Queering Chinese Crossings in Late Twentieth Century Jamaica: Larry Chang and the Gay Freedom Movement

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between Chinese racialization and queer formation in post-independence Jamaica. Alongside its international reputation for black empowerment and homophobic exceptionalism in the late twentieth century, Jamaica also becomes home to the anglophone Caribbean’s first gay activist organization, the Gay Freedom Movement (GFM), led by Chinese-Jamaican General Secretary Larry Chang. Focusing on Chang’s life and work, this essay analyzes the relationship between Chinese-ness and local and international iterations of Jamaican gay activism. Drawing on archival research and oral history interviews, I argue that Chinese-ness was key to Chang’s politics of crossing in which he wrote as different characters in GFM’s newsletter to represent and recruit across the lines of race, class, gender, and nation in support of a broad-based gay social movement. This strategic mobilization of Chinese-ness in the service of erotic autonomy queers the racial logic that positions Chinese diasporans as “middleman minorities” in their multiracial host societies.