music charts for weeks, sometimes months (Henry, 2006). These songs not only express the sentiments of the singer, but also appear to have a grim teaching purpose. For example, dancehall introduced what is popularly known as a ‘fire burn’ mentality. In these songs, for instance, ‘Bun Out Di Chi Chi’, deejays such as ‘Capleton’ (Clifton George Bailey) call for homosexuals to be executed by fire (Capleton, 2002). Deejay ‘Elephant Man’ (O’Neil Bryan), in his 2001 song ‘Log On’, demonstrates a dance that pantomimes setting fire to a gay person and stomping on that individual as he or she is on the ground.

What did my interviewees make of this rhetoric of guns and fire? Even the participants most inclined to associate dancehall with economic justice (the poorest ones) had no doubt that the word ‘gun’ is a literal reference to a weapon. This was because, being impoverished and sometimes homeless, they were most vulnerable to homophobic threats from guns. H23 in fact stated that

apart from the fire, the symbol of the gun is always used to drive fear in gay community. When I am walking down the street and someone suspects that I am gay, they would often use gun symbol next to head, while saying batty boy must die.

This is a powerful example, in my view, of the way in which homophobic dancehall lyrics can be translated into threats of physical violence. My interviewees had similar views about the presence of fire in dancehall lyrics. The majority of my study’s participants stressed that the ‘more fire’ mentality has proven detrimental to their community, and there have been repeated attempts to set gay men on fire. According to H16,

It is too depressing for me to think about what is going on in the society. Dancehall is spreading homophobia, we have no help from anyone when we are held and beaten at random. If someone tries to set us on fire . . . we are refused assistance at the hospital when the nurses realize that we are gay.

Once again, the gay men in my study have the distinct impression that homophobic dancehall content is translated to direct violence. The fact that Jamaican gay men in 2014 were hearing antigay lyrics hurled at them from a song released in 1992 attests to the lasting harm done by dancehall homophobia. Although Banton’s subsequent albums Til Shiloh, Inna Heights, Unchained Spirit, Rasta Got Soul, and his 2019 song ‘Country for Sale’ reflect some positive transformation for him as an artist, it is important to recall that Banton refused to apologize for this song, despite the fact that it almost ended his international career (Stolzoff, 2000). Indeed, not apologizing seems to have played well to sensibilities of the male, lower class audience to whom Banton sells his music. As Thomas (2004) notes, ‘His stance mediated the hegemonic force of economic (market) values by refusing to compromise what has been seen as a Jamaican cultural value’ (p. 242).

Moreover, Stolzoff (2000) says that in the dancehalls, the selector (the person, usually male, who plays the songs) would attempt to unite the audience through speeches intended to galvanize consensus against certain groups. Therefore, the selector would ask for a show of hands, a waving of a rag, from those who hate batty men (gays). The selector may even ask the crowd to direct violence against gays. According to Stolzoff (2000), ‘Since no one wants to be associated with these despised groups, especially with homosexuals and “heathen,” most men will follow the selector’s command’ (p. 208). In my study, A1 states that ‘I believe in freedom of expression, but dancehall promotes a misconception that we are bad and promiscuous, and this makes me feel low’.

Deejay ‘Left Side’ (Craig Parks) surmises the reason for bigoted lyrics: ‘Whenever a dancehall artist does a gun tune, or a homophobic song, they get nuff [a lot of] ratings from the crowd. Artists are very forward thinking, so when they see that this works, they continue writing about it’ (Henry, 2006). Similarly, Deejay ‘Frisco Kid’ (Steve Webley Wray) has a song titled ‘Mi Nuh Inna Weh Dem Inna [I am not into what they (gays) are into]’ (Frisco Kid). Kid said that his songs are creative, and he believes that the lyrics are well chosen and address reality (Pitter, 2001). Henry (2006) endorses Kid’s assertion that dancehall is a reflection of the temperament of the wider Jamaican society: ‘Dancehall tackles many issues, looking at things which happen locally and internationally, and is the mirror of present-day Jamaican life’.

