Though familiar to Americans primarily as a laid-back beach destination, Jamaica is hardly idyllic. The country has the world's highest murder rate. And its rampant violence against gays and lesbians has prompted human-rights groups to confer another ugly distinction: the most homophobic place on earth.
In the past two years, two of the island's most prominent gay activists, Brian Williamson and Steve Harvey, have been murdered — and a crowd even celebrated over Williamson's mutilated body. Perhaps most disturbing, many anti-gay assaults have been acts of mob violence. In 2004, a teen was almost killed when his father learned his son was gay and invited a group to lynch the boy at his school. Months later, witnesses say, police egged on another mob that stabbed and stoned a gay man to death in Montego Bay. And this year a Kingston man, Nokia Cowan, drowned after a crowd shouting "batty boy" (a Jamaican epithet for homosexual) chased him off a pier. "Jamaica is the worst any of us has ever seen," says Rebecca Schleifer of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and author of a scathing report on the island's anti-gay hostility.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1182991,00.html#ixzz0rjoYEP4wEXAGGERATED JAMAICAN HOMOPHOBIA TAKES ITS ROOTS IN SLAVERY. In her article 'Their homophobia is our fault', Decca Aitkenhead put the blame on slavery for Jamaican exaggerate homophobia: "The vilification of Jamaican homophobia implies more than a failure to accept postcolonial politics. It's a failure to recognise 400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation. Slavery laid the foundations of homophobia, and its legacy is still unmistakable in the precarious, overexaggerated masculinity of many men in Jamaica... Every ingredient of Jamaica's homophobia implicates Britain, whose role has maintained the conditions conducive to homophobia, from slavery through to the debt that makes education unaffordable. For us to vilify Jamaicans for an attitude of which we were the architects is shameful". Jamaican Reverend John Hardy embrassed this angle and made a column in Jamaica Observer two years later quoting Aitkenhead, hadding: "The black slaves and most of their descendants developed this hatred for homosexual activities because of the painful experiences that their forefathers endured during slavery. It is alleged that if and when a white slave master suspected that black male slaves were showing any sign of resistance to their enslavement, the most cruel and brutal treatment would be meted out to them. One such treatment would be sodomisation. Sodomisation could take place in one of three ways: The white slave master could sodomise the black males privately or publicly; Black slaves could be forced to sodomise each other in front of slave masters and other members of the plantation; Wooden objects known as ramrods would be used to sodomise the black male slaves, until at times blood and excreta would spurt out of their bodies as water gushes out of a broken fountain. It is this painful and humiliating experience of 400 years of slavery that gave rise to Jamaicans' homophobic attitude". Decca Aitkenhead article was severly criticized by Mark Steyn in the British newspaper The Telegraph: "As for the notion that even the randiest plantation owner could sodomise so many male slaves that he could inculcate an ingrained homophobia enduring for centuries, that's a bit of a stretch even for advanced Western self-loathers". (Excerpt taken from The Guardian and The Telegraph, January 2005 and Jamaica Observer, June 2007)
http://www.soulrebels.org/dancehall/h_roots.htmBoom Bye Bye: Is the Scene Still Paying the Consequences?
Although it has been years since the controversial, homophobic single ‘Boom Bye Bye,’ currently incarcerated Dancehall artist Buju Banton is still facing the repercussions for releasing the track as a teenager. Prior to his legal battle, the deejay faced constant struggle with US gay groups during the 2009 promotional tour for his Rasta Got Soul album. With constant cancellations of shows plaguing the tour, he even met with gay rights activists in San Francisco, although the outcome was not particularly constructive for either side.
Read more at Suite101: War on Reggae/Dancehall: Is Homophobia the Genre's Fatal Flaw?
http://reggae-dub-music.suite101.com/article.cfm/war-on-reggaedancehall-is-homophobia-the-genres-fatal-flaw#ixzz0rjpXbz94
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