March 24, 2021
Colin Robinson wasn’t easy. We disagreed (at first) on what I considered to be the inalienable connection between freedom of expression and LGBTQ+ rights. But never quite settled differences of opinion on marriage equality, which I support entirely, and which he did not consider to be a key part of the current struggle.
Then my son, Mikhail, got me ‘You Have Your Father Hard Head’, Colin’s collection of poems. “To enable my citizenship,” he wrote in ‘NYCitizen’, “I cannot act alone.”
I had by then written repeatedly about the fact that the Equal Opportunity Act explicitly denies redress based on “sexual preference or orientation.” I had said it out loud at more than one consultation. This was a challenge for all of us. We could not act alone.
Why? As Colin quoted me as saying in 2018: Among Caribbean people who, for the most part, embarked on a future on the basis of legislated freedoms, “there exists an instinctual aversion to the notion that freedom is superior to prohibition.”
On that subject, he credited me with “putting words to (his) fury.” It was both flattering and a reminder of what he by then considered to be a relatively distant but joint enterprise.
The last time we met was on a flight back home from Jamaica in late 2019. He’d stored his luggage in the overhead compartment over my seat. When we landed at Piarco, I got up quickly as he weaved his way to the back, as I warned him, “before you buss my head with that bag.”
As we stood and blocked steupsing people in the aisle, he expressed abstruse fear for his well-being. I had seen expressive anger and joy on his face before, but never the sadness I detected in his eyes – even through the glitter in his thick glasses. He could not have missed my own gloom.
This has taken some time. Colin passed on March 4. We weren’t really “close”, so I have not been on the inside loop. Things have also been busy. We’ve been having a pandemic and an ensuing infodemic to address.
The EOC responded quickly to news of his passing. Vice chairman Dr Gabrielle Hosein declared less than a day later that the EOC “walks in the footsteps of giants like Colin and we continue to work in his memory for justice.”
The EOA was something we discussed far less frequently than the broader question of constitutional protections and the public language that helped express a sometimes-deadly hate agenda against the LGBTQ+ community in the Caribbean.
The fact is the 2000 Act is but one of several frontiers and, even so, had footsteps of its own, with metrics and concerns that had little to do with the issues that occupied Colin and his allies.
Read the Hansard of May 19 and June 2, 2000, when the EOA was being debated. You would realise that the political backdrop to the introduction of the EOA, whatever the eventual add-ons, was the need to protect Africans and Indians from one another. Such was the politics of the day. Such is the politics today.
Then opposition MP, Barry Sinanan, was the only member of the House to address this outrageously explicit omission from protection under the new law.
“In any society you have people who are different from others, so we have homosexuals, and we have lesbians, and this is a fact that we must recognise in any progressive country,” Sinanan said. There was no follow-up during the debate from either his colleagues or from government speakers, including then prime minister Basdeo Panday who had piloted the bill.
There are a few things in this country for which there is apparent bipartisan support and this, clearly, has been one. Even a public health crisis has not reached this level of agreement across the political divide.
From what I understand, there isn’t much work left to be done though. Former EOC chairman Lynette Seebaran-Suite and her team have done most of it.
Current EOC chairman, Ian Roach, has recently been concerned about racist commentary on social media. The politicians have their eyes on him. Colin’s footprints persist. Work in his memory remains incomplete.
