Melville Cooke
Me a gallis
Me no homosexualis'
- Shabba Ranks, Live Blanket
MATTHEW 'ZEKES' Phipps may not have quoted Rexton Ralston Fernando Gordon (better known as Shabba Ranks) in court on Thursday, March 30, but his premise for denying being a homosexual was the same as Shabba's declaration of being a womaniser in the 1987 song.
As The STAR reported Mr. Phipps as saying, "I have several kids by different babymothers. Even since I was in jail a baby born for me, the baby was born in September. So I could never be a homosexual".
On the other side of the class divide, but still connected by that infamous gas riots congratulatory handshake, former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson did not have the luxury of leaning on a quantity of babymothers to support his denials of homosexuality when the JLP was dancing to the beat of TOK's Chi Chi Man.
He did deny being a homosexual, that headline in The Gleaner ahead of the last general election being remarkably similar to the one about Zekes in The STAR recently. And more recently, in informally summing up his legacy, Mr. Patterson measured his progress by saying that "man have more gal than before".
I am not, naturally, calling Mr. Phipps' sexuality into question, as the man has already made his position clear. However, his defence goes to the heart of something I pointed out about three years ago and goes even a little bit further. I wrote then that our common definitions of manhood are negative, in that men often define themselves by what they do not do, such as have sex with men, do the chew on women, run away from a conflict, ejaculate quickly or get drunk easily.
TO BE A MAN
I was on the write (pun intended) track, but as Mr. Phipps' statement brought home to me, I did not go far enough. For many of us equipped with the nuts and bolt of manhood, it is not enough to not be something in order to be a man. We have to be the opposite.
So Mr. Phipps is quite comfortable saying that he is not a homosexual because he has not one, not two, but several children with various babymothers. It is not enough to have one. A 'shotta' on either side of the law puts up his proof of not being a coward by counting off how many 'duppies' he has made and in what gory, glorious and gruesome style. A male driver proves that he is skilled by making it from one point to another on the road in less time than it would take for a John Crow heading for well putrefied, delicious pickings, a drinker sits in a watering hole and cures his insides night after night after night.
NURTURING AND ENCOURAGING
Before we embark on any serious plan to rescue the men, as many are intent on doing (although I am much more in favour of nurturing and encouraging the good ones than having some master plan to rescue the bad uns), this psychology of the opposites of manhood has to be addressed. It is a mindset which leads to many fatherless (for all intents and purposes) children, deaths by motor vehicle turned ramming object, hardened livers, murder upon murder with no apparent logical (if there can be any) cause.
Of course, that head space operation, even on a very small scale, is a tremendous, tiring task. I do not know why, because it must be such a burden to get up every single day and figure out how you are going to prove your manhood. Still, so many of us with the nuts and bolt of masculinity do it without fail and cannot understand why our lives are circles of frustration.
And many times very, very short.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer
