An open letter to
Jamaican LGBT activists
Dear friends,
The —Boycott Jamaica— campaign launched by a handful of North American activists has elicited a great deal of controversy, with list serve postings often aimed at —point scoring— rather than clarifying the issues. This letter is an attempt not to embarrass the activists on the various sides of this dispute, but rather to calmly illustrate why we feel that unfortunately this particular boycott is an example of how not to voice international solidarity.
A core principle of any international solidarity campaign should be that the main organizations in the country most affected should direct the campaign. They are the ones who have to live ( or possibly die ) with the consequences and thus they should be the ones controlling it. In the case of the prospective Jamaican boycott this core principle was violated: No substantive discussions were conducted with Jamaican activists before it was launched.
The sad thing is that we have a famous example from history that might well have been imitated: the world-wide campaign to boycott South Africa. Because it was approved and directed by the main freedom organizations in that country, it was respectful of local activists and thus didn't have the kind of internal divisions about the campaign that we're seeing in the present boycott.
The result was that the campaign took on a truly international character, not just confined to a handful of activists, but embraced by people of good will of all races. Because it had such widespread support, including the almost unanimous support of freedom activists within South Africa, the campaign was able to isolate the apartheid regime, despite the best efforts against it of the American and several European governments. Because it was directed by South African activists on the ground who knew the lay of the land better than anyone else, its targets were well-chosen ( unlike the present campaign's targeting of Red Stripe Beer ) .
Therefore, on one point we must respectfully disagree with our friends in Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals & Gays ( J-FLAG ) , who, in one of their statements, seemed to imply that boycotts never do any good. What one can say is that successful boycotts, like that against apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and Anita Bryant's Florida orange juice in the late 1970s, are rare and not easy to organize under the best of circumstances; when major missteps occur in the organizing, they have zero chance of success.
However, the central point that our J-FLAG friends insist upon is right on the mark—as helpful as outside activists can sometimes be in applying supplemental pressure to hateful regimes, the main battle must be organized and fought for by the activists inside the particular countries in question. Jamaican LGBT people must lead the campaign for LGBT freedom in their own country, as Russian LGBT people do in their country, African LGBT people in their countries, etc.
We are aware that the opinions of any LGBT community in any country around the world are not monolithic. Each of us is very aware of the many political divisions in each of the cities we live in. However, for there to be successful campaigns, whether locally alone, or in conjunction with outside activists, a substantial segment of the community in question must agree to them and be at the heart of their organizing. For there to be no substantive participation in this campaign by leading Jamaican LGBT organizations points to it being very poorly conceived.
Finally, most countries around the world have long and dismal histories of being dominated by one or another outside power, and most peoples in those countries harbor legitimate resentments against those histories of domination. It is thus a responsibility of LGBT activists living in those handful of countries that historically have been responsible for such domination—the United States, Russia and Western Europe—that we not replicate a —gay— version of that arrogant domination by failing to respectfully work with, or respect the wishes of, the activists indigenous to countries that historically have been dominated.
Active Jamaican participation in organizing the present boycott was at best an after-thought for the North American boycott initiators. The unfortunate result is that we now have a messy internal dispute on our hands that serves no one's interests, least of all Jamaican LGBT activists who already have more than enough urgent issues to deal with. This is tragic and need not have been.
We hope that future campaigns are undertaken with a good deal more thoughtfulness and preparation.
Andy Thayer
Roger Fraser
Bob Schwartz
Craig Teichen
William Lockett
Rich Wilson
Gay Liberation Network ( Chicago )