Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince

CHARLOT JEUDY

30, founder of Kouraj

Charlot Jeudy is an L.G.B.T. rights activist in Port-au-Prince. He lives in the neighborhood of Martissant where he was born. Martissant is a dense neighborhood close to the city center. Charlot created Kouraj, a safe space for gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals in Haiti to congregate and celebrate. Before our meeting, the Kouraj office had recently been relocated after threats of violence at their previous location. We were met by a Kouraj activist on the main Delmas road and taken by motorcycle through a maze of narrow streets to the unassuming office. Before the conversation began, we were scanned with a metal detector wand.

My mother is a fervent Catholic, so I was raised as such. I was born January 1, 1984 in Martissant. My siblings and I were raised there, and I still live there. What saved us was education. My mother made sure we all went to school. That’s all I have, and that’s what helped me realize that it wasn’t fair for people to be attacked because of their sexual or gender orientation.

I was sixteen when I realized I was gay. I noticed that I was interested in other teenage boys like me. I started hating myself for it because everything I knew or believed condemned it. I prayed about it, but nothing happened. So I started faking being heterosexual.

When I turned eighteen, I confessed to my mother that I liked men. She responded that the most important thing for me was to finish school. Nothing else mattered. Until now, my parents have never questioned me about it. Maybe that’s where I learned to be so strong and positive about this.

At twenty-two, I was in a relationship with a girl. I told her that we should stop because I was gay. From then on, I’ve been openly gay. Like me, my parents are true Haitian citizens. If they can accept it, maybe others will too. It was hard, but I was lucky to have a father who was a sergeant in the army. He was an authority figure in the neighborhood, and we were one of the first families to move in there. They respected him and couldn’t attack me because of my dad, which wasn’t the case for some other homosexuals in the neighborhood. But I did suffer. I suffered for my friends. So I started to think about how to change this.

One day in 2009, a friend was having a birthday party. He was also gay. Everyone at the party had such a good time! It was good to be with like people in a safe environment, so my friends and I started thinking about organizing L.G.B.T. nights. I was already involved in many other local civic engagement committees in my neighborhood, so I had the skills necessary to start an organization that would advocate for an issue that affects me personally. In 2009, there were a couple of organizations in Port-au-Prince that were looking at homosexuality from a medical standpoint, since the L.G.B.T. community is said to be more vulnerable to S.T.D.’s and H.I.V./AIDS. But we wanted something new, a safe environment for our community, and so we started with L.G.B.T. nights.

We named our organization “Friend to Friend,” and it mostly existed to plan social events for the community. The first event we held was at a private home in Tabarre, which is a quieter, safer neighborhood than Martissant.¹ We also had an event called “Homo-naval” during Carnival time. Carnival is one of the most dangerous places for us to be, so we decided to have our own carnival.

We started talking about ourselves as the “M community” because all the L.G.B.T. words start with M: Masisi (gay), Madivin (lesbian), Makomè (trans), and Mix (bisexual). They are offensive terms, but we’ve turned them around and decided to own those terms instead. It makes us stronger. The term “homosexual” is usually only used by intellectuals. So we came up with the M community as a united entity and so people can understand exactly what we’re fighting for in our debates. That’s how Kouraj started.

IT’S NOT MY CAUSE, IT’S SOCIETY’S CAUSE

After the earthquake, the Haitian society started seeing us in a bad light. Haitians were hearing homophobic speeches everywhere. There were some preachers, mostly from the United States, who were teaching the people that the earthquake was the result of our sins, especially homosexuality.² We thought it was nonsense. But people were so scared of us that they started persecuting us. We couldn’t even be under the tents. Some of us had to convert to Christianity to stay safe. The goal changed from social to policy. We decided the best way to do it is to start a dialogue. We started being more vocal—we use the media a lot. We have our own Web site too. We encouraged people to speak out about hate crimes. We became a voice for our community. It is unacceptable that people are attacked because of their sexual/gender orientation. Haiti shouldn’t accept such things. This is a democracy.

We started going to towns outside the city and dialoguing with L.G.B.T. people. We organized them into groups and encouraged them to speak out. It’s not my cause, it is society’s cause. If we want to progress as a society, we have to start by changing our way of thinking. These erroneous beliefs don’t do us any good.

You have to understand that in Haiti, religion holds a big place in our society. Even non-Christians have some religious beliefs. That is the reason why homosexuals are seen with suspicion. They’re misunderstood. That sometimes leads to psychological abuse from their community. Even in politics, they use the term to denigrate their opponents. All the abuse forces some people to never assume their identity. They stay in the closet. They can’t even have their family’s support.

