Can’t Every Body Be a Commonwealth Citizen? Making Safe Space for Sexuality on the People’s Forum Agenda

By Colin Robinson, CAISO: Coalition Advocating for Inclusion of Sexual Orientation, Trinidad and Tobago

Hope? I grew up listening to my now 80-something-year-old mother’s lampoon of Empire Day. How she and her schoolmates would be “lined up in the hot sun” on Harris Promenade and made to sing “Land of Hope and Glory”. For which they were rewarded with “a hot sweet drink and a cold bun”. So I can’t help but wonder, with a similar inartfulness, to what extent CHOGM and the People’s Forum (CPF) have become modern-day Empire Days. When we’re all lined up to sing a postcolonial anthem of hope in human rights, democratic governance, international cooperation – and youth. Capped off by the passing around of some toothless sweet drink-and-bun resolutions.

But I have different reasons.

Sexual Citizenship. Issues of sexual citizenship are still greeted with ambivalence or hostility not just from Commonwealth governments. (Around 40 of them still criminalise non-normative sexuality.) This is also often the response when these issues get raised in civil society advocacy forums like the CPF. Unlike many other issues raised on this blog that highlight differences over analysis or strategy, or the challenge of political will for particular solutions, in the case of same-sex sexuality or of citizens who cross gender boundaries in their self-presentation, it becomes a question of the legitimacy of the issue itself, and the moral worth of the citizens raising it. At the Commonwealth People’s Space at the 2007 summit, local advocates for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people report they were attacked, prevented from speaking as scheduled and ejected, then beaten by security forces outside. “This is crazy! The word ‘people’ officially lost meaning today. They’re plainly saying we’re not people”, one said. To paraphrase M. Jacqui Alexander, it seems “Not just any body” can be a Commonwealth citizen.

In fact, across the Commonwealth we tend to glorify our state-sponsored antipathy and inequality for those who practise same-sex desire. Homophobia is a source of national pride. And, as Jacqui Alexander points out, our leaders write GLBT nationals out of citizenship. A Southern African premier described lesbians and gays as worse than dogs and pigs. One in East Africa opened a forum on reproductive health calling for gays to be locked up. A West African leader invited gays to leave the country or stay and be beheaded. They make the Caribbean prime minister who last year told a British television audience there would not be a homosexual in his Cabinet look progressive in comparison. In Southeast Asia, sodomy charges were used as a political tool to attack an opposition leader. And a government press council equated lesbianism with “sadism”.

But it is not just rhetoric: Though courts and legislatures in a handful of the largest and smallest states in the Commonwealth have taken bold steps at sexual inclusion, extrajudicial killing, arbitrary arrest, torture, excessive punishment, prohibition of assembly and general moral panic over same-sex affiliation are common. Commonwealth states, even secular ones, cling proudly, to Old Testament-inspired colonial-legacy laws that criminalise non-normative sexualities – long after we’ve deliberately thrown off other regulatory frameworks of colonial morality over race, gender and religion. Further, as Adepeju Mabadeje and Tracy Robinson point out, the pattern of “progress” in Africa and the Caribbean tends to be one towards greater criminalisation of sexuality. Even in Trinidad & Tobago, proud host to CHOGM, immigration laws can summarily deny entry to homosexuals and those “reasonably suspected of attempting to bring into Trinidad and Tobago” persons “for homosexual purposes”.

And what laws do not accomplish, social and religious stigma – from the bench, church and mosque, as well as the community – does.