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HUMAN RIGHTS
Jamaican gay activist seeking refugee status in Canada urges leaders to renounce hate crimes
ANTHONY REINHART
February 15, 2008
There are certainly more inviting places to spend Valentine's Day than in an old church in east-end Toronto.
Still, Metropolitan Community Church was a damn sight safer for Gareth Henry yesterday than where he spent the previous Feb. 14 - inside a drugstore in Kingston, Jamaica, as 250 peoplestood outside shouting anti-gay slurs and calling for him and three other men to be beaten.
Instead, Mr. Henry said, the police who were called to break up the mob wound up doing its dirty work.
"I was physically abused by four police officers," Mr. Henry, a 30-year-old Jamaican gay activist now seeking refugee status in Canada, said yesterday. "I was slapped in the face, beaten with guns and left on the floor of the pharmacy while they escorted the three guys out. Their thing was that I talked too much."
In Jamaica, where anal sex is still punishable by 10 years of hard labour, and some dancehall singers win fans by advocating violence against homosexuals, Mr. Henry was among a handful of souls audacious enough to demand the right to live in peace.
His own treatment, along with a string of gruesome killings and assaults on others, have since pushed him to the reluctant conclusion that a life in exile offers the best chance to make change - and to stay alive.
"It was a hard decision," Mr. Henry said of his move to Toronto late last month, where he promptly filed a refugee claim. But it was a choice between "a different environment that would allow some level of comfort and security, or staying there and constantly living in fear. At some point in time, you're going to get exhausted, because you're fighting a battle that seems impossible to win."
Mr. Henry opened a new front on the battle yesterday, with the high-profile help of Rev. Brent Hawkes, the Metropolitan Community Church pastor who was instrumental in winning key rights, including marriage, for gays and lesbians, and Helen Kennedy, long-time activist and head of Egale Canada, a gay-rights group.
Dubbing their Valentine's Day effort the "Call for Love," they held a news conference to urge political and religious leaders in and outside Jamaica to renounce hate crimes against homosexuals, which they said are too often exacerbated by an apathetic, and in some cases complicit, police force.
Later, they delivered a letter to the Jamaican consulate-general in Toronto, asking the Caribbean country's government to ensure police "uphold their sworn duty to equally protect and serve all Jamaican citizens." The consulate did not respond yesterday to a request for comment.
Mr. Henry said he'd wished for that kind of protection many times, as he saw friends and acquaintances attacked just for being themselves. As co-chair of J-FLAG, a gay-rights group, he offered support to the victims' friends and partners, and for his trouble, began to attract police attention himself.
In 2005, when a friend and HIV/AIDS activist named Steve Harvey was abducted and shot in the head, Mr. Henry went to identify the body.
"The police officers said, 'Why are you crying? You're gay, a man crying over another man,' " he recalled. "For my own safety, I had to leave the scene of the crime, and the next morning, there were police officers outside my apartment. I said, 'What crime have I committed?' "
In another case, in the north-coast resort city of Montego Bay in June of 2004, Mr. Henry and a few friends watched helplessly as three police officers roughed up Victor Jarrett, a man in his early 20s whom the officers had accused of looking at a teenage boy on the beach. When the officers were finished, a crowd that had formed chased Mr. Jarrett into the city.
"The five of us were standing there, hoping that he may be safe; that he would find somewhere to run to and somewhere to hide," Mr. Henry said. But, the next morning, the Western Mirror newspaper carried a front-page headline: "Alleged Gay Man Chopped To Death In MoBay."
"In the time that he needed us the most, it was the time we were actually turning our backs on him," Mr. Henry said, describing how he and his friends feared they would have met a similar fate had they intervened.
The case, documented by Human Rights Watch in a damning 2004 report titled "Hated to Death: Homophobia, Violence, and Jamaica's HIV/AIDS Epidemic," weighed heavily on Mr. Henry in the drugstore a year ago, as he watched a similar situation shaping up - with himself in Mr. Jarrett's place.
"What went through my head was, what happened to Victor 2½ years ago, this is what is going to happen to me."
The police took Mr. Henry to a station away from the waiting mob and released him. He went into hiding shortly thereafter, moving from place to place in an effort to keep up his work with J-FLAG. But police, along with threats, continued to find their way to him.
"At this point in time, I need to take this break," Mr. Henry said, adding that his growing preoccupation with safety had overtaken his ability to do his work.
"I will not be there physically," he said, "but I will do what I can."