For example, let’s say a young man admits to his parents that he is gay; they will throw him out of the house. He’s not going to get any type of support from anyone. He won’t find a job. It’s really bad. And since religion, or should we say, the Catholic Church, controls in part our schools, our children’s sexual education is not done. Thus, the population is ignorant of many things when it comes to sexuality.

Let’s talk about the social and cultural aspect. Here, we have Vodou. Sometimes, Christians try to show that homosexuals are possessed by loas and bad spirits.³ A lot of people believe that. Even certain homosexuals themselves. They use it as an excuse for who they are.

I have to tell you that I don’t practice Vodou, but I participate in their ceremonies if they invite me. I don’t really attach myself to one religion, but I’ve always liked the loa ceremonies. I first started practicing folklore dance and attending loa ceremonies around the time I came out to my mother. It was a way for me to show everyone who I really was. I liked the loa ceremonies. It was the only environment where as a man I could dance like I wanted to with no judgments. I could express myself how I wanted to. Haitian society sets the norms, but the Vodou religion is different—Vodou is the most tolerant religion in Haiti to homosexuals. Vodou suggests the possibility of possession by loas, becoming inhabited by another spirit. There are certain loas that when they possess you, you behave like them. For instance, when Ogou, who is a male loa, possesses a woman, that woman behaves like a man.⁴ When Erzuli Dantor, a woman, possesses a man, that man acts like a woman.⁵ These cultural beliefs create some sense of security for homosexuals, and I would see many other homosexuals participating in Vodou ceremonies from the time I started attending them.

But the evangelists have had a great impact. The churches have a coalition. They talk about it in their sermons. They use Sodom and Gomorrah as their example to show that homosexuality is bad and that God condemns it. They make us look like beasts. Those evangelists met with other Haitian evangelists to persecute homosexuals. For the first time in Haitian history, an organized religious group took the streets of Port-au-Prince to protest against homosexuality, on July 19, 2013. Forty-seven homosexuals were attacked that day. That wasn’t the only protest there was. That same group protested all around the country. They even had the support of a state official who said that the south is the most immoral part of Haiti because of homosexuals. Can you believe it?

We work a lot on H.I.V./AIDS awareness. We talk to the youth about prevention. We distribute condoms and lubricants. We do things like that. We also sensitize the people about human rights in general and pressure the government to provide justice where justice is due when there is a case.

We’ve created a network. We help each other. We report the hate crime cases. We try to connect to many organizations that can help us in this fight. We need to eliminate that stigma, and I feel like it will also help against the stigma against H.I.V./AIDS. Some people have a double life because they can’t come out to their wife. Since they will not use condoms, if they become or were infected from a male partner, they bring that into their marriage.

In our constitution, it’s clearly stated that the government has the obligation to protect everyone, with no exceptions. Our government also ratifies many international laws as well. Are they upheld? Now, it is going to take a lot of work for that. Even the media that is supposed to be independent refused to play our commercials, even though we offered to pay. The best way to educate the population is through radio, and we don’t have access to it.

There are no specific laws that discriminate against homosexuals; we have “social laws” against it. The last law about adoption that was passed was very discriminatory, though. It stated that homosexuals couldn’t adopt. The pretext was that the child will somehow have a one-sided upbringing. That’s bogus. We have so many single-parent families.

Madivin is the Kreyol word for lesbian. There are not organizations like Kouraj for them, but we also provide the same space for them. Even the women’s rights organizations here do not really accept those women among them. They don’t feel too comfortable working with us. The discrimination is not really different for them. It’s about the same, and those women are sometimes sexually exploited because of who they are.

I think that if society becomes more sensitive about our case, if more gay people join the fight, things can be done. Kouraj is just a link in the chain. We need more people. They have to understand that other entities are trying to shut us up from many avenues. They’re trying to control the justice system and our press. Poverty is also making things harder. Even the discrimination problem is different based on your social status. I have a friend from the higher class who told me that his father is okay with him being gay as long as it’s quieted. He told him that he will fly him to the U.S.A., Canada, or Dominican Republic whenever he has certain needs, but he should never get involved with anyone here. It’s just a way to protect his reputation. I wasn’t that lucky. As we say at home, kote mare bourik se kote li sevi bezwen li—where you keep the donkey, that’s where it takes care of all its needs.

It’s clear that society is made of different types of peoples and that they don’t always think alike. It is our responsibility as individuals to overcome those barriers. If the community is engaged, things will get better. However, if the community stays passive, nothing will work out. We have to work to change things. The same way we’re fighting against child slavery, we must fight for homosexuality. We do all we can to continue this fight. If we’re talking about human rights, we have to talk about all of them. Someone cannot pick which one they like and leave the others.