CARIBBEAN DRAG ARTISTS
We Have Always Been Queer
Resilience, resistance, transgression in the Caribbean & diaspora
BY RYAN PERSADIE
The Global North often
imagines — and continues
to position — the
Caribbean as an ongoing
site of queer death, violence, and
impossibility. Legacies of colonial
buggery laws, ongoing rates of
queer hate crimes, and nationalist
politics within the region that privilege
the cisgender heterosexual as
always the ideal citizen work to position
gender and sexual difference
as always marginal and outside
the space of Caribbeanness.
In addition, myriad articles and
Western news outlets amplify narratives
and mythologies that Caribbean
nations — specifi cally,
countries such as Jamaica, Trinidad
and Tobago, Barbados, and
the Bahamas — are “the most homophobic
places on Earth” and often
need to be “saved” through the
lessons of the “free” queers of the
North to achieve queer modernity.
These messages of homohegemony
are further exacerbated by
popular queer media and cultural
productions, such as “RuPaul’s
Drag Race” “and “Gaycation,” that
suggest “legitimate,” “authentic,”
and “valid” forms of queer life are
only to be found within the “safe
havens” of diaspora. From this
perspective, places such as the US,
Canada, and Europe offer landscapes
of freedom, liberation, and
safety. Thus, Caribbeanness and
queerness become incompatible.
For instance, in a recent 2020
episode of “Canada’s Drag Race,”
contestant Anastarzia Anaquway, a
Bahamian-Canadian drag queen,
shared a moment that amplifi ed
these imaginings of queer Caribbean
life. She explained that while
living in the Bahamas, she was
shot in a homophobic attack and
almost died. During this segment,
she went on to sing the praises of
Canada, explaining that of seeking
asylum was quite easy for her, providing
her with space to live queerly
without threat of violence.
Caribbean drag artists on “Ru-
Paul’s Drag Race,” such as Vivacious
PHOTO CARIBBEAN EQUALITY PROJECT
PHOTO CARIBBEAN EQUALITY PROJECT
Jahlisa A. Ross.
Sundari, The Indian Goddess.
(Jamaican-American), Priyanka
(Guyanese-Canadian), and
Monét X Change (St. Lucian-American),
have also shared stories involving
violence faced by queer and
trans people in the Caribbean.
Although acts of homo- and
transphobia are rampant in the
Caribbean, such narratives forget
to account for the ways in which
queer and trans Caribbean communities
have made space to pursue
their same-sex desires and
pleasures and organize against
and resist heteropatriarchies. Such
stories, however, are often elided
on these programs where, instead,
a homonationalist politics involving
belonging and even becoming
citizens in the US or Canada
is celebrated. This simultaneously
works to suggest for one to attain
a queer Caribbean life, one must
either adhere and veil their queerness
through performing heterosexuality
or ultimately articulate
one’s sexual or gender diversity
and risk social exclusion, violence,
and possible death.
As many queer and trans Caribbean
communities know and
PHOTO CARIBBEAN EQUALITY PROJECT
PHOTO CARIBBEAN EQUALITY PROJECT
DJ Nina Flowers.
Phil Atioh.
experience, however, the Global
North is far from a space of liberation
and freedom for Black,
Indigenous, and other people of
color. Mainstream queer spaces,
programming, and services often
work through frameworks that
privilege the histories, challenges,
and narratives of white, cisgender,
LGBTQI+ communities that often
bifurcate the complexities of race,
gender, class, ability, religion, and
other vectors of experience that
shape queer and trans Caribbean
lives. For this reason, Caribbeancentric
organizations such as Barbados
Gay and Lesbians Against
Discrimination (BGLAD), the Jamaican
Forum for Lesbians, All-
Sexuals and Gays (JFLAG), the
Society Against Sexual Orientation
Discrimination (SASOD) in
Guyana, the Coalition Advocating
for Inclusion of Sexual Orientation
(CAISO) in Trinidad and Tobago,
the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention
in Toronto, and the Caribbean
Equality Project in New York
have emerged. Engaging in critical
and much-needed work to provide
support and resources for the specifi
c complexities of queer and trans
Caribbean life, these organizations
respond to gender-based violence,
hate-crimes, mental health, social
exclusion, housing, and legal challenges
that specifi cally affect Caribbean
communities.
Such community groups provide
clear evidence that despite the mythology
that “legible” and “valid”
forms of authentic queer life can
only exist in the North, the Caribbean
has always been a site of
gender and sexual transgression,
community, and organizing. If we
turn to local festive celebrations in
the Caribbean such as Carnival,
Jab Jab, the Matikor/ Dig Dutty,
Phagwah, Londa Ke Naach,and
other rituals, we can see how crossdressing,
genderplay, inversion,
and role reversal have always been
deeply embedded into the cultural
fabric and landscape of the region,
providing Caribbean queers with
methods to remix, resist, push
back, and mash up Western, neocolonial
ideas of “authentic” sexual
and gender practice.
In places like the rum shop, the
beach, the fête, queer pageants,
the nightclub, the dancehall, the
market, and other spectacular and
mundane places of congregating
and celebrating pleasure and joy,
queer and trans Caribbean folks
have worked to transgress, challenge,
and critique the rules of normalcy.
Here, the body becomes the
medium to “free up” or transgress
the limits of heteronomrative living
and being. With this in mind, the
Caribbean has been and will continue
to be a place of queerness.
Defying the norms of the Global
North, of dominant Euro-American
Pride and activist organizations,
and of mainstream queer media,
Caribbean ways of doing queerness
have never neatly fi t within
the rules of Western queerness. In
particular, the work of Caribbean
drag artists have led the charge on
what it means to undo the normative
scripts of gender and sexuality.
Drawing upon histories of
resilience, freedom-seeking, trans-
➤ CARIBBEAN DRAG, continued on p.15
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