In the op-ed, “LGBTQ+ community in The Bahamas seems to have a sense of entitlement,” author Kevin Evans declares that the Davis administration’s unimaginative manifesto, Our Bluprint for Change, does “not specifically mention the heterosexual community either. So what’s the point?”
The point is simply that intentionally excluding LGBTQ+ people from national discussions and the National Development Plan is a form of violence. A violence whose aim is to erase LGBTQ+ people from Bahamian history, thereby silencing queer voices, destroying queer knowledge, and queer pathways of existence.
There is no need to mention heterosexuals because the document is written to recognize only heterosexual citizens. The exclusion of LGBTQ+ people from the document indicates that its contributors created the piece from a prejudicial, discriminatory, patriarchal, heterosexist, and homophobic perspective, which is commonplace in Bahamian society.
In fact, M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) in her book, Pedagogies of Crossing, asserts that because Bahamian “citizenship is contained within heterosexuality, the [Bahamian] state produce[s] a group of nonprocreative noncitizens who are objects of its surveillance and control (p.40). Since citizenship is ultimately about which bodies are included and excluded, this means that there are “consequences [for] being disloyal to heterosexuality” (Alexander, 2005, p.42). In other words, marginalized or non-heterosexual bodies are punished for their deviation from or refusal to comply with a state-sanctioned heterosexual ideology.
In a forthcoming chapter set for publishing, I argue that persons subscribing to the state-sanctioned ignorance, inherent within heterosexual ideology, about the existence of LGBTQ+ people in The Bahamas are bestowed with a social advantage. If you are shaking your head in disagreement perhaps, your failure to perceive that you have been granted access to an advantage that LGBTQ+ people are denied is predicated on the fact that you don’t call it an “advantage,” but rather the “favor of God,” or the “natural order” of humanity.
This social advantage is mystified as ‘God’s eternal approval of the life lived by his followers and can be encapsulated in the church saying all Bahamians would have heard declared from a pulpit: “Favor ain’t fair.” The belief in God and the need to cling to the Christian church for many Bahamians is “a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair” (Baldwin, 1998, p.309).
This mask has become an integral part of the Bahamian identity so much so, that I’ve also posited, to be Bahamian is to intentionally forget about the oppression, violence, and trauma that has created this space.“God,” for many Bahamians is nothing more than a magic genie, whose lamp is conveniently rubbed and presence invoked to sanctify violently harmful prejudices, induce severe forms of stigma and ensure that discriminatory behaviour remains unsusceptible to any form of legitimate critique, questions, or calls to be changed.
Heteronormative Bahamians refuse to accept that The Bahamas has never had an ounce of love for LGBTQ+ people, yet many lament that this country is a “Christian” nation. Your failure to see or believe anything that I write or declare about queer life in The Bahamas is directly related to this crucial truth, “whatever [heteronormative] people do not know about [LGBTQ+ people] reveals precisely and inexoribly, what they do not know about themselves” (Baldwin, 1998, p.312).
In The Bahamas, we have perfected the art of intentional forgetting to the point that we refuse to acknowledge that racism still exists, homophobia is rampant, we are misogynistic and femmephobic towards women and feminine people and we simply do not value children. We refuse to acknowledge that “when we were told to love everybody, [as a child,] it applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to [LGBTQ+ people, people of Haitian descent and other marginalized groups] at all” (p.310).
Kevin Evans accuses myself and LGBTQ+ people of:
Having a sense of entitlement
Engaging in “reverse discrimination” against heterosexual Bahamians
Seeking preferential treatment
Flaunting our sexuality in public
Playing the victim
Yet, James Baldwin points to the root of these accusations, declaring,
What you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you. What I think of you as being, is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I am not describing you when I talk about you, I am describing me… (Incarcerated Nation Network INC Media, 2022, 1:00:12)
Baldwin continues,
I’ve always known, that what you were describing was not me [when you called me a sissy or faggot], and of what you were afraid, was not me. It had to be something else. You had invented it, so it had to be something you were afraid of, and you invested me with it.
Now that’s solved; no matter what you’ve done to me, I can say to you this, and I mean it, I know you can’t do anymore and I’ve got nothing to lose. And I know, and I’ve always known, and really always, that’s apart of the agony, I’ve always known, that I am not a [sissy or faggot]. But, if I am not the [sissy or faggot], and if its true that your invention reveals you, then who is the [sissy or faggot]?
I am not the victim here…I’ve learned this because I’ve had to learn it, but you still think, I gather, that the [sissy or faggot] is necessary. Well, he’s unnecessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. So, I give you your problem back, you’re the [sissy or faggot] baby! (Incarcerated Nation Network INC Media, 2022, 1:00:58).
More plainly stated, everything Kevin Evans accuses LGBTQ+ people of is what heteronormative people are guilty of doing.
We resist your violence and oppression!
I resist your violence and oppression!
Every person living in The Bahamas must contend with and take responsibility for the violence against and oppression of queer and other marginalized bodies in The Bahamas.
Again, Baldwin’s words potentially illuminates a pathway to progress for the entire archipelago of The Bahamas to consider:
…Whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being must divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him (1998, p.314).
P. S. There are some key terms that need to be defined as I continue my discussion about LGBTQ+ people in The Bahamas: namely what I mean when I say the words, queer, homophobia and heterosexism.
Bell hooks describes queer as “not about who you’re having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live” (The New School, 2014).
Audre Lorde defines homophobia as “the fear of feelings of love for members of one’s own sex and therefore the hatred of those feelings in others” (2007, p.53).
Lorde (2007), also defines heterosexism simply as “the belief in the inherent superiority of one pattern of loving and thereby its right to dominance” (p.53).
References
Alexander, M. J. (2005). Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Duke University Press.
Baldwin, J. (1998). Collected Essays (T. Morrison, Ed.). Library Of America.
Incarcerated Nation Network INC Media. (2022, June 4). James Baldwin: TAKE THIS HAMMER: -1963. Www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFaQHQFcT7k&t=3256s
The New School. (2014). bell hooks - Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body | Eugene Lang College [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJk0hNROvzs
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