Shabba
SINCE JAMAICA is a deeply Christian and fundamentalist society, dancehall artistes who are socialised here have every right to and do claim the same religious directives against homosexuality that guide Christian clergymen. The fact that they may not be ordained ministers does not mean that, like any other Jamaican citizen, they do not have a clear understanding of and the right to use biblical guidelines.
This includes scriptures like the story of Sodom and Gomorrah at Genesis 19; and verses that condemn homosexuality like those at Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13; and in the New Testament, Romans 1:26-27. The directive given to man and woman by God in the creation story at Genesis 1:28 is also very important in dancehall culture. Dancehall artistes believe that man and woman are to "Be fruitful and multiply-" and this is why God created Adam and Eve, not 'Adam and Steve'.
Christian fundamentalist clergymen in Jamaica and other countries use these and other scriptures in their damnation of homosexuality as an abomination that will be punished by hellfire. It is clear from his recent article that Ian Boyne feels a real need to distance Christianity and its more
prominent supporters from the un-Christian dialogue of dancehall's anti-homosexuality.
BIASED ATTACK
It seems, however, that he is unaware of the disingenuous and very biased attack against Christianity that is being conducted under the ambit of tolerance and human rights for homosexuals. The scriptures mentioned above and other select portions of the Bible are now increasingly being deemed 'hate speech' under new legislation that aim for wide-ranging sexual tolerance.
It is important to note that the greater percentage of dancehall artistes and its main audience come from the inner-cities of Kingston and St. Andrew and among the lower working-classes. Many men from these groups have little or no access to resources, like a decent job,
that they need for social and economic mobility. This lack encourages these men to play into the colonial and patriarchal tendency to identify their manhood through sexual conquest and domination which is also reflected in extreme paranoia about male homosexuality. Buju Banton's controversial Boom Bye Bye reaffirmed this notion.
REAL MEN
Indeed, the belief is that if a man publicly condones male homosexuality he supports taking power away from 'real men'. What my research has shown is that dancehall's anti-homosexual lyrics are a part of the wider terrain of a very patriarchal structure that empowers the Jamaican male. The current response of the greater majority of heterosexual Jamaican men to male homosexuality is somewhere on a continuum of mild unease to raging paranoia. This is the kind of raging paranoia that met the August 1997 directive of then Commissioner of Corrections, Colonel John Prescod, to distribute condoms in prisons in an effort to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS. His directive was seen by some men as a public acknowledgement of the 'hidden secret' of their homosexual activities in prison; and the gross miscalculation of the high levels of anti-homosexual paranoia in the prison population resulted in the untimely murder of sixteen male prison inmates.
