Dear Editor,
Incongruous as it may seem, the nexus, in recent writing in Stabroek News and the Kaieteur News, is erected between a process restorative of our dignity (decolonisation) and a multiform psycho-sexual disorder.
Antoine Craigwell in a letter in KN urges us to view a coming court case involving cross-dressing as another advance on the way to emancipating ourselves from mental slavery. Alissa Trotz in her ‘Diaspora’ column in SN presses upon us a similar view, putting the possible decriminalisation of cross-dressing and other homosexual practices in the same historical context as the struggle for the recognition of local culture that was part of the resistance to European hegemony and racism (‘This case is about, and for, all of us,’ March 1).
The fiction is sustained by the appeal to ancestral values in Craigwell’s letter, where we are assured that in India and Africa our folks were, before the Westerners imposed their alien laws, happily sodomising each other without let or hindrance. We are therefore to be persuaded of the liberating virtues of deviation from the natural order. The argumentation is false, the ethnology contrived.
If anything at all the current advocates of gay rights are examples of a neo-colonialist tendency to mimic every fad and fashion that is born in the former metropoles. Gays soldered themselves onto the human rights wagon in the West. They misappropriated some of the space that feminism created; they battened on to liberation theology in the churches. Our pro-homosexual activists have not only slavishly copied the arguments and methods of the Gay movement, they have now seized, similarly, upon a movement aimed at the social good, decolonisation, to slip their absurdities past the sphincter of our moral consciousness.
And if the manoeuvre is evident, its necessity becomes clear when one realises that they have no argument and must therefore appeal to our sympathies and our reflexive reverence for all that is ancestral and anti-colonial even as they seek to recolonise us in the worst way possible.
Trotz, as she inserts the sodomite into the historical narrative about suppression of native culture, ignores the fact that nowhere in the written record has it been remarked that a political manifesto, appeal to a royal commission, party platform or pamphlet, has made homosexuality a demand formulated by the anti-colonial movement in the Caribbean or elsewhere. If anything at all, the practice was seen as a vice that found soil and sunshine in the miserable conditions of the colonies. Often it was felt, wrongly, that the seeds were brought and planted by white men. In effect then, efforts by Craigwell and Trotz have no historical support.
What therefore is the argument that accompanies these appeals? It is that consenting adults are free to do with their beings as they see fit. A principle unsustainable in itself. Clearly in the domain of sexual-marital behaviour this is nonsensical. It summons among us the chaos of incest between consenting adults (Egypt can be cited as ancestor example) or polyandry (Africa has had those as ethnological curiosities) or unrestrained free love (certain Indian tribals were noted for the sporadic practice). In areas of personal law where human interaction is codified in great detail and limits are set, lawyers for the gays will seek to demolish the foundation stone of civilised practice.
So while the principle on which they will argue is inadmissible, in its possible consequences it will force the courts to have to redefine the sociological, psychiatric and functional limits of personal law. For if we were to allow anyone to do as he pleases then we are liberating, not only the gay, but the whole menagerie of sexual deviants still stuffing the compartments of the closet.
And the homosexuals, in a remarkable example of indifference, say not one word in favour of sadists and masochists, fetishists of all kinds, prostitutes and whoremongers, paedophiles and peeping toms, urine drinkers, and the other depraved. Let us say nothing of the necrophiles whose pleasure occurs only with the dead, or zoophiles who abuse animals. Inventive lawyers can argue that the beast, like the human minor, can in no circumstances give or express consent. And, ipso facto, cannot withhold consent either. Or that the dead who by their silence may suggest consent, have, in any case, all their rights eternally extinguished at their demise, or at least post rigor mortis, and therefore the needs of the living take eternal precedence. Casuistry and nonsensicalities of this sort are bound to arise in the future.
The closet then, is multi-compartmentalised. It is this world that we are asked to let out. Or to let in among us.
We have got to ensure that we live in a clean world. Roger Williams in a recent letter has said that the best we can do for the brethren afflicted with these disorders is to offer them the truth and the possibility of healing. They have to be told that those are not “heights.”
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
