Homophobia as the State of Reason: The Case of Postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago

I held my jersey in front of me to hide my body. He then told me to “take off the jockey shorts too.” I obeyed. I held my jersey in front of my pelvic area in an attempt to hide my nakedness. At this point in time I was wearing no clothes. There was a table located next to us. P. C. Teasdale then told me to rest all my clothing on the said table. I was now completely naked and facing the officers. I attempted to hide my nudity with my hands. I was then told by P. C. Teasdale to move my hands from in front of me. I removed my hands. They both looked at me and started to laugh very loud. They ridiculed me. P. C. Teas-dale then said to me “that you playing man and that small cuckoo you have” referring to the size of my penis. P. C. Teasdale then told me to squat on the floor facing them in full view of them. During this incident we were in full view of anyone who desired to pass along the corridor. Throughout this entire incident I was kept standing in the outer area of the cells. I was scared and totally embarrassed.

— Testimony of Kennty Dave Mitchell, Civil Appeal No. 118 of 2007

In the Western imagination, the postcolonial Caribbean is often stigmatized as enacting some of the most homophobic nationalisms, serving as a useful counterpoint to frame liberal democratic nations as vanguard (especially enshrining LGBTQ subjects as rights deserving). As such, those nations positioned at the margins of Western modernity are seen to bear strong proclivities to an immature modernity or even premodern (regressive) condition. This simplistic analysis elides any discussion of how homophobic nationalisms in postcolonial settings are more complicated and suggestive of a different (albeit contentious) engagement with modernity. In fact, the hardening of homophobic nationalisms forces us to question how and why, in particular settings such as postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago, compulsory homophobia is deployed as a form of moral management that is compatible with postcolonial modernity.¹ My aim in this article is to explore this “problem space” of homophobia as a regulative and generative force in post-colonial nation-states, caught in tension between liberal disciplinary aspirations and contemporary anxieties conditioned by the colonial past.² This embattled context conditions the discursive parameters that power the truth of Trinidad and Tobago’s postcolonial condition and its agonized relation to modernity.

Within this space is situated the case of Afro-Trinidadian Kennty Dave Mitchell, who in 2001 filed a case in the High Court of Justice, San Fernando, against the attorney general of Trinidad and Tobago based on what Mitchell alleged was his wrongful arrest and false imprisonment in July 2000.³ At the time of his arrest Mitchell was twenty-two years old and was described in news reports as a “self-confessed homosexual” involved in a “ ‘common law’ relationship” with his same-sex partner, living in rural south Trinidad.⁴ One newspaper article reported that “he ran a small business out of his home, he drove a maxi (local taxi), and he’d done a lot of other things to earn a living.”⁵ According to the judgment, “On 24th July, 2000 at about 4.30 p.m. he was with his partner, Kinno Jarvis, walking past the Princes Town Police Station when the police called out to him ‘fat boy, come!’ He went into the station. At about 5.00 p.m. he got up to leave when P. C. Teasdale shouted out to him ‘you lock up, you lock up.’ P. C. Teasdale then arrested him. He was then taken down a corridor to the cell area and was strip searched.”⁶

Mitchell told the court that while he was detained at the police station on suspicion of his involvement in a vehicle robbery, he was strip-searched and ridiculed by police officers about his penis. Mitchell’s case attempted not only to seek compensation for loss of daily earnings while wrongfully imprisoned but to...