Today, Aug. 6, is Jamaica's independence day — but human rights groups say it's also a moment for Jamaicans to ponder the reality that their country is still one of the world's most homophobic.
The Caribbean island continues to uphold a colonial-era sodomy law criminalizing homosexuality. In May, a government cabinet minister publicly endorsed a song celebrating anti-LGBTQ violence — which reports indicate is seeing a new uptick there in recent years.
Jamaican-born gay author and filmmaker Max-Arthur Mantle is not surprised.
“There’s been some progress," Mantle said. "There’s an LGBTQ community active in Jamaica now.
"But the society is still locked into that horrific homophobic stance where queer people in Jamaica, they’re seen as ‘other.’ It’s an issue that’s still urgent.”
A decade ago, Mantle’s debut novel Batty Bwoy — the term is a Jamaican slur for a gay man — won positive reviews for its account of the difficult and dangerous coming-of-age of a gay Jamaican like himself, on the island and in the U.S. Jamaican community.
Now, Mantle is set to direct a feature film version of the book — Batty Bwoy! — which will begin production later this fall. He hopes it will help prod Jamaican society — and the larger, gay-unfriendly Caribbean itself — to make LGBTQ people more accepted. And legal.
“It’s going to make history as the first gay, LGBTQ feature film shot in Jamaica," said Mantle — who recalls a group of people, one with a knife, threatening him and calling him "batty bwoy" one night in Jamaica's capital, Kingston, as he stood alone on a street corner one night waiting for a bus. (A Good Samaritan, he said, fortunately intervened.)
"I’ve been navigating this project for, like, five or six years," Mantle told WLRN in an interview from Los Angeles, where he now resides after living for many years in Miami.
Mantle acknowledges more Jamaican LGBTQ persons are appearing on TV — most notably in the HBO detective series “Get Millie Black,” written by Booker Prize-winning Jamaican novelist Marlon James.
But Mantle, who directed the 2018 documentary Visible: The LGBTQ Caribbean Diaspora, feels feature film treatment can benefit Jamaica’s gay community the way the Oscar-winning 2016 movie Moonlight, set in Miami, positively depicted gay Black men.
“Moonlight is the bar in terms of Black queer cinema," Mantle said. "I was actually living on Biscayne Boulevard when they were shooting at the cafe. It was very authentically done.”
READ MORE: Homophobes of the Caribbean: Can gays change hearts and laws on the islands?
Batty Bwoy! will also be shot in New York and Los Angeles. But Mantle says he wants to craft that Moonlight authenticity in the Jamaican context.
“My story, how it resonates is in the Jamaican lens," Mantle said.
"Very often Hollywood, when they try to use Jamaica, it’s just like, ‘Ya mon, no problem!’' It’s not like that. It’s in the language — the patois — the dance hall music, the food.”
"There's been progress — but Jamaica is still locked in a horrific homophobic stance where LGBTQ people are the 'other.’ It's still an urgent issue."Max-Arthur Mantle
Jamaican-born, Miami-raised actor Damian Thompson, who will play the story’s protagonist, Mark Palmer, said he too is up for a portrayal of Jamaicans as more than just reggae stereotypes — "especially when you consider you can't throw a rock in the U.S. without hitting a Jamaican or Caribbean nurse or other skilled worker in your community."
And because Thompson too is a gay Jamaican, he’s drawn to the film’s coming-out-while-coming-of-age narrative, which he said he welcomes for "not being an exploitive rendering."
“Coming out around the Jamaican and Caribbean community wasn’t necessarily the easiest," Thompson, who attended Miami Northwestern High School and had a central role in the 2022 film Wedding Season, told WLRN from New York.
"You’re at a party with friends, and that word ‘batty bwoy’ you'll hear in certain songs — like ‘boom bye-bye inna batty bwoy,’ y’know, that kind of stuff, about harming, hurting, people of this persuasion. You hope a film like this will make people more invested in speaking up the next time they see or hear something like this.”
“Boom Bye-Bye” is a notoriously violent homophobic song — recorded by Jamaican reggae star Buju Banton, who was once arrested, but acquitted, for leading a gang assault on gay men in Kingston.
Thompson realizes Mantle’s choice of Batty Bwoy! as his film’s title may put off some Jamaicans. But he said he understands the decision.
“The way that Max-Arthur broke it down to me made sense," Thompson said.
"It’s like we are confronting the word that everyone felt comfortable to throw around without any remorse — but now when you have a film that has this title, all the sudden we’re being jarred.”
That said, however, Mantle acknowledges the title has made it somewhat more challenging for his L.A. company, Mantle Productions, to finance the project as well as secure Jamaican filming locations — including a primary school where the principal's own son is gay.
"Even for some Jamaican people who support gay rights, the title might feel a little too in-your-face," Mantle said. "A little raw."
Still, he points out, that didn't dampen the success of the novel Batty Bwoy, and he believes it will help the film ring truer as well.
Barrel children
Batty Bwoy! also examines longstanding Jamaican issues such as "barrel children" — the kids of parents who emigrate to the U.S. or the U.K. to make better money for their families, and are known for shipping "barrels" of goods back home to help make up for their absence.
The character of Mark is one such "barrel child" — whose mother, Daphne, will be played by Jamaican actor Belinda Reid-Marshall.
“When I read the script, it came close to someone I know who is the mother of someone like Mark," Reid-Marshall told WLRN from Kingston, where much of Batty Bwoy! will be shot.
"So, as a mother myself, I could really feel Daphne’s emotion just flowing through me.”
At the same time, Reid-Marshall — who also has a role in “Get Millie Black” — is more positive about how an LGBTQ film like Batty Bwoy! will be received in Jamaica today.
“Jamaica has come a long way in accepting and understanding that people have a right to [their sexual orientation]," Reid-Marshall insists.
"I really want to see this project work for Max-Arthur, because I want to see things continue to move in that direction here."
What's more, Reid-Marshall aptly added, supposedly LGBTQ-tolerant countries like the U.S. haven't exactly been a model in recent years themselves, especially in states like Florida.
Still, Jamaica's Supreme Court — most recently two years ago — refuses to repeal the law criminalizing homosexuality.
This despite a recent trend among neighboring Caribbean nations like Barbados to do away with those statutes, which are a holdover from British colonial rule. Last week, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court struck down a similar law in the island nation of St. Lucia.
Trinidad and Tobago's Supreme Court this year re-instated the sodomy law it repealed in 2018. It said the repeal had violated a constitutional provision preserving colonia-era laws — and that has now raised calls there to amend the Constitution.
Either way, Mantle insists Jamaica has no such constitutional obstacles.
“The conversation now among Jamaicans is: well, we don’t really [enforce] the law," Mantle said. "But it’s still on the books!”
And that reality, he and other Jamaican LGBTQ advocates point out, is still too often an invitation to homophobic discrimination and violence.
Mantle, and everyone involved in his film project Batty Bwoy!, hope that once the movie is made, it will nudge Jamaica to finally erase that archaic page from its national book.
UPDATE: Since this report aired, WLRN has learned Belinda Reid-Marshall has been cast in another role in Batty Bwoy!
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