Thus, we can see the complex politics of dancehall culture. Dancehall challenges hegemonic social forces, advocating for the poor to be included in the social, economic and political agenda. Yet while with one arm it embraces the disenfranchised, with the other it pushes away members of the LGBTQ community. As Stanley-Niaah (2004) has suggested, ‘dancehall identity is contradictory, competitive, as it is simultaneously sacred’ (p. 115). When people hear dancehall, do they hear a call for economic justice or a condemnation of non-normative sexual identities? Or do they ignore the lyrics and attend simply to the vibes of the music, not the message? Whatever the answer, we cannot afford to ignore dancehall culture. As Stolzoff (2000) explains,

[I]n addition to its presence in mass media, the artifacts of dancehall are everywhere in public spaces . . . Yet dancehall plays a deeper role in shaping notions about personhood – that is, the motivations, values, and worldviews of young children – even before those children choose to become active participants. (p. 2)

This complex politics was borne out in my interviews. Nearly all of them agreed that dancehall lyrics were cultivating antigay sentiment among fans. H20 opined, ‘Children learn these homophobic sentiments from dancehall music, which is later cultivated into practice. This cannot be productive for any society’. Yet although most were not optimistic that a dancehall artist singing a pro-gay song would change national perceptions of gay people, several of the interviewees from impoverished backgrounds were less certain. Perhaps dancehall could redeem itself and bring a message both of economic justice and of social tolerance. By contrast, a number of professional and working-class participants went so far as to suggest that homophobia is an engine of dancehall music popularity: about half stated that they believe that some people support the music because they do not want to be labeled as gay.

Dancehall and masculinity

Although Pinnock (2007) is surely right to note that homophobic attitudes in dancehall do not ‘indicate the absence of homosexual practices amongst men and women in the dancehall’ (p. 59), the link between dancehall and aggressive heterosexual masculinity is undeniable. Furthermore, much as dancehall is torn between contesting the economic status quo and abetting normative sexual identity, so is Jamaican masculinity caught between dominance and subjugation. As Lewis (2004) shows, Caribbean men of African descent represent the majority of the male population on these islands, and they likewise represent the largest prison population, most of the drug traffickers and the majority of the unemployed. In such conditions, Lewis (2004) notes, ‘Men are in danger or crisis’ (p. 237). However, he also stresses that men in the Caribbean exert enormous power. Their power is attributed to ‘the resilience of masculinity and . . . the seductive power of patriarchy’ (Lewis, 2004: 237). Therefore, understanding masculinity in Jamaica and its contradictions is useful to our analysis of dancehall and homophobia.

Although many Jamaican men are in social and economic peril, normative masculine identity projects dominance. This matches what Ruxton (2002) has named hegemonic masculinity, in which a society idealizes one view of masculinity and endorses the behavior associated with it, giving these types of men more power. In Jamaica, fashioning the ideal male role starts with socialization (Evans, 2001). Boys at a young age are taught to be rough, and they will be ridiculed if they display ‘feminine’ tendencies. In Jamaica, the male homosexual is perceived as effeminate; to straight men, homosexuality undermines masculinity (Hearn and Morgan, 1990). Especially in the inner-city, males must portray a rough exterior. The former prime minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley, provides a sobering description of masculinity when he says that it takes machismo to survive in the ghetto (inner-city), and that these singers (dancehall deejays) feel the need to proclaim their own sense of inadequacy in the face of a hostile society (Gopal and Julien, 1994).

As shown earlier, it is in the inner-city that dancehall has found its niche. The male fans who live in ghettos have a fragile sense of their economic prospects, and some of them compensate with a hyper-masculinity. Dancehall lyrics urge males to identify their manhood through sexual conquest and domination, which is often reflected in their extreme paranoia about male homosexuality. According to Pinnock (2007), in songs such as Shabba Ranks’ ‘Dem Bow’, ‘the Jamaican “rudeboy/ghetto yute” is warned against performing the emasculating rituals of oral sex (with women), which gives away his (masculine) power’ (p. 55). This suggests the underlying vulnerability of masculine identity in dancehall. Avoiding sex with men is not enough; one also has to avoid the wrong kind of sex with women.

