Luca Istodor is a queer activist from Romania. They graduated from Harvard with a Gender Studies major and are now a project coordinator for Romanian LGBTIQ+ organization Accept. Their first book, A Space of Our Own, featuring 20 queer love stories, was published in Romania in 2020.
I’m not going to lie, my first encounter with Guyana was quite random and unexpected, to both myself and the people around me. During my time as a student at Harvard, I had already traveled to Chile, Serbia, the Netherlands and Vietnam. When the time came to choose a research topic for my senior thesis, I started looking online for different queer organizations. I knew that I wanted to write something around (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer) LGBTIQ+ activism, a field I had been involved in since my high school years in Romania. I came across Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD), this LGBTIQ+ organization in a country I didn’t really know much about, called Guyana.
What sparked my interest was, perhaps, the most salient piece of information I could find on Guyana, which was obsessively repeated on many travel websites and reports around LGBTIQ+ rights in the country: that Guyana was the only country in South America to criminalize buggery, a law which, although more widely applicable to different kinds of non-normative sex, was mostly conceived and used against gay men. This was particularly interesting to me in the context of Romania’s own relation to the decriminalization of homosexuality: the article that criminalized homosexual acts in the Romanian penal code was only fully removed in 2001. Growing up as a queer teenager in Romania, I had always been quite baffled that in 1996, the year I was born, my sexual orientation was still criminalized, with people having been put in jail for homosexual acts as late as the mid ‘90s.
I also quickly became interested in Guyana’s colonial history, particularly since the buggery law originates from the British penal code. That colonial history became another point of connection, given Romania’s own peripheral position in Europe, historically under the influence of different imperial powers. Along with those connections, however, it is impossible not to acknowledge my privileged position as a white researcher coming from a Western elite institution: few have the chance to search for queer organizations, choose one to conduct their research at, and pretty much be confident that their academic institution would give them a grant to go there.
After initial discussions with the team at SASOD Guyana, I made my decision. When I announced that I was going to Guyana, my mother quickly replied: “I don’t even want to think about it.” What she meant was that she wanted a few weeks of peace before she started worrying about my fate in this country she knew nothing about. After a few weeks, my mother started her research. She found a myriad of warnings online, that she communicated to me in an increasingly alarmed tone. She warned me that I might be robbed on my way to Georgetown from the airport and that I should not drink the tap water. She bought three different mosquito sprays, to protect me from getting Malaria and Yellow Fever.
I headed for Georgetown via Paramaribo, and people I met there did not have a much more positive perception of Guyana either. Both my host in Paramaribo and a taxi driver told me that I should have conducted my research in Suriname instead, which is “not as poor as Guyana” and “much safer.” After all of these warnings, a large part of the enthusiasm I initially had for exploring Georgetown faded. My first day in the city did not necessarily help . I took a walk downtown and realized the city looked different from most places I was accustomed to, although parts of it strikingly reminded me of smaller towns in Romania. I was intimidated by the people who stared at me or even stopped me on the street to ask me where I am from, because I was obviously a (white) foreigner. I was overwhelmed by the hundreds of fruit I had never seen before that were sold in the markets, which came along with the quite embarrassing experience of not recognizing an avocado because of its much larger size than I was used to. The day ended on quite an unpleasant note. I went to one of the parks in the city and the guard told me not to walk further, because there is a thief hiding in one of the alleys of the park, waiting to rob someone. I decided to head home, feeling quite defeated by the city.
A similar dynamic applied to expectations around LGBTIQ+ rights. I had read several reports and articles, which emphasized the violence and the discrimination the community faces. Two of the most prominent reports, which are readily accessible online, are Trapped (Georgetown Law Human Rights Institute, 2018) and Documentation of Country Conditions Regarding the Treatment of Gay Men, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgender Individuals in Guyana (Columbia Law School Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic, 2017), both written by scholars at US-based academic institutions. Following these readings, I was prepared to give up on public displays of affection with men and I was expecting to be harassed on the street for not having a more traditionally masculine gender expression. These perceptions also influenced my academic work. As part of my interview guide, I had established, for instance, that I was going to ask Guyanese LGBTIQ+ activists whether politicians had opposed the existence of their organizations or had tried to end their activity.
