Mark Wignall | Go for it, Dalton Harris

About two weeks ago, I met with a source and we both sat at a small table in one corner of a seedy bar on the edge of a tough inner-city community. My source's story was one of corruption in high places and a thousand-and-one other misdeeds.

As he began to speak and pull sheets of paper from files he carried with him, I noticed a certain body language and a voice inflection. I stared across at him and asked, "Are you gay?"

He answered, "Well, yes."

Now that that fact was out of the way we could get on with following the paper trail of corruption and skulduggery and me poring over the documents he was handing me. Thirty years ago, I would not sit with such a person. In that sense, I have evolved like many of us in Jamaica.

NOW TO DALTON

In recent weeks, a Jamaican singer by the name of Dalton Harris has set our hopes on fire with his awesome singing on the X-Factor. Many Jamaicans were rooting for him to come out the big winner, that is, until he dared to post a happy picture of him seated in the lap of a male contestant and firmly in the embrace of the young man. Jamaica exploded!

Instantly, those of us who were on our social evolutionary path did not want to be tugged into the belief that Harris could be gay or, at the very least, was much too chummy with another person who was male. Those of us who were homophobic simply 'bun him' and washed him out of our memories. Somewhere along the way his excellence in delivering a song became immaterial.

In the 1970s, I read like a madman on book steroids. The black American writer, James Baldwin, was one of my favourites until he came out as homosexual and I stopped buying his books. A similar thing happened with the great singer, Johnny Mathis. About a year later, good sense prevailed and I began again to devour Baldwin's words and Mathis' soothing trills up and down the beautiful haunts of singing at its best.

NOT MY BUSINESS

The closest male friend to me is my brother, Ernesto, and there is no way that anyone of us is going to be seated in the other's lap. I would just be very uncomfortable doing that. Whether Dalton Harris is gay, straight or somewhere slotted along the sexual spectrum of where is most comfortable ought to be none of my business, or for that matter, yours.

But, this is Jamaica where we all want each other to abide by the rules set by that single imperious voice inside us that states you must be like me or, you are damned to go to hell. It is that 'understanding' that drives us into loudly making social and sexual rules for others because, in that great pretence, we make the declaration that we are most comfortable running with the herd.

Most Jamaicans who have drunk healthily of the homophobic Kool Aid are convinced that being gay is a choice, a lifestyle that can be turned on and off at will. An uncomfortable percentage of those making the most noise are silently in the closet, and the actions of Dalton Harris are creating painful realities for that cohort.

According to my lady, Chupski, Harris should have known better than to post such a picture. "He should have played it like a politician, knowing how Jamaicans think."

I say, go and sing, my boy. Keep increasing that big footprint of Jamaica on the global stage.

mawigsr@gmail.com