Nearly all of my interviewees reported that their experience with dancehall homophobia in the present was conditioned by their experience of masculine norms in the past. H18 explained that he was asked to leave his school because the principal said he was too feminine and was tarnishing the reputation of the school. He later completed high school at a private institution. In another example, H6 states that he was attacked in a Western Union in Kingston because his attackers believed that he was too stylishly dressed to be a straight man. Similarly, H7 described being attacked at school. Students claimed they suspected that he was gay because he ‘acted like a girl’. The majority of participants explained that derogatory comments against them were mostly made by men, and these comments were always rooted in homophobia.

These comments suggest the degree to which my interviewees understand masculine identity as something performed (successfully or not) in public. For instance, H7 was not certain when younger what he was doing that made the other boys think he was acting like a girl. Similarly, H6 did not set off to Western Union that day with the intention of dressing like a woman, but merely with the intention of dressing well. Jamaica has been for them a space in which slight deviations of social appearance are read as deliberate violations of gender boundaries, punishable by violence. In this respect, some of my interviewees have experienced a conflict between dancehall as a space where they can use their bodies to perform their identities and dancehall as a space policed by homophobic lyrics demanding adherence to a masculinist script.

Chrissy and Sidonne (the only participants who insisted that I use their names) are prominently featured in a 30-minute documentary, ‘Jamaica’s Underground Gays’, in which reporter Ade Adepitan and director Andrew Carter visit Kingston, Jamaica, where they investigate the growth of homophobic attacks (Adepitan and Carter, 2014). Carter meets a gay and transgender group living in a storm drain. Both Chrissy and Sidonne hail from inner-city communities (ghettos). They shared that they were chased out of their communities by ‘thugs’ because it was obvious to everyone that they acted like girls. They were both depressed when they thought about not being able to see their families. I was moved to tears when I saw the condition of the storm drain in which they were living. They work as commercial sex workers at night, which they said does not provide enough income for them to rent a house. Even if they could afford it, because of homophobia, it would be almost impossible for them to find a place to rent. They cannot live in the ghetto where rent is low. Other residents will not allow it. And they were already chased out of a home in a middle-class community. They are convinced that securing asylum in a developed country with more progressive policies toward homosexuals is their only hope for a better life.

Chevannes (2002) offers several assertions to explain why some Jamaicans feel such repugnance and active rejection toward homosexuals. One of these assertions will be highlighted, because it does fit the present analysis and because his explanation is insightful. Chevannes points out that gay men are vilified, while lesbians are tolerated, so it must be the act of anal penetration that repulses some Jamaicans. Interestingly, however, he states, ‘Anal penetration appears to be a not-uncommon practice in heterosexual intercourse’ (p. 88). Chevannes argues that anal penetration itself is not the overriding factor; perhaps it is the ‘coupling of man and man’ that some Jamaicans resent. Some Jamaicans are challenged by homosexuality as a legitimate gender identity; in this case, ‘gender is a function of ideology and functions as ideology’ (Pinnock, 2007: 52). This ideological underpinning is sustained through Jamaican cultural, political, social, economic and religious norms. The homophobia in spaces such as the dancehall is just a reflection of a much larger, well-nigh universal, cultural norm.

Dancehall and religion

Given that the link between dancehall and Jamaican masculinity features celebrations of hypersexuality and glorifications of criminal behavior, we might not expect to see a link between dancehall and Christian devotion in Jamaican homophobia. But the link is indeed there, and my study’s participants were sensitive to it because they all were or are affiliated with a Christian denomination: Roman Catholic, Church of God, Baptist, Revival and Seventh-day Adventist. One way to explain this unexpected connection is to note that although dancehall and Christianity endorse different norms regarding sexual behavior and law and order, they agree on the norm of heterosexual identity and so refer to one another in their avocation of this norm. When it comes to antigay sentiment, we might say, their methods differ, but their goals are similar. As we will see, the subjects I interviewed saw dancehall and Christian worship as working together in their hostility to the Jamaican LGBTQ community.

