• ELIXHER
• On January 6, 2014

By Helen McDonald

While many look back at 2013 and see a triumphant year for LGBT equality, one story reminds us that there is still work ahead. Massachusetts-native and anti-gay activist, Brian Camenker, condemned initiatives to end Jamaica’s laws against sodomy at a rally in Kingston. Last month, Camenker, who founded MassResistance in 1993, delivered the keynote address at the event in Emancipation Park, sponsored by the Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society (JCHS). Ironically, the rally served as an International Human Rights Day celebration.

Brian Camenker

Camenker used this platform at the JCHS event, entitled “Celebrating God the Perfect Lawgiver with Song, Dance, Poetry,” to denounce efforts in Jamaica to repeal the Buggery Act. The Buggery Act, a piece of legislation stemming from British colonial rule, outlaws anal sex and same-sex conduct. Since Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller’s political campaign in 2011, wherein she promised to bring the anti-sodomy laws before Jamaica’s Parliament and hold a conscience vote to overturn it, many conservative and right-wing groups within and outside the island nation have fought to defend this homophobic legislation. Camenker encouraged this anti-LGBT stance in his speech, using the United States, and more specifically Massachusetts, to prove that acceptance of LGBT individuals degrades society.

“The repeal of the buggery law is being sold to you in a very slick and dishonest way,” Camenker announced before the Caribbean crowd. He went on further to say that the government says repealing the anti-sodomy laws “is about freedom and tolerance and anti-violence… But it’s ultimately about tyranny and an increase in diseases and the loss of your freedoms.”

How does Camenker define this idea of LGBT tyranny? Camenker claims that the negative consequences of legalizing queer behaviors include Pride parades that encourage people to embrace variant sexual conduct; anti-discrimination laws that punish bigots; adoption of children by same-sex couples; schools having events that “indoctrinate” children by telling them that it’s normal to be gay and that their parents’ religion is “wrong;” “forcing” gay marriage on the people because the courts make the decision; HIV/AIDS research that exploits state budgets; and imposing the acceptance of “transgenderism” through anti-discrimination laws.

Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller

The biggest stretch in Camenker’s speech is that the speaker uses Martin Luther King, Jr. to defend his stance. He motivates the crowd, insisting, “I hope that you in Jamaica can use our experiences to your advantage. As Martin Luther King said in his famous ‘Letter from [the] Birmingham Jail,’ a law that doesn’t square with God’s law is no law at all.”

Camenker and his address are simply continuations of the legacy of white saviorism in people of color communities. Oppressive, white supremacist ideologies, much like his own, invade our nations and communities and shape the way that we interact with one another, but our countries are “backward” and “primitive” when our policies reflect these Western notions. When Dr. Wayne West of the JCHS welcomes Camenker to the stage, West declares that Camenker identifies his homophobic work “as a sort of civil rights movement, protecting people from others who are seeking to impose things on them.” This white saviorism, in practice, ignores its own contradictions; people who internalize these white savior tactics go as far as to denounce systems that staunch their traditions of oppression by claiming that their rights are at risk without acknowledging the ways that they work to deprive other people of their own freedoms.

Camenker uses the LGBT rights movement in the United States as evidence that being gay and queerness degrade society, but his argument depends on severe distortions and erasures of reality. He denounces Pride parades and “pro-gay” education indoctrinating people and encouraging that gay is normal, but conveniently does not mention research that shows that the presence of gay-straight alliances in schools is linked to a decrease in the number of suicide attempts in LGBT youth populations. He speaks about HIV/AIDS research on behalf of LGBT people compromising state budgets as if the disease does not also affect heterosexual people. In fact, the Center for Disease Control recently announced that heterosexual populations are at increased risk for HIV infection. Furthermore, local LGBT activists and groups led many of the first HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns in major cities like New York and San Francisco in the 1980s, before government-funded groups began programs to help mainstream society years later. Camenker views LGBT people and behaviors as detriments to society, but our “tyranny” definitely has produced many forms of social uplift, while his brand of liberation destroys.

Although the UK Parliament officially nullified buggery laws for England and Wales in 1967, many former colonies like Jamaica continue to enforce these regulations on sexual behavior. Facing pressure from LGBT activists within and without the island nation, Jamaica finds itself at a critical point in its social history. The Jamaican government and people can continue to promote a law that encourages a culture of LGBT-hatred, or they can move towards progress by shifting social attitudes towards queerness.

I encourage Jamaica to stop inviting hateful “activists” like Brian Camenker to their home, and to truly embrace the principles of Martin Luther King, Jr., not distortions of his beliefs. Just weeks before MLK Day, our national observance of his birthday, I offer a different King quote as advice: “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

Helen McDonald is a 20-something college student living off of bad cooking, social justice and a lil snark. She also discusses the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality on her personal blog revolutionaryrainbows.tumblr.com and is a contributing writer at BloodyShrubbery.com.