Roots of Homophobia
BBC Channel 4
August 21, 2001
Original link for this article: LINK
'Batty boy'--an abusive term meaning homosexual--has become an all too familiar chant on Britain's streets. The term comes from Jamaica, where violent homophobic lyrics are part of the staple diet of dancehall music. In Roots of Homophobia, on BBC Radio 4 this week, Rikki Beadle-Blair travels to Jamaica where homosexuality remains a crime punishable by ten years hard labour and homophobic murders go largely unpunished. They say "Burn the Battyman".
Day 1 – London
Despite travelling during the off season, the Air Jamaica flight is packed . And raucous - strangers call across the plane to one another like family - addressing elders that they have never met before as 'Mum and Dad'. A small posse of drunks, clutching cans of Red Stripe and brandishing thick Shanty-town accents, swagger up and down the aisles. Earlier, we'd seen them been escorted onto the plane by uniformed officials. "Are they being deported?" my producer wonders... I'm too busy avoiding eye-contact to answer--lets not get gay-bashed before we even get there.
Later – Montego Bay
As soon the plane doors open the heat rushes in like a living thing made of air--overpoweringly humid and fertile-feeling. I feel welcomed by the smiling sun and warm embracing breeze--should I kiss the runway? Once through customs, everyone we meet checks out my hair and smiles, "Wh'appen Rasta?" seemingly taking my bleach-blonde hair for religious commitment rather than a fashion statement. My return smiles are tentative, I'm waiting to witness the hatred and intolerance and the threats that have kept me away for so long--all my life--from my mother country.
Day 2 – Montego Bay
As I work out on the rusty equipment in the rustic gym at the Doctor's Cave Hotel I ponder the events of last night . Just as I was settling down to CNN in my sports socks, there came a knocking at the door. A small, dark-haired white gentlemen of vaguely European nationality blinked at me in vaguely confused wonder and asked plaintively, "Pieter?" I blinked back, "Sorry?" He blinked round me into the room, craning his puzzled neck, "Pieter?" I explained that Peter must be another room, because this was definitely mine. "And who you are?" He demanded, looking me up and down. "Not Peter, I'm afraid" I answered, bidding him goodnight as I gently closed the door . Five minutes later the phone rang. "You are Jamaican?" the stranger asks softly--and throws me. "No, er, yes, well, sort of, why?" "Jamaica is beautiful." he urges, "Jamaica is beautiful." "Yes, I say." "Let me visit, yes?" he pleaded. "Let me in.?" I know how he feels... So I walked down to the beach this morning, all the kids trundling by in rattly old school buses giggling and pointing at me smiling and waving back. And then I hear it from a passing car. The greeting I've been waiting for. The gentleman caller I've been expecting. "Batty man!" I almost feel relief. It's happened - it's over--they know me, I know them, we know our positions--the Bigot and the Battyman. I'm home.
Day 3 – Montego Bay
Today we met with the local reps from J-FLAG---the Jamaican gay rights pressure group. Howard is a fine-boned and elegant, soft-spoken, delicate-featured , Bob Marley lookalike.
Stories of hate.
He tells us of a friend of his who, once the word hit the streets that he might be gay, had become fair game--so much that when he was at work they stole every thing he had, every stick, every brick, 'even his pisspot.' The police, of course, did nothing. Devastating. Steve offeres to be Rikki's bodyguard--apparently he's going to need it. When we asked if we could meet this guy, Howard blind-sided us by saying "Sure, he's probably working next door right now!" and nipped out of the building to fetch him, leaving us reeling, only to return moments with the news that not only is the man in question too injured to attend work--but that he has no work to attend; they've had to let him go leaving him homeless, jobless, traumatised and injured.
