This Pride Month, RJ tells me about what it means to be black, British-Jamaican and queer, and why Black Pride is so important to him.
This summer UK Black Pride was expected to surpass in size the festival of ten thousand held in Haggerston Park in July 2019. Restyled as #PrideInside for 2020, the celebrations will go online; a necessary move that the organisers hope will open the movement to allies across the world.
For RJ, the opportunity to come together is something he cherishes. In his mid-twenties, black, and British-Jamaican, RJ first experienced Black Pride in 2016. There he finally felt he could relax and be comfortable as himself.
“It is overwhelming when you first get there, being unapologetically black and queer,” he says. “Corporate Pride is an advertising campaign; the radical element of protest is still at the forefront of Black Pride.”
RJ has only come to terms with his own identity in the last five years. He describes growing up black and queer as “awful, f*cking terrible” as he contended with the expectations of his community rooted in deeply-held beliefs.
“I grew up Christian, with all the expectations,” he says. “It’s all implied, but you know you are a living and walking sin.”
Listening to RJ feels like an inter-generational echo of one of Jamaica’s early LGBT leaders, Larry Chang.
Born in Jamaica in 1942 to Chinese parents, Larry became the first Jamaican to come out publicly when, in 1974, he began signing public letters. It was an understated step in a struggle that had been with him as long as he could remember.
“You just have feelings, and you get to know somehow that these feelings are wrong; that it’s sinful” he says.
For his relatives, the concept of being gay did not exist. The question, ‘Why aren’t you more like Raymond?’ constantly beat him down. His cousin, Raymond, became an internationally venerated multi-millionaire, and his university even named a department after him. Raymond was everything a Chinese family expected of a boy.
“I knew from a very young age that I would never be able to meet those expectations,” Larry says.
The stereotype surrounding the archetypal man in Larry’s family is a premonition of RJ’s experience some fifty years later. Long before he could verbalise his feelings, RJ knew he was different. Only when he went away to university could he think more deeply and begin to understand. He had felt the weight of expectation of what it is to be a black man, what he calls the “narrow hypermasculine stereotype”.
“There is little room for femininity or sexualisation,” he says. “It’s all linked to religion, culture and respectability. You need to be careful if you are not a ‘proper black man’ or black spaces can be ostracising.”
RJ was surprised that he was not welcomed into the queer community when he began to understand himself, and he developed an impression that being queer was a white thing.
“I was naïve,” he says. “I have experienced more racism in the queer community than in the non-queer community.”
He finds stereotypes of black men persist – having a big penis, being animalistic and less caring – that make being black and queer a fetish for some. He receives strange messages online on account of being black, and people often do not respect his personal space. The language of porn sites quickly made him see they were not made for him, but for others.
And it was not only racism; in the world that he entered he was not effeminate enough to fit, and he found that the same power structures that existed in society also existed in the spaces he thought would take him in.
“It relates to the hyper-sexualisation of queers,” he says. “For single, queer men, sexual contact is the only contact they can rely on.”
The hierarchy that RJ discovered within the queer community is what makes Black Pride so important for him.
“In black queer spaces I am more comfortable,” he says. “There is a beautiful black queer scene in London where we can be unapologetic. I am at the centre of everything in a black queer space.”
These hierarchies within others are a feature of Larry’s life that he has long thought about. An outsider being Chinese in Jamaica, and being gay, Larry speaks of his own intersectionality in playful terms.
“I am a singularity,” he once said to me. “We are not really people, we are events.”
He has developed a distaste for labels, perhaps as a rejection of a life spent maligned by each section of which he was supposedly part. He sees clearly how it happens; the defensiveness within subjugated groups, and their passionate fear of and aversion to the outsider.
Larry suffered racist and homophobic abuse throughout his youth, much of it from his neighbours who would stone his house and try to get him arrested. One family, reggae musicians, were worse than most. In his poem, Sounds Like a Stone’s Throw, Larry vents his anger at his neighbours ‘Denouncing oppression / Declaring freedom. / For some’ and whose ‘songs of freedom don’t ring true’.
In early underground gay clubs in the 1970s, Larry would dance to such songs whose lyrics were hypocritical and hateful towards people like him; dancehall and murder music with aggressively anti-gay sentiments. He would simply follow the beat and rhythm, and not “intellectualise” the words, considering it yet another “confusing complexity”.
And RJ struggles with this apparent contradiction in himself today. He loves Jamaican culture and is proud of the heritage that is integral to who he is. He finds himself singing along to reggae songs – music he adores – even the lines denouncing ‘the sodomite’. For him, it is about reclaiming the words, their meaning, and the experience that feeds the stereotype he must constantly navigate. It complicates his identity, but reflects his childhood and family.
“I have to be aware, and to unlearn parts of my upbringing,” he says. And he sounds like Larry, adding, “I like the beats, not the lyrics.”
RJ is comfortable with his mother and one or two close relatives, but says it would not be good for his well-being to come out to the rest of his family, most of whom live in Jamaica. He avoids extended-family events, feeling it would simply make no sense to be open with them.
The history of gay rights in Jamaica is interesting to RJ, but he is unaware of the Gay Freedom Movement (GFM), the first Caribbean gay rights organisation that Larry co-founded in the 1970s, or J-FLAG (the Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals & Gays), its prominent successor. His understanding is contemporary; this, he says, part of the erasing of the black gay identity in history.
“Lots of prominent people were certainly gay but kept it secret,” he says. “I’m surprised there is fifty years of literature available.”
The feeling is wrapped up with the impression RJ held as he tentatively explored the queer scene that it is a white space; an impression Larry recognises. Larry is now researching and publishing biographies of queer people of colour. Today, it is Claude McKay, the Jamaican writer and poet of the 1920s and 30s who became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
For Larry, this is about moving the world on from the white and anglophone domination of history and the new online sphere; one that excludes the rich stories of people like McKay. It is a sentiment RJ understands clearly.
But Larry does not accept that activists of the past have been erased. He took asylum in the US when he discovered a plan to burn down his house; his colleague, Brian Williamson, was murdered, stabbed seventy times. That was a time when newspapers would not even print the word ‘gay’. Now there are more supportive organisations in Jamaica than he can even count, and J-FLAG holds an annual symposium: the Larry Chang Human Rights Symposium. Like cousin Raymond, Larry has something lasting, named in his honour.
RJ is at the front now, questioning the racial hierarchies in the queer community, and the conflict between his upbringing and his identity; being black and queer. And this week he will miss the festival that first allowed him to find part of himself.
As RJ puts it, “Black Pride helps me to square the circle.”