This LGBT History month, many will learn about the work of Jamaican LGBT rights campaigner, Larry Chang. We met for coffee, and he told me about his life, activism, and being the first person to come out publicly in Jamaica.
“I am a singularity. We are not really people, we are events.”
So Larry Chang told me when we met for coffee in a quiet suburb of Lisbon one Saturday morning: confidently, with the half-smile and raised eyebrow of someone who knows they are saying something unusual.
Unusual has been Larry for most of his life: an outsider in his homeland of Jamaica being of Chinese descent, and in his family where Larry the individual was never acknowledged.
The fact about Larry that his family refused to accept is simple. Larry is gay. And in 1974 he became the first Jamaican to ‘come out’ publicly.
When you first meet Larry you relax. He does not look even close to seventy years old. With barely-wrinkled skin, he is slim and toned, with teeth and eyes that peek out suggesting mischief. He wears loose-fitting, neutral clothes, and his middle-class Jamaican accent purrs delivering descriptions of work as an artist, writer and activist. Only the long, sparse white hairs on his chin offer any hint of the years gone by.
I once asked him how he has done it: out-witted time and dodged its effects.
“It is about minimising stress.”
Lisbon is the latest stop in Larry’s complicated journey. Born in the summer of 1949 to Hakka-Chinese immigrants, Larry emphasises the fact of being the only son in a traditional Chinese household.
“I had three sisters, but girls don’t count. They’re not fully human. You know, it’s universal.”
And the expectations that came with being the boy are central to Larry’s story. He laments the question that harassed him through childhood: Why aren’t you more like Raymond?
“He was everything I was not.”
Larry’s cousin, Raymond, excelled at sport; Larry refused to play any. Raymond earned a place at a top school in Kingston; Larry went to “some little country school nobody ever heard of.” Raymond won scholarships in New York, then Toronto, became a multi-millionaire and donated upwards of $25 million to philanthropic causes. He was Chancellor Emeritus of Ryerson University who named their School of Continuing Education after him. In 2011 he was appointed to the Order of Jamaica and became an officer of the Order of Canada in 2014. Larry was having coffee with me.
“That is one of the most damaging things you can do to a child, not to appreciate who that child is; trying to mould that child along some preconceived model,” he says. “I knew from a very young age that I would never be able to meet those expectations.”
Larry’s sexuality was not something his relatives would accept, especially in a country where to be gay was not only frowned upon, but illegal. At the time, nobody in Jamaica spoke publicly of being gay; the country’s entrenched, violent homophobia explicit in the dancehall music of artists such as Elephant Man. For his family, this was the ultimate shame. The concept of being gay did not exist, and being Chinese in Jamaica Larry even looked like he did not belong. Only after returning from six years studying and working in California did he find Jamaica’s hidden gay scene.
“You feel alone, with no idea that there could be others that feel the same,” he says. “But I never felt that it was a mistake.”
In Kingston, Larry’s sexuality was known in his gated middle-class neighbourhood. Around the corner lived reggae singer Carlene Davis and her producer husband, Tommy Cowan. Their son, Nathan, would walk past Larry’s house on his way to school, but stop to throw stones. Then there was the racism, and gay-bashing, and the vandalism of Larry’s car. Not all by Nathan and his friends, just the neighbours.
“The usual kind of punk behaviour,” he says.
When listening to Larry recount this abuse, you notice things. He continues with the same disarming, smooth accent, but the pitch rises, consonants take on definition and, with it, emotion, and his back becomes straight. He raises his hand, pointing an index finger as though telling you off. He wants you to listen, and to understand.
The change is abrupt and speaks of someone who has not spent a lifetime avoiding stress. There is another side of Larry, and seeing it so vividly made me wonder how he could think the actions of his neighbours usual. Because it was so common.
“I have written a poem about this called Sounds Like a Stone’s Throw,” he tells me.
In the poem, Larry vents his anger at his neighbours ‘Denouncing oppression / Declaring freedom. / For some’ and whose ‘songs of freedom don’t ring true / Unless One Love One Heart is felt / To include the sodomite down the street / The battyman round the corner.’
In early underground gay clubs in the 1970s, Larry would dance to 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.
Larry’s next-door neighbour was worse than anyone. She would make up excuses to call the police, then demand he be arrested for being homosexual. Whilst he never truly feared imprisonment - the law was rarely applied in that way - Larry knew that for him, just to exist was to break the law.
“You have to build defiance in order to stand up to it,” he says. “Otherwise you can't survive.”