Day 4 – Negril
Just discovered there's a ragga band with a record out right now called Chi-Chi man. 'Chi-Chi' being a quaint name for 'termite' and, it turns out, a hip word for 'battyman' - y'see, both termites and homosexuals 'eat wood.' Cute. And this cute song advocates the burning and killing of Them. Us. This record has been number one for weeks. This afternoon we're hanging out at the local internet bar when, guess what--the video comes on TV! The barman pumps up the sound system, people gyrate on their barstools and sing along. Seeing my interest, the barman yells over the pumping bass, "Yeh man! That's how we do in Jamaica! We take the battyman queers and burn them!" "Why?" I enquire, disingenuously. And it was on: David taped everything as the barman, along with several buzzing barflies, lectured me on the pointless evils of homosexuality quoting vaguely from the bible the whole time. If the young manageress's nine year old son turned out to be gay she told me, she would cut his throat. What if a batty man walked in this moment, I asked. They would run to their cars and fetch their car irons beat him within a inch of his life, came the reply, if he was lucky. Oh dear... "What if I told you I was gay?" "Why?" laughed the barman "You is a battyman?" Well, he'd asked. What choice did I have? "Yes."
I was met with gales of disconcerting disbelieving laughter followed by a tidal wave of debate questions but no car irons. A couple of guys offer to be my bodyguard---apparently I'm going to need it. There's time for a heartbreakingly brief swim in our private bay before motoring back through tropical rain-storms to Montego Bay where we hooked up with John, one of the members of J-FLAG who had volunteered to take us around. I was driving him and his best friend to the bus station, when they suddenly yelled out "Pull over!" I thought somebody was having a fit but it turned out that they'd spotted a buddy on the roadside. Moments later I found myself surrounded by the stars of the local gay scene--a scene that consists of precisely this: a bunch of cute fem boys and sexy butch boys, and whatever, hanging out and flirting and subtly intimidating passers-by. Just like you always find 'em, all over the world, wherever you go. Queens in their kingdom.
Day 5 – Montego Bay
It's a week of firsts! My first Pentecostal service. I thought I'd done this before. I was wrong. I have never never experienced anything quite like this. Three-and-a-half hours of singing, praying, testifying and speaking in tongues in a packed church under eighty degree sun and through hammering raining and ominous thunder. Everyone was warm and welcoming posing for pictures and helping me find the correct passages in the Bible, whether I want to or not. They talked about the distinction between the sinner and sin etc., and how they would never turn anyone away if they were gay. Attempt to dissuade them, yes, but not turn them away. They seemed sincere, gentle dignified people; they certainly did not react adversely on hearing that I was gay, if anything they leaned closer to me and intensified their gentility.
A Pentecostal view.
Charming. Seductive. If I'd been born and raised among these persuasive folk, where would my sexuality be now? Where would my spirit be? Saved or confused? Repentant or just silent?
Day 6 – Kingston
We visit the Kingston HQ of J-FLAG. The building was overflowing with excitement. It turns out that parliament has suddenly and unexpectedly responded to a year-and-a-half old submission from J-FLAG, entreating them to amend the constitution to protect homosexuals from discrimination. Fresh off the plane from Johannesburg where she has just recently begun to make a (state acknowledged and constitutionally protected) life with her partner, is the extraordinary Jamaican Donna, graciously articulate, gently imposing, fiercely determined and--most crucially--'out'. She is more free in South Africa. Donna is to be the face J-FLAG of gay Jamaica. She talks passionately of wanting to feel in her own country the way she is able to feel in South Africa, the first country in the world to include homosexual protections in the constitution. How ironic that a black person would have to turn from Jamaica to South Africa to find equality.
Final day – Kingston
I had a frustrating interview today with an academic who seemed to believe that homophobia in Jamaica sprang from the lack of subservient women to bolster the beleaguered male self-esteem--the first person I have interviewed here that I didn't like at all. But that's not really fair as before we could really go at it he was called away and the interview was cut short. Plus I was already in strange mood. We had just come from a church yard in the depressed area of Mountainview where last April a gay man, caught with a lover in his home had been chased a mob of twenty or so 'Rude Boys' before being cornered in the grounds of the tiny rustic clapboard church where he had run for sanctuary and been shot there in the churchyard amongst the weeds and burned cars. David had bought some flowers and I laid them on the steps of the church until a couple of barefoot and quite fey young men appeared.
We must remember.
We asked if they knew about the young man who had died there--how and why. One of the youths, a cautiously fey young thing who apparently had a bedroom adjacent to the chapel was evasively vague. Did he know what happened? "Not re-a-allyyyy..." On the card I had written 'We remember'. And we do. We must.
Rikki Beadle-Blair is a writer and film director. He recently starred in Metrosexuality, which he also wrote and directed and which was shown on BBC Channel 4 earlier this year.