Across the Caribbean two realities exist in conflict: the diversity and fluidity of beliefs and lifestyles having to do with sex and marriage within actual communities, and the staid and forbidding values touted by church leaders and politicians. Caribbean queer theorist Rosamond S. King—who just won Lambda Literary’s Lesbian Poetry Prize for her book Rock | Salt | Stone—explains in her 2014 investigation into sexuality in the Caribbean, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination, that while sexuality in the Caribbean is diverse—with multiple partnership relationships by both men and women, serial monogamy, informal polygamy, and same-gender and bisexual relationships—politicians and church leaders espouse conservative views to win votes. “If the realities of Caribbean sexualities are so flexible,” she writes, “then why do the region’s political leaders still act as though marital, heterosexual, monogamous nuclear families are—and should be—the norm? This behavior persists in part because the practice of espousing conservative (some would say Victorian, Brahmanic, Catholic, and Mohammedian) ideals allows political and religious leaders to promote a Caribbean cultural nationalism that is markedly different from the ‘loose’ morals perceived in the contemporary laws and popular culture of the global North.” In a chapter on homosexuality, King disputes the idea that the Caribbean is the most homophobic place on earth. She argues that homosexuality has always operated in the Caribbean region and does so under the structure of el secreto abierto, or “the open secret,” which not only permits but encourages acceptance of homosexuality in the region, as long as discretion is observed.
In their legal challenge, Jones and his team argued that section 13 and section 16 of Trinidad’s current law are unconstitutional and violate the rights to privacy, liberty, and freedom of sexual expression. Trinidad and Tobago’s constitution was written in 1976, when the country became a republic, severing the ties it had continued to maintain with Britain’s constitutional monarchy after the islands achieved independence in 1962. In 1986, its parliament amended the act, doubling the maximum penalty for sodomy between adults, and in 2000, increased the maximum penalty again to twenty-five years. But the amendment to the law also created an opening for Jones’s action, on the basis that the Sexual Offences Act nullified the “savings clause” written into the constitutions of former British colonies, which decreed that British laws could not be changed after independence. Since the Trinidadian government had amended the buggery law over the years, the law was open to reform. Because of this constitutional argument, Jones’s victory was not just a win for Trinidad and Tobago but has opened the way for similar legal challenges in the seven other Caribbean nations—and the thirty-six other countries in the Commonwealth—that similarly criminalize homosexuality. In fact, just yesterday it was announced that three Barbadians will be challenging their country’s own “buggery” laws, which, they argue, criminalize intimacy between consenting partners. [...]
That proposal never got off the ground. But evangelical church leaders also damned the decision, as expected. Remarkably, though, the Catholic Archbishop of Port of Spain, Charles Jason Gordon, gave the ruling his public support. Days after the ruling, photos of Michelle-Lee Ahye, Trinidad’s track and field star and the gold medalist in the 100 meters at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, with her long-term girlfriend, Chelsea Renee, were leaked online and made front-page news in the Trinidadian press. This aggression backfired, as many of her countrymen and women rallied around her in support. Weeks later, Ahye married her girlfriend in the US. Another national hero, the calypso singer David Rudder, has also openly supported the ruling, an incredible shift in consciousness away from the music scene’s old cultural tropes of machismo and homophobia.
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