Larry’s defiance turned to activism, and he began campaigning nationally alongside the few others willing to put their heads above the parapet. In 1974 he co-founded the first gay rights group in the Caribbean, the Gay Freedom Movement. They began consciousness-raising through their newsletter, the Jamaica Gaily News, and ran a youth program, prison outreach and a free STD clinic.
Soon, he took the step of coming out publicly. In typical understated fashion, he put the information in plain sight and let everyone else join the dots, by beginning to sign public letters with his real name. Interviews on radio and television pushed him into the public consciousness.
In 1998, he was one of twelve activists who founded the Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG) to campaign for the protection of LGBT people from state-sanctioned violence and for equal treatment under the law. The man determined to avoid a damaging life of conflict was taking on the most powerful institutions in Jamaica.
J-FLAG grew so quickly that they could not even fit all of their members in one building, but its prominence brought challenges. As the decades of threats and abuse took their toll, Larry decided to move to the country to lie low. Even as he sat with me twenty years on recounting the events that followed, he still could not break away from the ingrained, ambiguous euphemisms that have characterised so much of his life.
“After about a year I had a friend come to visit,” he told me.
I had to push: was he in a relationship with the man?
“Yes I was.”
To the locals, the man was there from Kingston on business, and one evening in a bar, he revealed that he was staying with Larry. The patrons were clear: ‘Oh don’t you know that’s a battyman? As soon as you leave, we are going to go and burn that house down, and him in it.’
Now Larry knew that he could not live safely in the closet like his friends in a small country where news travels, and within days fled to the US. In Atlanta he applied for asylum, but his immigration lawyer advised him to leave the southern states, feeling the judges there were too conservative. Even in exile, discrimination followed Larry, the outsider. He moved to Washington DC, where he got asylum relatively easily.
In 2004, Larry’s decision to flee Jamaica was brought into sober focus when his friend and fellow J-FLAG founder, Brian Williamson, was murdered by Dwight Hayden, a closeted gay man that Williamson had been supporting financially. Hayden had arrived at his flat with another man asking for money, and stabbed Williamson seventy times.
Larry had lost touch with his old friend: a slight, he thought, because he had not stayed in Jamaica to continue to fight for the cause. Whilst the motive for the murder is still unclear, Larry is in no doubt.
“If I had returned to Jamaica, his fate would have been mine also,” he says.
In Washington, Larry the activist changed course. He founded grassroots community group, Ecolocity, working with NGOs and local government to start farmers’ markets and community gardens, and running composting workshops. He spoke at conferences, gave seminars, but after ten years had a sudden moment of clarity, realisation, and despair.
“One or two individuals might change their behaviour. It makes you feel good, but nothing will change because the entire system is based on profit-making.”
As Larry explained his despondency to me, I wondered if at the time of writing those letters, founding J-FLAG, and learning of the death of his friend he had ever felt so small: if he ever came close to thinking it was not worth it, and that he would just go and live comfortably with his friends in the closet, avoiding stress. But that wouldn’t be him.
His experience in DC led Larry the poet, activist and artist, to turn his thoughts to an idea for a new economic system he calls Net Planetary Value.
“It is about how we take back our very concept of value and divorce it from money which is arbitrary and fictional.”
He believes everything that can be counted can be assigned an index that inflates and diminishes based on its contribution to the good of the planet.
“It’s all about the interactions of people with each other. Our monetary system is thousands of years of institutions and conditioning.”
However outlandish the idea may be, it goes back to those times in Jamaica and Washington: moments when he realised how conditioned human beings are to conform, the brutality with which we can treat one another when stripped of a sense of true value, and his feeling that the machine was too big.
Disaffected, Larry left DC for a brief stay in Chiang-Mai, but he could integrate. Chasing warm weather and a low cost of living, he came to Portugal in 2016. That is where I met him, as he arrived, late as always, to choir rehearsal one Sunday evening. He had joined CoLeGaS, an a cappella choir associated with campaign group ILGA, to meet like-minded people in his new home city.
As the prominence of J-FLAG continues to grow, gay rights are fixed on Jamaica’s national agenda. Every year the organisation holds the Larry Chang Human Rights Symposium. In 2017, Larry returned to Jamaica for the first time as the keynote speaker. It is one of several truly valuable things that, like cousin Raymond, Larry now has named in his honour. Sadly, though, he has no family left to appreciate his contribution.
As we finish our coffee, I ask him whether he finally fits in Lisbon.
“Fitting somewhere is not even an option for me. Because there is no other person like me. Because of my singularity.
“Where would I fit?”
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