Big Pride, Little Pride, and the Cunning of (In)Visibility in the Southern Caribbean

Abstract

This essay explores the history, politics, and practice of global-style Pride in Trinidad and Tobago. It distinguishes between “Big” and “Little” forms of Pride and emphasizes that Pride did not emerge with the advent of a parade and day of high-profile visibility in 2018 after a successful High Court challenge to remove homophobic anti-sodomy and related laws in this twin-island postcolonial Republic, but developed over decades of organizing and intervention in lower-profile and more inwardly community-oriented ways, setting the foundation for the new institutional form and full-scale public orientation of #PrideTT. Once conjured, Trinbagonian Big Pride was paradoxically successful vis-à-vis the nation at large, yet also beset by tension, conflict, and schism within. I show how the pattern and structure of this dissension and debate embody wider global currents in the geopolitics of late modern sexuality as well as reflect local parameters and vicissitudes that make the politics of visibility and representation tricky business and far from an unalloyed good. #PrideTT is symptomatic of the changing and contested global political economy of queer visibility and sexual citizenship dramatized by being played in local keys and rhythms, thereby undermining the assumption that Pride is progress.