Caribbean Matters: Trinidad and Tobago’s reinstated anti-gay laws fire up activists
Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. Hope you’ll join us here every Saturday. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.
On March 25, there was disturbing news from Trinidad & Tobago: the victory won in the courts repealing laws against homosexuality in 2018 has just been reversed. There were a flurry of articles reporting this from LBGTQ+ publications and organizations, though not much in the mainstream U.S. media.
Alex Bollinger at LGBTQ Nation reported:
That year [2018], the High Court in the Christian-majority nation ruled in a lawsuit brought by LGBTQ+ activist Jason Jones that Sections 13 and 16 of the Sexual Offenses Act are “irrational and illegal” because they violate the rights to privacy and freedom of expression.
“What I think the judge pointed out was ‘here every creed and race find an equal place,’ and I think we must all come together now and embrace each other in true love and respect,” Jones said at the time.
But on March 25, the Court of Appeals reversed that decision, saying that only Parliament can overturn the country’s ban on homosexuality. The Court of Appeals also reduced the maximum sentence associated with homosexuality to five years in prison. Prior to 2018, the maximum penalty was 25 years in prison.
LGBTQ+ rights journalist Rob Salerno, an editor for Erasing 76 Crimes posted how this happened in the first place:
Queer people suffered an enormous and surprising setback on Wednesday when the Court of Appeal overturned the 2018 ruling that struck down the Caribbean country’s laws banning gay sex. I’m going to try to break down what happened here.
In 2017, UK-based Trinidadian activist Jason Jones filed a challenge to the country’s buggery and serious indecency laws – the laws which effectively ban gay sex, as well as oral and anal sex between straight people. A year later, a court on the island ruled in his favor, finding that the laws were unconstitutional insofar as they applied to consensual acts in private.
Trinidad became part of the leading edge of a wave of legal challenges that saw laws banning gay sex struck down across the region. Belize had preceded it in 2016; shortly after the ruling, a coordinated set of legal challenges were launched in all of the other former British colonies in the Caribbean islands. By 2024, activists had won challenges to sodomy laws in Antigua and Barbuda, St Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, and Barbados – with cases still pending in Grenada and St Lucia. Around this time, these rulings were mirrored in court decisions striking down anti-gay laws in other former UK colonies, including Mauritius, Botswana, and India, making them part of a larger global trend.
Erasing 76 Crimes editor Colin Stewart wrote about how these anti-gay laws are part of a growing trend:
The slow, decades-long progress toward recognition of the human rights of LGBTQ people has encountered a setback with the March 25 decision by the Trinidad and Tobago Court of Appeal to reinstate that Caribbean country’s laws against homosexuality.
Because of an early 2025 adoption of a new homophobic penal code by the West African nation of Mali, the total number of nations with anti-homosexuality laws now stands at 66.
Before those reversals, the number of nations with laws against gay sex had fallen to 64 from more than 90 at the beginning of the 2000s. The latest countries to end the criminalization of same-sex intimacy are Namibia in Africa and Dominica in the Caribbean in 2024, Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and the Cook Islands in the South Pacific in 2023, following in the footsteps of Singapore in Southeast Asia, Antigua & Barbuda, Saint Kitts & Nevis, and Barbados in the Caribbean — all in 2022.
The Trinidad and Tobago case is now being appealed to the Privy Council in London, UK, Trinidad and Tobago’s highest court.
One of the strongest voices fighting for LBGTQ+ rights in the Caribbean is that of Jason Jones, profiled in January 2025 for the Caribbean Collective by Tiara Jade Chutkhan:
Jones, who was born in Trinidad is the son of an English mother and Trinidadian father and playfully refers to himself as “Tringlish.”… With Trinidad’s anti-gay environment, in 1985 at the age of 21, Jones relocated to London where he studied theatre and acting. […]
It was in 2017 that Jones would take on his largest project yet. He began working on repealing all legislation in the Caribbean that discriminated against the LGBTQ+ community. Jones explained that many Trinidadians didn’t realize these laws existed or could be used against them. Some of the laws included members of the LGBTQ+ community being denied entry into Trinidad and two people of the same sex not being allowed to rent a hotel room.
On April 12, 2018, he won a landmark legal challenge at the High Court of Trinidad and Tobago which decriminalised adult same sex intimacy. This win guaranteed freedom for nearly 100,000 Trinidadians and set a precedent. The case was also cited in a recent case that led to a decriminalisation victory in India.
Come 2025, Jones will stand before the UK’s Privy council for LGBTQ+ decriminalisation. His victory there will assist decriminalisation in at least 10 other countries across two continents.
“The only way to change hearts and minds is to change laws. Unless you have laws that protect minority communities, there’s no way you can break this deeply-entrenched-hundreds-and-hundreds-of-years of homophobic ideology,” Jones says.
Michael K. Lavers, the international news editor of the Washington Blade wrote:
Court of Appeal Justices Nolan Bereaux and Charmaine Pemberton overturned it on March 25. The Daily Express newspaper reported Justice Vasheist Kokaram dissented.
“As an LGBTQ+ citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, this regressive judgement has ripped up my contract as a citizen of T&T and again makes me an unapprehended criminal in the eyes of the law,” said Jones in a statement he posted to social media. “The TT Court of Appeal has effectively put a target on the back of LGBTQIA+ people and made us lower class citizens in our own country.”
Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, Barbados, and Dominica are among the countries that have decriminalized consensual same-sex sexual relations in recent years.
Victories still stand in other nations in the Caribbean and there are other activists, like Orden David, who have also fought hard for those changes.
For years, Orden David was persecuted in his native Antigua and Barbuda — a frequent complaint by many LGBTQ people who fear for their safety across the conservative and mostly Christian Caribbean, where anti-gay hostility is widespread. […]
Facing ostracism and risking his life as the public face of the LGBTQ movement, David took his government to court in 2022 to demand an end to his country’s anti-sodomy law.
Last year, a top Caribbean court ruled that the anti-sodomy provision of Antigua’s sexual offenses act was unconstitutional. LGBTQ-rights activists say David’s effort, with the help of local and regional advocacy groups, has set a precedent for a growing number of Caribbean islands. Since the ruling, St. Kitts & Nevis and Barbados, have struck down similar laws that often seek long prison sentences.
“It’s been a legal and historic moment for Antigua and Barbuda,” said Alexandrina Wong, director of the local non-governmental organization Women Against Rape, which joined the litigation coordinated by the Eastern Caribbean Alliance for Diversity and Equality. […]
The ruling said Antigua’s 1995 Sexual Offences Act “offends the right to liberty, protection of the law, freedom of expression, protection of personal privacy and protection from discrimination on the basis of sex.”
Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne told the AP that his government decided not to challenge the ruling: “We respected the fact that there should be no discrimination within society,” he said. “As a government, we have a constitutional responsibility to respect the rights of all and not to discriminate.”
David’s case was also covered in this video by the Associated Press:
This is an issue we’ve covered here in the past. It is important to note that members of the LGBTQ+ Caribbean community here in the states also face challenges, for example, this news story documented by CBS News in New York last year:
To be Indo or Afro Caribbean immigrants, children of immigrants here in the states, and to be openly LGBTQ+ under the vile Trump anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion and deportation campaigns isn’t easy. It’s up to all of us to fight back, and to be more aware of battles being fought both here and in our neighboring countries.
Please join me in the comments section below, and post links to activist groups you are aware of, are part of, or you support.