Dear Editor,

Privacy in Jamaica is in need of protection. It seems to me many things that become issues were not so fated. But it would make sense that we would not know how to protect something we do not understand.

I am not speaking about phone locks, passwords, or privacy settings on social media platforms. They are important, but not for this piece. Instead, I refer to the freedom from unauthorised intrusion into private spaces and affairs.

The stain of homonegativity in today’s Jamaica functions as an excuse, or even a catalyst, for persons wishing to intervene in how others live their lives. It is not enough that they preoccupy themselves with the affairs of others, trying to know all they can. They see a need to diagnose someone’s reality based on stereotypical identifiers and to impose their rationalised cures of moral dissonance, and to a greater extreme, violence.

My understanding is that such people believe once an individual fits the bill, according to them, of being homosexual, they have abdicated their rights to peaceful gathering, privacy and comfort in their homes, and to other civil liberties. Under their flawed moral code, two or more persons of the same sex should not reside under the same roof, particularly if one of those person’s gender expressions do not match their phenotype. If they do, they are involved in homosexual activities and are somehow a threat to everyone else’s livelihood. How?

That kind of thinking is not only unhealthy, but senseless. It breeds unnecessary anger and aggression that could leave someone severely hurt, or dead, as it often does. Heterosexual paranoia threatens Jamaica amidst this thriving obsession with homosexuality. It is the only explanation for a neighbour seeing it fit to harm another neighbour assumed to be gay, community members setting another member’s home ablaze because enough members of the opposite sex do not visit, or posting pictures of same-sex lovers found in a lost cellphone on a social network. Something that has been around for generations has been turned into a novelty. If harming another because of their difference makes us feel better about ourselves, our cultural psyche is reprehensible. It means only the appropriately masculine or feminine among us is safe. At this point, the reported reduction in crime offers no comfort. If there is no privacy, there is no peace of mind.

Yohan Lee

St Andrew

yohan.s.r.lee@live.com