Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica

This is an excerpt of Dr. Matthew Chin’s newly published book, Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica published by Duke University Press in 2024. This excerpt, which looks at the early years of the anglophone Caribbean’s first LGBTQ+ organisation, The Gay Freedom Movement (GFM), is publish on this website with the permission from Dr Chin and Duke University Press.

GFM emerged in the context of a vibrant, albeit underground, social scene, among same-gender-desiring, Jamaicans. Dennis, who was born in the rural parish of St. Thomas in 1934 and moved to Kingston in 1952, recalled that prior to Jamaica’s independence, the city was home to numerous cruising, spots where men would meet each other for casual sex—along South Camp Road, Marescaux Road, East Queen Street, and so on—as well as other sites of gay male gathering that ranged from small home-based affairs and clandestine bars to nighttime outdoor dances. In the 1960s, as Dennis remembers it, Kingston’s gay scene began to really take off, prompting him to start his own gay bar. By the time GFM began publishing JGN [Jamaica Gaily News] in 1977, the newsletter reported on the events of numerous gay bars in Kingston, such as The Closet, Speakeasy, Maddams, Fanny Hill, and the Keyhole, as well as White Lady in Spanish Town. Though these establishments had difficulty remaining open due to the economic hardships of the period, they nevertheless operated as sites of sociality for same-gender-desiring Jamaicans that supported gfm’s emergence, despite their ephemeral nature.

Violence was the immediate impetus for gfm’s formation. Though Jamaicans often objected to homosexuality by appealing to biblical scripture or the need to maintain something like “the natural order,” reporter Jennifer Ffrench theorized violence against same-gender-desiring Jamaicans in terms of “madness.” She noted, “The question of morality is one which has always affected our society in peculiar ways. When this morality has to do with sex, the effect oftentimes goes beyond peculiarity and borders more on madness.” The pages of jgn are replete with stories of such “madness,” including beatings, stonings, and stabbings; discriminatory employment termination; and severe ostracism. These iterations of violence rarely attracted the attention of the island’s mainstream media. jgn contributors recognized that these acts of violence were perpetrated, not always by “straight” individuals, but also by other same-gender-desiring Jamaicans who might become involved in “gay bashing” for various reasons, such as to avoid being identified as “gay” themselves. Indeed, it was repeated acts of intracommunity violence at The Closet, a gay club in Kingston, that led freelance designer Larry Chang to organize the meeting in September 1977 that precipitated GFM’s formation. During the meeting, a committee of six was formed to investigate the issue and come up with recommendations. The committee was composed of Chang, John Harriet (a white American college student participating in an extended exchange program in Jamaica), and four Black and brown men of middle-and working-class backgrounds.

For Chang and Harriet, their life experiences were a major impetus for their involvement in this initiative. Chang was born into a Chinese Jamaican family in Brownstown, St. Ann, in 1949. Having attend the California College of Arts and Crafts in Berkeley in 1967, he became politicized by the feminist, Black Power, and gay liberation movements sweeping across the United States. In his final year of college, he began answering gay personal ads in underground publications and having his first dating and sexual experiences with men. He returned to Jamaica in 1973 with the goal of contributing to Jamaica’s nation building while also finding a way to honor the erotic subjectivity and community building he had begun in the United States. Conversely, Harriet began to develop his political personhood in Jamaica. Born in 1948 and raised in a middle-class white family in Boston, Harriet found himself transformed upon signing up for a college exchange program in Jamaica. Laboring alongside agricultural workers in St. Thomas during the week and socializing in Kingston’s gay bars on the weekend helped him to recognize both the pernicious workings of racism in the United States as well as the sex negativity that permeated his devout Irish Catholic upbringing. Harriet’s involvement in what was to become gfm grew from the development of his critical consciousness of race and sexuality in Jamaica.

In January 1978, the Jamaican newspaper the Daily Gleaner published a letter that Chang wrote to the editor highlighting the validity of homosexuality as a form of intimacy. His letter was significant in two respects. First, unlike other Jamaicans who submitted similar letters to the editors of the island’s newspapers in support of homosexuality using pseudonyms, Chang deliberately chose to use his real name. Second, Chang identified himself as “General Secretary, Gay Freedom Movement, P.O. Box 343, Stony Hill,” thereby introducing the first self-proclaimed gay activist organization in the anglophone Caribbean to the Gleaner’s reading public and providing a way to communicate with the organization. Other Jamaicans would come to learn of GFM and reach out to Chang upon reading the letters he wrote not only to the Daily Gleaner but also the Jamaica Daily News and the Jamaica Star. With Chang’s name and gfm’s address appearing frequently in Jamaica’s newspapers, Chang soon found himself communicating by mail with individuals across the island.

In writing to gfm, many Jamaicans expressed both surprise and happiness that a gay activist group existed on the island and requested more information about GFM and how they could get involved and meet others. Those living in rural areas expressed strong sentiments of loneliness and isolation and indicated an especially strong desire to connect with other Jamaicans “like them.” In his responses, Chang not only found himself telling interlocutors about GFM and how they could participate, but also providing counseling in letter form and his telephone number should individuals wish to speak with him further. Donna Smith was in sixth form at Immaculate Conception High School and living with her grandmother in the Harborview neighborhood of Kingston when she first learned about GFM. Upon realizing her sexual attraction to other women, she decided to focus one of her research papers on the topics of homosexuality and the gay revolution to develop a better understanding of her desires. Having made her topic known in her class, several of her classmates brought her material that they thought that she could use, including one of Chang’s letters in the newspaper. Smith was elated to learn of the existence of a gay organization on the island and immediately wrote to Chang. Chang not only put her in touch with other gay women, whom Smith interviewed for her research paper, but also encouraged her to participate in gfm. She became an active member in the organization and a regular contributor to jgn, penning the column “Girl Talk” under the penname “M’Lady.”

Yet some of gfm’s interlocutors sought much more than a connection to other gay Jamaicans and involvement in the organization’s activities, because they experienced the same material hardships as other Jamaicans in the late 1970s. In this period the island experienced an economic recession occasioned by its agreement with the International Monetary Fund that drastically reduced Jamaica’s standard of living by a quarter and resulted in a national unemployment rate of almost 30 percent in 1980. GFM fielded letters from gay Jamaicans who, in addition to searching for community, struggled with incarceration, poverty, and hostile family members who threatened to kick them out of their homes.

Copyright Duke University Press, 2024