Apr 03, 2009  |  By: Laura Douglas-Brown  | COMMENTS     

This week, a small group of activists launched Boycott Jamaica, an effort to bring tourist dollars to bear against the Caribbean island’s long history of virulent homophobia. While the effort is still fledgling, it has the potential to have lasting impact — if not directly on the island’s government, then on boycott participants and those they educate about it.

Jamaica’s record of hostile, even deadly treatment of its LGBT citizens is well documented. In 2006, boycott organizers note, activists interviewed by Time Magazine dubbed it “the most homophobic place on earth.”

The State Department’s Human Rights Report for 2008, released in February, noted that the Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All Sexuals & Gays continues “to report human rights abuses, including arbitrary detention, mob attacks, stabbings, harassment of homosexual patients by hospital and prison staff, and targeted shootings of homosexuals. Police often did not investigate such incidents.”

The State Department report also cataloged human rights abuses in numerous other countries around the world, but Boycott Jamaica organizers present both practical and philosophical reasons for focusing their effort on this one nation.

“Jamaica is uniquely vulnerable because tourism is a significant part of its economy — and it is only 600 miles from the United States,” they argue. “The tropical island earned $2.1 billion from tourism in 2006 — with many cruises to the island originating in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. More than three million people visited Jamaica in 2006, with more than one million arrivals from the United States. We believe that a significant number of tourists would not visit if they knew how Jamaica treated its GLBT citizens.”

In addition to not visiting Jamaica and urging others to do the same, Boycott Jamaica also wants its supporters to not buy Jamaican-made products including Blue Mountain Coffee, Myers Rum and Red Stripe Beer.

The boycott will end, they say, when the Jamaican government takes two steps: “one, publicly commit to end gay bashing on the island and improve the human rights situation, and two, [issue] a statement from the prime minister clearly and unequivocally condemning violence against GLBT people and expressing regret for past violence.”

BOYCOTT JAMAICA GOT underway with a well-designed and persuasive website, www.boycottjamaica.org, but a rather small group of public supporters.

At press time, a list of “endorsements” on the site included only eight participating bars and restaurants, all but one in San Francisco; a dozen activists, including its founders; and two relatively unknown “civic organizations,” the South African Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and the Alexander Hamilton GLBT Veteran’s Post in San Francisco.

Pictures of the March 29 “Campaign Kick Off Rum Dump in the Castro” were similarly underwhelming, showing fewer than a dozen colorful — but clearly not crowded — participants.
Still, the research and organizing track records of Boycott Jamaica’s leaders should quell skepticism about the effort’s legitimacy, if not its ultimate success.

Jim Burroway is editor of the Box Turtle Bulletin, a web site known for exhaustively debunking anti-gay talking points. Wayne Besen, a former spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, founded Truth Wins Out, a non-profit dedicated to countering the so-called ex-gay movement. And Michael Petrelis is a consummate rabble-rouser with a skilled eye for uncovering scandal through public documents.

In just a few days, they have managed to garner attention to their cause from both gay and Jamaican media, and Petrelis said on his blog that San Francisco City Supervisor Bevan Duffy, a boycott supporter, has organized a Tuesday meeting with Newton Gordon, the honorary consul of Jamaica for San Francisco.

STILL, ATTENTION DOESN’T EQUAL success, and whether the boycott can change the country’s policies remains far from certain.

Tackling the question in a section on the Boycott Jamaica web site, organizers point to the film “Milk,” last year’s Academy Award-winning biopic that introduced the gay rights martyr to a generation of gay people who were children or not yet born when its hero was gunned down.

“As seen in the movie ‘Milk’ starring Sean Penn, the GLBT community launched a boycott against Coors beer in 1977. By 1978, Coors adopted language against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment,” Boycott Jamaica says. “The Coors boycott was a success. We firmly believe that a boycott can also be successful over time against Jamaica.”

More recent gay boycotts have been neither as quick nor as effective. Perhaps the most prominent of the 1990s was the battle against Cracker Barrel, the folksy restaurant chain that unapologetically fired gay workers.

Although sit-ins and a boycott in the months following the 1991 firings drew media headlines and helped educate the American ...