The role of the church in dictating many other social norms in Jamaica is extensively documented (Boyne, 2007; Chevannes, 2002; Cooper, 1995; Thomas, 2004; White and Carr, 2005). Castello (2004) maintains that throughout much of the history of Western society, religion and the state have tried to police sexual behavior. More specifically, Charles (2011) locates intolerance for homosexuals in Jamaica in the history of slavery and in the way slaves were treated by the church, which functioned as an ally of the slave-owners. He asserts, ‘The church started to spread the Christian gospel to convert the captive Africans so they would be “saved from sin” and become tractable’ (Charles, 2011: 8). This intolerance included views about sexual immorality. The English Buggery Law of 1553 outlawed anal sex. Similarly, Article 76 of the Offences Against the Person Act of the Jamaican Criminal Code (1864) also outlawed buggery (anal sex). According to Charles (2011), ‘This combination of secular law and religious dictate are the antecedents of the negative homosexual themata found in Jamaica today’ (p. 9). Fundamentalist Christian churches (which dominate the spiritual landscape of Jamaica) have long taught that anything other than heterosexuality is a vice.

For example, some pastors, in criticizing the LGBTQ-friendly public service announcement of 2011 (mentioned earlier), say that the church is not targeting gay people in particular but rather condemns immorality in all areas of society. Yet the associate pastor of the Tower Hill Missionary Church in Kingston, Mark Dawes, suggests that the church needed to be even more vocal in denouncing the homosexual lifestyle. Dawes stated that ‘As innocuous and as innocent as that public service announcement might appear, it is part of a wider plan by militant homosexuals to gradually desensitize Jamaicans to homosexuality, so that homosexual behavior and practice can become mainstream in Jamaica’ (Wilson, 2011). Several other ministers held similar views against homosexuality, such as Reverend Monsignor Kenneth Richards, rector at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kingston, who pointed out that the Catholic Church did not embrace homosexual unions because such unions were not in keeping with religious principles – and as such, the public service announcement (PSA) should not be aired (Wilson, 2011). Wilson also posits that although the PSA had the backing of powerful and varied individuals and groups, ‘The PSA’s message has not found favor with several church leaders, who continue to maintain that anything outside of the heterosexual lifestyle is not in keeping with biblical principles and will, therefore, never be endorsed by the religious community’. According to Milton Gregory, executive secretary of the Jamaica Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, ‘Inasmuch as you want to be accommodating, homosexuality is not biblical and [insofar as] it is not biblical, then I have a problem’ (Wilson, 2011). Although having a ‘problem’ with gay people may sound vague, LGBTQ Jamaicans readily see the link between religious disapproval and violence. To participant H13, Gregory’s statement feels like ‘a subtle form of violence toward gays; it is almost like telling people to stone us’.

This long-standing Christian hostility to homosexuality in Jamaica has filtered into the consciousness of the creators of dancehall music. Several dancehall deejays (namely, Banton and Shabba) have said that they wrote their homophobic lyrics to please God. This paradox (of an alliance between church and dancehall) has resulted in a stance against homosexual people that seems difficult to soften, much less eradicate. Nor can we simply differentiate church and dancehall by saying that the former is peaceful, whereas the latter encourages violence. This distinction (it may seem) is implied by the reanalysis of West and Cowell (2015), which found that religiosity predicted ‘more negative attitudes’ toward gay rights, but ‘less negative behavior’ (p. 6).

