BetterMost, Wyoming & Brokeback Mountain Forum
Our BetterMost Community => Chez Tremblay => Topic started by: Kd5000 on April 18, 2006, 12:01:09 pm
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were beaten with tire irons by by a gay-bashing mob while vacationing on St. Martin." Sounds like ppl should boycott Jamaica and other islands in that part of the world...
It's in this week's issue of TIME MAGAZINE. The article is titled
"The Most Homophobic Place on Earth?
Crimes against gays are mounting in Jamaica and across the Caribbean"
Brian wears sunglasses to hide his gray and lifeless left eye—damaged, he says, by kicks and blows with a board from Jamaican reggae star Buju Banton. Brian, 44, is gay, and Banton, 32, is an avowed homophobe whose song Boom Bye-Bye decrees that gays "haffi dead" ("have to die"). In June 2004, Brian claims, Banton and some toughs burst into his house near Banton's Kingston recording studio and viciously beat him and five other men. After complaints from international human-rights groups, Banton was finally charged last fall, but in January a judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence. It was a bitter decision for Brian, who lost his landscaping business after the attack and is fearful of giving his last name. "I still go to church," he says as he sips a Red Stripe beer. "Every Sunday I ask why this happened to me."
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 schoo...
The article continues, but it gets more grim...
THe link for the full article...
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1182991,00.html
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I have long heard stories of the virulent homophobia in Jamaican culture, and West Indian culture in general, both in the countries themselves and in the communites of emigrants overseas. I once read an advisory in a guidebook advising gay tourists to avoid The Bahamas. A sad story such as this does not surprise me--the only thing that does is how such a fabulous gay icon as Grace Jones came out of this world.
Scott
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Horrific, it's like something out a the dark ages. Makes you feel somehow unclean that human beings are still so unenlightend in this day and age. I think ANYONE planning a vacation in that part of the world should take their tourist dollars someplace else....send the message that we won't support this kind of hedious behavior! >:(
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I once read an advisory in a guidebook advising gay tourists to avoid The Bahamas. Scott M.
Shoot. I've already payed for a Florida vacation that inclues a cruise to Nassau. Should I skip over that leg of the trip you think?
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IMO, yes, don't spend your gay dollars there.
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I once read an advisory in a guidebook advising gay tourists to avoid The Bahamas. Scott M.
Shoot. I've already payed for a Florida vacation that inclues a cruise to Nassau. Should I skip over that leg of the trip you think?
Yes, do not honor that place with your presence. Perhaps economics will weigh much more heavily with them once other more welcoming islands get the bulk of people's money and not them.