• ELIXHER
• On August 9, 2013

Two women share how class, color, and community impact their experience
By Kimberley McLeod

In a farewell letter that went viral, one writer describes a love affair gone awry. After a whirlwind romance with the United States, a Trinidad native decides to return to the island, unable to endure living in a country that doesn’t love her back as a Black woman. The author doesn’t specify how she identifies. But one thing is for certain, for Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) men and women, especially, residing in a country that celebrates you for the color of your skin often comes at the price of having to hide pieces of your identity.

“I don’t wear my sexuality on my sleeve,” says Siobhan, a 39-year-old lesbian and Trinidad resident. “For anyone to know [that I’m gay], they have to ask and who is asking determines the answer.”

Who can blame her?

While things are certainly progressing in the Caribbean, there are reminders that there is still work ahead. Trinidad’s government refused to include sexual orientation as a basis for discrimination in the Equal Opportunities Act. A little over a week ago, more than 1,000 people in Haiti participated in a street demonstration to protest the legalization of the freedom to marry. Dwayne Jones, a gender-nonconforming 17-year-old in Jamaica, was recently stabbed to death and dismembered.

“[Our] supporters are getting louder,” Siobhan insists.

The part-time filmmaker grew up on the island as a child. After living in the U.S. for almost two decades, she returned to Trinidad to do some soul-searching. Although Siobhan admits to being a private person, she won’t hesitate to respond to intolerance, and feels perfectly safe doing so—a product, perhaps, of the changing climate in Trinidad and other places in the Caribbean.

Just earlier this month, an LGBT workshop was held at Trinidad’s national library where various LBGT advocacy groups convened to share best practices. Researchers presented findings that suggest gay or transgender Caribbeans who embody hegemonic standards of beauty—light skin and straight hair—have a better chance of being accepted.

Across the Atlantic in Kenya, Kat Dearham, a mixed race queer woman dating a transgender Kenyan man, must navigate a culture that privileges her fair skin.

“I love being in a space that values and nourishes Blackness and Africanness; it’s so unlike anything I’ve experienced in North America,” explains the 28-year-old Canadian researcher. “At the same time, it’s also been frustrating for me as a light-skinned mixed race girl not to have my own Blackness recognized. I’m constantly being read as White.”

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