Tracing “Gay Liberation” through Postindependence Jamaica

Abstract

In this article, the author complicates the current positioning of Jamaica within international discourses as exceptionally homophobic by focusing on the island in the 1970s as a site through which to understand how the struggle for sexual agency among subjects of same sex desire becomes possible. In 1977, Jamaica witnessed the birth of one of the Caribbean’s first gay activist organizations, the Gay Freedom Movement (GFM), during the democratic socialist administration of the newly independent island’s then prime minister Michael Manley. By situating GFM in relation to Jamaica’s national self-determination efforts and a vibrant transnational politics of what was then termed “gay liberation,” this article contributes to a queering of Caribbean history and to a decentering of the West in global histories of sexuality.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.