This is my response to the Jamaican gay debate, the Human Rights Watch report, the editorials in the New York Times newspaper and the Economist magazine.

Jamaica’s sexual identity pendulum has swung. A full-blown sexual revolution, toes tapping and biting its nails, sits waiting to finally see Dunn’s River flow and flood above ground.

Having been Bible-beaten into guilt, fear and boredom in the bedroom, Jamaicans, high on Uncle Sam’s cable TV, European porn hidden in Christmas barrels from New York and repressed curiosity, are now wallowing in juicy, consensual and kinky sex.

And neither the Church, paranoid media agendas nor mouldy legislation can push back the Portland-to-Negril roll of it.

Jamaicans have been busy lusting after women imported from Cuba and the Dominica Republic; been having their week’s worth of work stress unknotted at ‘massage parlours’; and been renting gay and lesbian movies from the foreign film aisle at DVD stores.

We’ve been text-messaging for adult sex parties staged along the network of Stony, Jacks and Red Hills in Kingston; been emptying magnum bottles and salivating over young girls passing corner bars on month-end Fridays; and been making millions servicing the fantasies of desperate housewives and their lonely corporate women friends.

Jamaicans have been accepting of fathers initiating their daughters into sex and young women being ‘saved’ by passionate pastors who pound pulpits for Jesus and scan the congregation for new converts for one-on-one Bible study.

We privately tolerate intellectual and entrepreneurial ‘chi chi’ men and publicly salivate at the sight of a Sapphic salsa by college women in New Kingston clubs.

We’ve been buying KY jelly and sex toys with extra batteries at pharmacies and still bubble to dancehall music’s boom and pulse – the testosterone boasts of what our men can do to our women.

So you see, sexual ignorance, wild experimentation, essential expression and misogyny are already a cultural norm here – so there’s no room on the list for misguided homophobia.

This other, and surprisingly lengthy round, of the just-say-yes-or-no-to-gays-in-Jamaica debate, powered by local Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual groups – working with their partners who are high-powered, effectively networked and global – is a waste of time.

It is a waste of time simply because most of the rabid Christian groups, faux Christian-minded columnists, radio talk-show hosts, rum bar judges and patio pundits, always want to make being gay or lesbian a moral issue, a problem for religion and its Bible to solve, when it is really about acknowledging and accepting variations in human sexuality. It is a call for open-mindedness, of infusing a spirit of live and let live.

It is about change, a recognition that the other side of normal, this word and state of being, is not necessarily abnormal – it can be this other word called different.

So what really is the big deal about repealing Jamaica’s colonial-era sodomy laws and asking talent-free dancehall deejays, starved for a concert crowd rail-up, to leave gays and lesbians off their lyrical assault agenda? Why do the holy-water brigade, spineless parliamentarians, fire-burning Rastafarians and armchair generals still in search of their G Spot, want us all to be a picture of sameness and fear, smiling from inside a little square box?

I believe that this global spotlight on Jamaica, thanks to OutRage!, Human Rights Watch, the New York Times newspaper, the Economist magazine and many others, have a lot of Jamaicans running scared.

Not because we fear the economic and political pressure from the outside, ’cause wi nuh like foreign white people telling us wha fi do inna we own country – what we really fear, is that they will come to reveal us for the outrageous sex-loving people we really are and already know our next-door neighbour, aunt, brother and boss to be.

Jamaica, in essence, has already rebelliously accepted and tolerated, seen and sampled the many variations of human sexual identity, and is living precariously, if not comfortably, among the Bible’s shades of grey and beyond outdated legislation. We just have a tradition of being two-faced about it. So Jamaica’s sexual revolution has already begun, our cover being blown, it’s just now being televised, that’s all.

Ingrid Riley is an award-winning journalist, writer and poet who lives in Kingston, Jamaica.