West and Cowell are of course studying the responses of Jamaicans who hold antigay views. What is interesting about the results of my study is that it brings in the perceptions of Jamaicans who are the targets of these views. For these people, church and dancehall interact with each other to promote both antigay sentiments and antigay behavior. In the view of H4, H5, H6, H7, H8, and H9, dancehall is competing with the church for the number one spot as chief sponsor of hatred for LGBTQA people. Take the example of H7, who attended a religious-affiliated educational institution. One night he discovered that some male students had disconnected the electricity to his entire dorm. When they attempted to enter his room, they were challenged by him and his roommate. He later realized that they had scribbled ‘Bun Chi Chi Man [Burn gay man]’ on his door. (He was later dismissed from the institution.) H7 was initially perplexed by the incident. His Christian dorm-mates, rather than condemning him by writing antigay passages from the bible, used dancehall lyrics, a genre of music that in other respects espouses attitudes about sex and violence that his dorm-mates would deplore. Yet when it came to homophobia, dancehall was the first place these Christians went for insults.

The participants of my study believed, in effect, that pastors resemble dancehall deejays: they are preaching what they think society in general wants to hear. The common thread in my interviews was to keep one’s gay identity a secret from everyone in the church. My respondents remained closeted because they knew they would not be accepted in their churches as openly gay men or women. L1 stated that she was sent to church to be changed, but instead she slept with six women in the church. H9 stated, ‘At the Pentecostal church, they bash gays’. The gays I interviewed bemoaned the clergy’s selective interpretation of the Bible. They wondered why clergy would focus on homosexuality to the exclusion of problems such as adultery or fornication (which my subjects purport is rampant in their congregations). H3 stated, ‘I am Roman Catholic and was condemned by my Jamaican priest. He was replaced with a priest from the U.S who accepted me . . . It was such a relief! I was about to give up on my faith’. In addition, H13 says that a priest

cannot help someone and condemn them at same time . . . As a matter of fact, a gay friend of mine was forced to marry a woman, or he would have been forced out of the church. He is married, but he is still sleeping with men.

In June 2013, the church mobilized to send a message that the Buggery Laws should not be repealed. The executive director of the Church of God in Jamaica, Reverend Lenworth Anglin, stated that ‘he was prepared to die to ensure that Jamaica does not succumb to pressure from homosexual activists’ (Thaffe, 2013). According to Carol Narcisse, chairperson of the Jamaica Civil Society Coalition (JCSC), ‘Language like “persons willing to die for” and so on, in my view, is unnecessary language at this point’ (Thaffe, 2013). Narcisse went on that there are other, more tolerant views within the church that are missing from the conversation. She appealed to those individuals to come forward. Narcisse concludes, ‘We can only hope that we can come through this discussion in a way that does not see greater violence, harm, intolerance and exclusion’ (Thaffe, 2013). In his observation of the contradictions of the church, Boyne (2007) stresses that ‘One well-known bishop is talking about whipping gays in Half-Way Tree, while being publicly silent about fornicating and adulterous pastoral colleagues. Where should they be whipped?’ One of my participants who belonged to the Revivalist tradition noted that his pastor had not condemned him, but the pastor had cautioned him that he needed to change before it was too late. Some of the study participants told me that they are convinced that the church could help LGBTQA people, but it will be hard because the church in Jamaica is built on tradition.

Asylum or bust

According to Broverman (2016), a new study called ‘The Developmental Cost of Homophobia: The Case of Jamaica’ stated that 74.4 percent of LGBT Jamaicans reported they have considered living abroad. The majority of my study’s participants felt a sense of hopelessness at the prospect of remaining in their birthplace. Many mentioned that if they are not granted asylum in another country, they will commit suicide. I spoke with three Jamaicans who have received asylum in the United States. They all expressed happiness with their decision to seek asylum. They said that to be granted asylum, the applicant needs to show a convincing reason. They contend that the asylum process can be brutal and painful if the applicant does not have support, both emotional and financial, to survive it. The process may take up to a year, and all applicants need to support themselves during that time.

