Aba A Luke

Ho­mo­sex­u­al­i­ty seems to be a trend­ing top­ic, with US Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma an­nounc­ing his sup­port for gay mar­riages, fol­lowed by a lo­cal march in Port-of-Spain on May 11 by the Coali­tion Ad­vo­cat­ing for the In­clu­sion of Sex­u­al Ori­en­ta­tion (CAISO), whose mem­bers are call­ing for HIV/Aids sta­tus, age and sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion to be in­clud­ed un­der the Equal Op­por­tu­ni­ties Bill. Even Works Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er has voiced his opin­ion, stat­ing if the US pres­i­dent could em­brace ho­mo­sex­u­al­i­ty, so could T&T. Here in the Caribbean, the ho­mo­sex­u­al­i­ty is­sue is still a very touchy one. On­line, com­ments made by lo­cals overt­ly bash ho­mo­sex­u­als, with much ref­er­ence be­ing made to re­li­gious sen­ti­ments. Oth­ers sim­ply stereo­type men based on how they look on the out­side, plac­ing many het­ero­sex­u­al men in com­pro­mis­ing po­si­tions.

Stereo­type I - Too styl­ish

Are gay men more fash­ion­able than straight peo­ple? If that is the case, then there a lot of hard-core gay men walk­ing around T&T and the Caribbean in gen­er­al. We live in a so­ci­ety that now en­cour­ages men to en­joy man­i­cures and pedi­cures, dress in the metro sex­u­al de­signs and even ta­per their eye­brows when nec­es­sary. Could this stereo­type re­al­ly be ap­plied in to­day's so­ci­ety with­out cast­ing false as­sump­tions on the sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion of some het­ero­sex­u­al men?

Stereo­type II - Ca­reer path

When you see a woman in a mil­i­tary uni­form and a man wear­ing dap­per threads with a de­sign­er's port­fo­lio in hand, does your "gay­dar" au­to­mat­i­cal­ly ring out? Ac­cord­ing to an ar­ti­cle on ABC news, there is re­search that sug­gests gay men pre­fer cer­tain pro­fes­sions like fash­ion de­sign, mod­el­ling, hair and nail tech­ni­cians and even in­te­ri­or de­sign. The same can be ap­plied to the no­tion that les­bians pre­fer sport­ing ca­reers and tough jobs like mil­i­tary po­si­tions and even jobs in the con­struc­tion sec­tor. But again, is it fair to lump all peo­ple fit­ting these cri­te­ria un­der the ban­ner of ho­mo­sex­u­al?

Caribbean ho­mo­pho­bia

Many women are of­ten caught won­der­ing whether a man who looks very mas­cu­line could ac­tu­al­ly be ho­mo­sex­u­al or bi-sex­u­al, based on his ca­reer choice and his smooth and fash­ion­able ex­te­ri­or. Sim­i­lar­ly, many women are judged based on their phys­i­cal ap­pear­ance, their jobs and their choice of cloth­ing. The fact re­mains, un­less they pub­licly de­clare their sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, whether or not they're ho­mo­sex­u­al can on­ly de­ter­mined dur­ing per­son­al in­ter­ac­tion. So while the stereo­types ex­ist, we may in fact be deny­ing our­selves the op­por­tu­ni­ty to pos­si­bly meet and in­ter­act with peo­ple who could very well be life part­ners, if giv­en the chance.