It did not take long, however, for my perceptions to radically change. A pivotal moment was walking on the foreshore, one night, with three of my newly made queer Guyanese friends. Two of them were in a relationship and were holding hands. As we were walking back to their car, a police van passed by us, the couple still holding hands. The van slowed down, and one of the policemen pulled down the window to ask: “how’s your night going?” After some small talk, the police officers left. It was only a few minutes later that I realized what had just happened: the police, about whom I had read harassed, ridiculed and even arrested LGBTIQ+ people, had seen my friends holding hands and did nothing. I was not sure how to process the incident.
Other such occurrences slowly made me realize that LGBTIQ+ people’s lives in Guyana are not simply a perpetual cycle of violence and discrimination. I felt increasingly comfortable at LGBTIQ+ parties and socials which I attended. I showed gay public displays of affection without any comments at a party that had not even been advertised as “LGBT-friendly”. Academically, I soon dropped the question about politicians opposing the functioning of LGBTIQ+ organizations, as activists would always answer it with a determined “no”. And life in Georgetown was far from being about the deadly mosquitoes and frequent robberies. I soon got used to walking alone and exploring the town, looking at the wooden houses, enjoying the colorful fruit and vegetable markets.
The more time I spent in Georgetown and the more interviews I conducted, the more I realized LGBTIQ+ Guyanese experiences encompassed both the violence that I had heard so much about and a lot of positive change. Beyond the fact that they are simply reductive, overwhelmingly negative portrayals of both Guyana in general and LGBTIQ+ rights in the country perpetuate a colonial image of Guyana as a savagely violent place. Although Guyana became independent in 1966, the almost 400-year history of British and Dutch colonialism seemed to have permeated my first impressions of the space.
The image of Guyana as “dangerous” feeds into what Palestinian scholar Edward Said calls the “imagination of empire.” Said examines the way cultural products were used to create the idea of colonized peoples as “subordinate,” “inferior,” “less advanced”, allowing “decent men and women to accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be subjugated.” Colonizers were portrayed as having a ‘civilizing mission’ that works towards enabling the colonies to reach the colonizer’s level of progress. The overwhelmingly negative articles my parents found online resonate with these colonial narratives. Guyana’s description often matches that of the savage space in need to be colonized, always underdeveloped compared to the West and implicitly in need of a Western “civilizing” intervention.
These colonial dynamics are replicated in discussions around LGBTIQ+ rights. As the only country in South America to criminalize buggery, Guyana is frequently portrayed online as much behind the West in terms of LGBTIQ+ rights. What I found, after conducting 38 interviews and finishing an internship at SASOD Guyana, is the importance of nuance when talking about queer experiences. To give an example, 12 out of 38 research participants believe that social acceptance of LGBTIQ+ people has generally increased in Guyanese society. Coming out stories people shared with me are far from simply being about rejection and violence. While it is undeniable that many queer people experienced physical or verbal abuse or were even kicked out of their homes by family, others found acceptance and a willingness from parents to learn about these issues. Additionally, an increasing amount of people are out online, more or less publicly, and talk openly about their identities to their friends. Another aspect that many online reports don’t mention is how much change activism has brought: organizations like SASOD Guyana, SWAG, GuyBow and Guyana Trans United foster safe community spaces, are in constant discussions with local leaders, both political and religious and bring visibility to the community through events like Pride, as well as online campaigns.
When it comes to gender identity, the trans community, and especially trans women, encounters the most stigma, manifesting itself as violence on the street and discrimination in public transportation and employment. When it comes to social class, 23 out of 38 participants support the idea that social class influences the way LGBTIQ+ people navigate violence targeted towards them, and 16 out of 38 interviewees mention that ethnicity is an important factor that accounts for the variety of queer experiences. Ethnicity is also closely tied to religion, with some interview partners mentioning that Hinduism can be more accepting of gender diversity than Christianity.
It is important to have an intersectional approach: gender, race, class and geographical location can start to explain why LGBTIQ+ people’s experiences vary so drastically. One thing is certain, however: it is essential to avoid the single narrative of queer life in Guyana as being buried in violence and discrimination, both because that does not reflect reality, and because it reinforces colonial dynamics we need to challenge.
As I write this article three years after my trip to Georgetown, I realize how my experience in Guyana also made me rethink the dynamics around Romanian activism, particularly the way we too often look at the West as a model for queer liberation and forget to take into consideration the specificities of our own local history and dynamics. On a more personal note, I miss Georgetown and the friends I made, despite my initial anxieties. My mom, who was perhaps the most skeptical and fearful of my trip, has now repeatedly expressed that she would like to visit, after hearing the stories I told her.