According to A2,

I was better off financially when I was in Jamaica. I lived in an upper-class neighborhood, so that provided some protection. However, one day I was in Half-Way Tree (a centralized commercial area), and I was attacked by a group of men who suspected that I was gay based on my demeanor. I was pursued and robbed in front of onlookers who did not come to my aid . . . I did not inform my parents of my sexual orientation until I was leaving Jamaica. I left on a visitor’s visa and sought asylum when I arrived in America.

A1 had a more traumatic experience. He was raped by men who claimed they wanted to reverse his homosexuality. He is absolutely contented with his decision to seek asylum, saying, ‘I would be devastated if I had to return to Jamaica after college. I cry when I think about what I went through in Jamaica. I would rather kill myself than have someone else kill me’. Chillingly, A3 says, ‘I am happy that I can embrace who I am. I am free in the U.S. I would take my life if I had to go back to Jamaica’.

Conclusion

Early in this essay, I mentioned Durban-Albrecht’s (2017) caution against treating Third World societies ‘as having exceptional problems with homophobia in a way that is somehow unrelated to the legacies of imperialism’ and ‘portraying black and brown populations as inherently and excessively violent’ (p. 168). I would like to conclude by remembering this admonition. It is relevant to note that in the 2012 US presidential election, Republican front runners Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney both purported to respect LGBTQA people, but stressed that they would not support adoption by gay people (which Santorum has described as societal dysfunction) or marriage equality (Terkel, 2012). Their view of LGBTQA people as second-class citizens illustrates that homophobia and transphobia exist not just in the poorer parts of the Americas. Yet we can affirm this and still point out that Jamaica has much work to do to keep up with the progress of its neighbors. The 2015 ruling from the US Supreme Court regarding same-sex marriage (that same-sex couples are entitled to the same federal benefits as married heterosexual couples) represents a huge step toward equal rights for all citizens. While there are limits to the law’s effectiveness, this ruling demonstrates an evolution from legal discrimination to a model of legal protection.

In his visit to Jamaica in 2015, President Obama voiced support for the rights of gay and transgender people. Though Jamaica held its first Pride Celebration in 2015, widespread reports of violence and intimidation against LGBTQA people continue to alarm gay, bisexual and transgender Jamaicans, as well as their allies abroad. Perhaps the idea of queer celebration is premature. Nearly everyone in Jamaica recognizes that the postcolonial legacies of economic deprivation and racism are weeds in the garden of Jamaican society. And the weeds continue to grow: just last year Forbes listed Jamaica among the 20 most dangerous places in the world for gay travelers to visit (Bloom, 2019). Hatred against gays, with such deep roots, cannot be eradicated until hatred is seen for the weed that it is. My interviewees had varying degrees of hope about the future. Some felt that continued pressure on Jamaican politicians will eventually yield results, especially if their inconsistent commitment to gay rights is called out. As H16 said of gay people supporting Simpson-Miller, ‘They were stupid to vote for Portia, and they need to hold her accountable’. Yet others were more pessimistic. H19 was less inclined to blame Simpson-Miller: ‘I love Portia, but she is not getting the support that she needs . . . I don’t think Jamaicans will ever accept gays’.

This essay has analyzed the responses of the 30 respondents of my study, along with documentary sources, in the spirit of West and Cowell’s (2015) assumption that ‘the more we know about the causes and predictors of antigay prejudice in Jamaica, the more effective prejudice-reducing strategies are likely to be’ (p. 304). Yet the picture that has emerged of these causes and predictors shows a great deal of blurry overlap between them. Popular music, gender performance and religious conviction all interact to deprive LGBTQA people of equal status in Jamaica. We live in an age when a whole country’s population can be split, turned against itself and distracted by a hate campaign in the name of religion or entertainment. It will take a different kind of masculinity, a different spirit of musical expression and a different form of religious commitment to fight the temptation to subscribe to prejudice, fear or hatred. Meanwhile, the bastions of privilege continue to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. The slave markets may have been closed, but the economic institutions that fed on African captives still ensure that some nations harvest privilege while others harvest poverty and civil unrest based on the hateful ideology of the slave owners’ priests.