Jamaican gay activist seeking refugee status in Canada urges leaders to renounce hate crimes
ANTHONY REINHART
February 15, 2008
There are certainly more inviting places to spend Valentine's Day than in an old church in east-end Toronto.
Still, Metropolitan Community Church was a damn sight safer for Gareth Henry yesterday than where he spent the previous Feb. 14 - inside a drugstore in Kingston, Jamaica, as 250 peoplestood outside shouting anti-gay slurs and calling for him and three other men to be beaten.
Instead, Mr. Henry said, the police who were called to break up the mob wound up doing its dirty work.
"I was physically abused by four police officers," Mr. Henry, a 30-year-old Jamaican gay activist now seeking refugee status in Canada, said yesterday. "I was slapped in the face, beaten with guns and left on the floor of the pharmacy while they escorted the three guys out. Their thing was that I talked too much."
In Jamaica, where anal sex is still punishable by 10 years of hard labour, and some dancehall singers win fans by advocating violence against homosexuals, Mr. Henry was among a handful of souls audacious enough to demand the right to live in peace.
His own treatment, along with a string of gruesome killings and assaults on others, have since pushed him to the reluctant conclusion that a life in exile offers the best chance to make change - and to stay alive.
"It was a hard decision," Mr. Henry said of his move to Toronto late last month, where he promptly filed a refugee claim. But it was a choice between "a different environment that would allow some level of comfort and security, or staying there and constantly living in fear. At some point in time, you're going to get exhausted, because you're fighting a battle that seems impossible to win."
Mr. Henry opened a new front on the battle yesterday, with the high-profile help of Rev. Brent Hawkes, the Metropolitan Community Church pastor who was instrumental in winning key rights, including marriage, for gays and lesbians, and Helen Kennedy, long-time activist and head of Egale Canada, a gay-rights group.
Dubbing their Valentine's Day effort the "Call for Love," they held a news conference to urge political and religious leaders in and outside Jamaica to renounce hate crimes against homosexuals, which they said are too often exacerbated by an apathetic, and in some cases complicit, police force.
Later, they delivered a letter to the Jamaican consulate-general in Toronto, asking the Caribbean country's government to ensure police "uphold their sworn duty to equally protect and serve all Jamaican citizens." The consulate did not respond yesterday to a request for comment.
Mr. Henry said he'd wished for that kind of protection many times, as he saw friends and acquaintances attacked just for being themselves. As co-chair of J-FLAG, a gay-rights group, he offered support to the victims' friends and partners, and for his trouble, began to attract police attention himself.
In 2005, when a friend and HIV/AIDS activist named Steve Harvey was abducted and shot in the head, Mr. Henry went to identify the body.
"The police officers said, 'Why are you crying? You're gay, a man crying over another man,' " he recalled. "For my own safety, I had to leave the scene of the crime, and the next morning, there were police officers outside my apartment. I said, 'What crime have I committed?' "
In another case, in the north-coast resort city of Montego Bay in June of 2004, Mr. Henry and a few friends watched helplessly as three police officers roughed up Victor Jarrett, a man in his early 20s whom the officers had accused of looking at a teenage boy on the beach. When the officers were finished, a crowd that had formed chased Mr. Jarrett into the city.
"The five of us were standing there, hoping that he may be safe; that he would find somewhere to run to and somewhere to hide," Mr. Henry said. But, the next morning, the Western Mirror newspaper carried a front-page headline: "Alleged Gay Man Chopped To Death In MoBay."
"In the time that he needed us the most, it was the time we were actually turning our backs on him," Mr. Henry said, describing how he and his friends feared they would have met a similar fate had they intervened.
The case, documented by Human Rights Watch in a damning 2004 report titled "Hated to Death: Homophobia, Violence, and Jamaica's HIV/AIDS Epidemic," weighed heavily on Mr. Henry in the drugstore a year ago, as he watched a similar situation shaping up - with himself in Mr. Jarrett's place.
"What went through my head was, what happened to Victor 2½ years ago, this is what is going to happen to me."
The police took Mr. Henry to a station away from the waiting mob and released him. He went into hiding shortly thereafter, moving from place to place in an effort to keep up his work with J-FLAG. But police, along with threats, continued to find their way to him.
"At this point in time, I need to take this break," Mr. Henry said, adding that his growing preoccupation with safety had overtaken his ability to do his work.
"I will not be there physically," he said, "but I will do what I can."
Dem too cantakerous and GRUDGEFUL
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