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Jaevion Nelson, a member of the Jamaica Youth Advocacy Network (JYAN), recently had a thoughtful piece published in America's Quarterly, a leading journal dedicated to covering social, political, and cultural issues in the Americas region.
You can read a long excerpt from Jaevon's article "The Advocate" here. This is my favorite part:
"It is mainly because of such youth tolerance [in Jamaica] that a vibrant gay community flourishes on our island. Scores of homosexual men and women bask in the opportunity to live “freely” — important indicators that our island of sun, sea and sand might someday fully allow people to live as they choose without prejudice or discrimination."Jaevion presents an appropriate mix of optimism and practicality above. As he points out, the advocacy of Jamaica's youth -- including the work of groups like JYAN -- has had a definite and positive cultural impact in regards to LGBT issues. At the same time, Jaevion and other young Jamaicans aren't standing still. There is still a great deal of discrimination to combat and stop: in its most recent Human Rights Report on Jamaica, the U.S. State Department focused on a number of horrible abuses against the country's LGBT community, including arbitrary detention, harassment in health care settings, and even mob attacks.
"But in order for that to happen, much more needs to be done. And I am proud to be deeply involved in my generation’s efforts to win cultural and legal acceptance for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. In 2007, I joined the Jamaica Youth Advocacy Network, a youth-led leadership and advocacy organization that seeks to develop youth activists’ capacities to lobby for change by promoting positive behavior, teaching advocacy techniques and advising and guiding policies that affect us."
A night-into-day change regarding LGBT equality in Jamaica can only be reached with the help of its youth. And while the solutions must ultimately come from within, my hope is that we here in the U.S. will think of creative and substantive ways to support the work of great activists like Jaevion. Any ideas?
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