Jamaica, Three Years Later: Effects of Intensified Pro-Gay Activism on Severe Prejudice Against Lesbians and Gay Men

Abstract

Jamaica has developed an international reputation for severe anti-gay prejudice. However, in the past few years, between 2012 and 2015, intensified waves of activism have increased the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Jamaicans, and supported their social and legal inclusion in Jamaican society. This research investigated the effects of that activism by taking advantage of two large, representative surveys of Jamaicans’ attitudes toward lesbians and gay men: one in 2012 and one in 2015. Over the three-year period there were significant reductions in desire for social distance and opposition to gay rights. However, there was no significant change in anti-gay attitudes, and there was evidence of an increase in anti-gay behaviors. There was also no evidence of polarization of responses to gay men and lesbians; rather, the most prejudiced Jamaicans showed the largest reductions in bias. Implications of these findings for activism in Jamaica and other anti-gay countries are discussed.

Notes

¹ The samples were explicitly described as “nationally representative” in the original reports (e.g., Boxill et al., 2012, p. 6). However, these reports did not specify their mechanism of assuring that the samples were nationally representative (e.g., through the use of probability-based sampling). They did specify that participants were a deliberately diverse sampling of Jamaicans drawn from 231 urban and rural communities with the aim of achieving a nationally representative sample. However, it is possible that the original authors meant only that the sample was “nationally representative” in the sense that it covered a diverse and representative set of Jamaican communities.

² This lower value for degrees of freedom is due to the fact that some participants (35 in 2012 and 268 in 2015) did not report any information about their level of education.

³ Similarly, this lower value for degrees of freedom is due to the fact that some participants (33 in 2012 and 2 in 2015) did not report any information about their level of religiosity.