Britain can’t just reverse the homophobia it exported during the empire | Edward Akintola Hubbard | Opinion
This year is the 50th anniversary of the UK’s decriminalisation of its Buggery Act, which was instituted in 1533, during the reign of King Henry VIII, to make homosexual sex a crime punishable by death. As Britain gradually became the world’s most expansive empire over the course of a few centuries, “buggery†laws were exported to its colonies where, in many cases, they have remained in effect to this day. Britain can now celebrate the golden anniversary of the end of the act as one of its many progressivist achievements as a modern democracy. However, in former British colonies such as Jamaica, homosexual sex is still prohibited, by sections 76 and 77 of the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861 â€" sections that specify “buggery†and “gross indecency†(respectively) as crimes punishable by up to eight years in prison.
Britain’s abolition of the act was a momentous victory for human rights and social inclusion, but it is fraught with irony. For one, many of its former colonies, which were otherwise eager to remove the shackles of imperial domination and pursue cultural and political independence, were very willing to make an exception in the case of buggery. Former colonial outposts, such as the Anglophone Caribbean, are thought of today as spaces filled with the most extreme forms of homophobic danger, which is supported by anti-gay laws which are actively enforced.
In 1992, the international release of Jamaican dancehall superstar Buju Banton’s smash hit Boom Bye Bye brought unprecedented attention to the issue of homophobia in the Caribbean and the African diaspora. The lyrical content of the song amounted to a violent call for the murder of gay men. It caused a storm north America and Europe, where New York-based GMAD (Gay Men of African Descent), and later other LGBTQ groups in the United States, Canada and the UK, protested against the song, picketing outside Buju Banton’s concerts and forcing radio stations and promoters to boycott dancehall music that promoted violence against the LGBTQ community.
Recriminations quickly came from the dancehall industry and several prominent Jamaican intellectuals, who counter-charged that the international campaign against homophobic dancehall music amounted to censorship, and that Jamaica’s values were under attack from Anglo-American cultural imperialism. Suddenly, British colonial laws became indigenous “Jamaican valuesâ€. Coming from abroad, the criticism of anti-gay violence in Jamaica served to encourage a nationalist tendency to defend against these charges. Today, the buggery laws are invoked as a nativist imperative, a necessary bulwark against western progressive values and one of the few means of protecting the imagined moral purity of Jamaicans.
Meanwhile, Jamaican dancehall artists continue to openly embrace and promote homophobia as an important feature of their music, performances and personas, and continue to enjoy enormous success locally and globally. There is irony here. Britain, the same empire that invented and exported “buggery†to the colonised world, now exports in equally aggressive fashion a pro-gay foreign policy agenda to many of the same countries it colonised. As is to be expected, the backlash arising from these vigorous efforts by the government of former prime minister David Cameron has only served to redraw old cultural and political battle lines that now pit ex-coloniser against ex-colonised.
Proposals to have British foreign aid be dependent on the repeal of anti-gay laws have armed many countries of the global south with an effective populist rhetoric of anti-imperialism and cultural protectionism. Just as perplexing (and ironic) is the fact that, despite the largely unacknowledged horrors of its colonial exploitation of the world, Britain has somehow managed to use this progressive agenda to maintain its sense of moral and cultural superiority over the places it once dominated â€" places that have chosen to continue its atrocious legacy of legally sanctioned homophobia.
The fight against homophobia exists in the contemporary world as an important marker of civilisational status, while homophobia is the ultimate signifier of cultural backwardness and dystopia.
Meanwhile, at home in the postcolonial Caribbean, homophobia serves several purposes: firstly, as a populist, anti-imperialist rallying cry for outright dismissal and hostile action against any LGBTQ rights appeal, perpetually imagined as emanating from outside the postcolonial nation-state. Secondly, as scholars like M Jacqui Alexander have pointed out, homophobia provides the perfect opportunity for the poor countries to pursue an anti-LGBTQ agenda which distracts from more pressing local problems, and provides a credible platform for strong, macho leadership. Finally, homophobia is also a highly effective way for the thriving crypto-economy of sex tourism in the Caribbean to capitalise on the idea of toxic hyper-masculinity.
As Britain celebrates its progressive achievements in gender and sexual inclusion, and as LGBTQ activists continue to bring much-needed attention to the enduring statutes that criminalise homosexual sex all across the postcolonial world, the history of Britain’s legally sanctioned anti-gay violence must be fully understood alongside the many contemporary uses of homophobia.
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