“Barbados’ Constitution contains a ‘savings clause’, which protects laws inherited by the former British Empire from constitutional review, even if these laws run counter to fundamental human rights.” LGBT rights in Barbados.
It’s tough returning to Barbados where the buggery law (Chapter 154, Section 9 of the Sexual Offences Act criminalising “buggery”) translates to publicly endorsed homophobic behaviours like verbal abuse and threats that sometimes become physical. As someone who is non-heteronormative, this is particularly difficult after living in countries where, in my experience, sexuality wasn’t even a consideration. In one of them, I threw a drag party and may have been the only one there who didn’t identify as ‘straight’ (or show up in drag – I’d been so busy preparing).
Next day photoshoot with world renowned photographer Tyler Durden (Actually Tyler Fox of halfwhereanywhere)
In Barbados, try meeting a guy on the spectrum who isn’t paralysed by fear and neurotic about being found out to be exactly who he is.
A friend wrote about growing up gay in the Caribbean and did a great job of presenting a balanced view which also summarises my ordeal. Although…I’ve gone from enjoying the skill required to manoeuvre anonymously, to relinquishing obsession about muting who I am for my own safety.
In the Bim Grindr
‘Catfishing’ is a word I recently learnt from someone’s profile on Grindr containing a litany of things they did not want in a person. I then experienced catfishing as an accepted reality in this virtual space. This is what happened:
I complimented a guy on his profile pic to which he thanked me. Later on WhatsApp, the person in the photo he had up wasn’t the one I’d complimented him on before on Grindr! When I asked, he said, with a laugh, that it wasn’t his photo on Grindr and he thought he’d said because he usually tells people upfront! Expressing how I felt about the deceit, his response was: “We are in Barbados, not America!”
When did fraud become normalised?
Desperation has kept me returning to these hook up apps because they’re the only places you can even talk to other guys who like guys in Barbados, but this experience made it easier to follow through on what I’d been considering again – deleting the app. It’s too much effort for mostly frustrating results.
In Person or Bust
Understanding that it’s a numbers game and happening across someone who shares the same illusions about life is improbable, I’ve returned to meeting guys the old-fashioned way…by chance, in real life – eye contact, with increased risk of getting hit with a “big rock”, since, as a population, we look ahead while striding backwards.
Buddies wasn’t shy! It was right on the main road.
There were gay bars in Barbados in the late 90s…well at least one, Buddies. Yes, it hosted drag shows, but it was also a place where you could sit and have a conversation. There were also fixed party locations you could depend on for a last Saturday of the month release. Who remembers the Bull Pen? What a name! Now, there’s a monopoly of the party scene, the locations shift around like we’re dodging bullets and I’ve stopped going because the crowd gets younger as the entrance fees feel increasingly exploitative. As the world progresses towards inclusion, I live where rain and tap water has become unreliable, where an oasis is a thinking man confident enough to be.
There must be others like me, but finding them requires action I can’t conceive. Manifesting itself through pictureless profiles and pontificating posturing, the climate of cowardice is as persistent and prevalent as the drought.
The Bar
I go less frequently to an ‘everybody friendly’ bar. Men, eyes inflamed with kill-devil, will offer unsolicited words, in encouraging tones, because they “don’t have anything against people like you”. I’m like, “Dude! I’m just trying to drunken myself in peace.”
It is a space inside a space, a secret in plain sight with circular tables to sit two or three and lighting that has the confidence to fully reveal only the faces of the Deputies in the sponsored-beer fridges. I’m drawn to these places where the visitors—their presence—feels as if it were linked to mine, forming an invisible, impenetrable chainmail. These customers’ emotions tend to be wild and base and easily surface, so, in the mirror behind the barman, I make an assessment. We Bajans always raising we voices and seem vexed—”Yuh cunt!” is a fairly common conversation tag used for emphasis, for example.
Taking communion
At the bar’s alter, I bow, take communion, the spirit alters my perception and I am no longer good at saying when such and such a thing happened or that it did at all. Sometimes I will think a word, yet say another. I surpass the daily recommended amount because a full bottle will replace an empty one, and you won’t hear the end if you refuse the courtesy.
I will sing karaoke, and, in my altered state, I take myself seriously as a singer, closing my eyes to belt. Almost no longer ashamed that my voice only suits white boy bands, my requested songs are: R.E.M’s ‘Losing my Religion’ and Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Don’t Look back in Anger’.
The crowd is a mix of alcoholics, domino players, alcoholic domino players, beggars, visiting vagrants (soon to be chased off by the owner wielding a machete), sex workers, a mad man (or artist) wearing a beach umbrella and older man-woman couples. The thing uniting them all is knowing the lyrics to the oldie goldies which they sing as if auditioning for an Irish pub version of American Idol.
Once I met a Guy
Before I left the island and had experiences that inadvertently made things I say unrelatable to other Barbadians, I met a guy at the bar. You couldn’t hear him speak. Everything he said was as if a secret he was telling himself.
His best feature was his uncombed hair—a broccoli head, although solid-looking but soft. His light brown eyes burnt their way out his skin, taunt and many shades darker, luminescent like he’d been polished with slaps.
That was the night I awoke next to him and saw a tamarind-seed-coloured centipede fitting the seam of my own back and the sheet. It was a centipede that never fell from the bed covers, however, when he shook them out, nor ran, head side-to-side from under the mattress when he lifted it from the floor.
I insisted he not accompany me back to the bar. A lowlife saw I could be easily robbed – walking alone in the alley, wearing denim and tan, and lack of ‘badman’, missing a sway or bop. He took my remaining 10 dollar bill.
It is the potential for thrills that attracts me to these holes in the fabric of “wholesome”. That and a lack of options which question my direction. Do I even want to meet someone?
I’m left with being the most me I can muster and trusting that others will either be drawn to that or repelled.
Comentários