KINGSTON, Jamaica--Thirty-five years ago, David Swanson, then a 26-year-old marketing executive, and his new boyfriend Chris decided to take their first holiday together in the Caribbean. They chose Jamaica.
Barring the rainy weather over the first three days, the holiday went mostly well. They stayed at a small hotel and “they welcomed us like family,” Swanson recalled to The Sunday Gleaner from his San Diego, California, home.
However, while admiring one of the larger resorts from the beach, they received a shocking reality check when they were told in no uncertain terms that they were not welcome there because they were two men.
“It really cast a light on what we as [gay – Ed.] travellers were facing at the time, in very stark terms,” said Swanson, who has been married to the same man for 35 years. “So, it was hard.”
In the years after he became a travel writer in 1995 and was assigned to cover the Caribbean, Swanson was invited to stay at the resort several times, but he refused each time – “Why would I want to stay at a resort as your guest when you won’t take me as a paying customer?” he asked.
But in 2018, Swanson and his husband accepted an invitation to stay at the resort’s new property and the experience there was a delightful surprise.
“We were welcomed, and we were treated as though we were any other couple there,” he said. “And I felt very good about that.”
Since that encounter 35 years ago, Swanson has visited the Caribbean countless times, including about 10 visits back here, sometimes alone, often with his husband. And while he believes the perception that Jamaica and the region are homophobic is greater than the reality, many of his friends and colleagues swear they’ll never go to Jamaica because of laws that make lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people feel unwelcome.
“If we had laws on the books someplace in the United States that said, ‘We don’t want Caribbean people here, Caribbean people are not allowed,’ but you went and the people there made you feel welcome, would you feel like that was a fair trade-off?” he argued. “The [anti-gay] laws on certain islands are still on the books because no one cares to change them or because there is a genuine community support for them. And if I am the average vacationer and I want a beach vacation, I have a choice of places to go, why wouldn’t I want to choose a place that I’m certain I am welcome?”
Boycotting the English-speaking Caribbean
Swanson’s friends and colleagues are among a large section of the travel population – both gay and straight – who are boycotting the English-speaking Caribbean due to laws that discriminate against the LGBTQ community, according to a report released on Wednesday by Open for Business (OFB) – a coalition of 22 leading companies, including AT&T, Barclays, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Virgin, that advocate for LGBTQ equity globally.
These laws, as well as social stigma and violence against LGBTQ people, affect tourism, productivity, the competitiveness of workers and businesses and the overall economic outlook of the region, costing these Caribbean countries as much as US $4.2 billion a year, with the tourism industry losing between $435 million and $689 million each year, revealed the study, which was conducted in Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.
It also found that 18 per cent of the 1,435 prospective travellers surveyed, mainly from the UK, the US and Canada, said they would not visit the region, with the key reason being anti-LGBTQ laws, OFB stated.
The survey results come as no surprise to Peter Wickham, a Barbadian political consultant who is gay, married and splits his time between Barbados and gay-friendly Strasburg, Germany.
According to Wickham, the English-speaking Caribbean continues to be seen as homophobic, which impacts negatively on visits by both gay and straight visitors “because they feel that their friends would not be welcomed and they’re not comfortable going there either.”
“What happens is that gay people may say that when they want to travel, they will look to destinations which are more gay-friendly,” he told The Sunday Gleaner.
This assertion is supported by research conducted by Community Marketing & Insights (CMI), a San Francisco, California-based LGBTQ-owned and -operated market research firm that has been conducting LGBTQ consumer studies for nearly 30 years.
In its most recent survey conducted in December 2019, 39 per cent of respondents said that in deciding on where to take a holiday, it was “very important” that the destination is LGBTQ-friendly, while 41 per cent said this was “important” to them. It was the number one factor in choosing a destination, followed by whether or not the destination offers natural beauty and whether or not it is safe or has low crime rates.
“The LGBTQ community, like everyone, wants to travel to places where we’re gonna have a good time and not be harassed. So if we are getting signals either through government policy or negative media stories that bad things are happening to LGBTQ people when they’re travelling, or the locals who live there [harass us], it discourages us from travelling to that destination,” David Paisley, CMI’s senior research director, told The Sunday Gleaner. “There are many destinations within the Caribbean that are not perceived as LGBTQ-friendly, therefore, they will get a lower percentage of the travel market from our community. That’s just the way it is. If you’re not perceived as a friendly place, why would someone travel there?”
Key distinction
How big the global gay travel market is remains unclear, with estimates in the US ranging from eight to 10 per cent of the overall travel market, said Paisley.
Also unclear is how much they pump into the economies of the countries to which they travel, although the CMI survey found that four per cent of the LGBTQ community described themselves as luxury travellers, 33 per cent said they were moderate-price travellers with a little luxury, and 22 per cent described themselves as moderate-price travellers.
The survey also found that on average, LGBTQ travellers took 3.1 leisure trips, 1.5 business trips and 2.2 trips primarily to visit family or friends a year.
“The key distinction between LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people is that we do take more trips per year, so we probably spend more,” said Paisley. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean we spend more per trip.”
Wickham, the gay political consultant, used his husband and himself as perfect examples of the typical gay traveller, whom the Caribbean ought to target.
“[We] are both professionals, we both earn a decent living, we have no children and no dependents. So generally speaking, in our circles, we find that the proclivity to travel and spend while travelling is higher than it is for persons that are straight, because they have children,” opined Wickham, who insisted that Caribbean countries were missing an opportunity to market themselves as gay-friendly.
Unlike the English-speaking Caribbean, the regional destinations that are part of the Dutch kingdom are seen as welcoming to the gay community. Curaçao, for example, has hotels that market themselves as such, while the destination hosts gay pride parades during Pride Month and participates in trade shows that target the LGBTQ community.
“We are LGBT-friendly, we do the occasional show in that market and we do not discriminate against that market,” Paul Pennicook, the former director of tourism for Jamaica, and who now holds a similar post in Curaçao, told The Sunday Gleaner, while explaining that this doesn’t mean Curaçao was “aggressively pursuing” that market.
St. Maarten, on the other hand, is more aggressive in its approach, targeting the LGBTQ market with various initiatives, including a recent digital marketing campaign.
“St. Maarten has always been a LGBTQ community-friendly island, welcoming our friends from all over the globe,” May-Ling Chun, the Dutch Caribbean territory’s director of tourism, said. “We will be marketing more aggressively to this very important target group. We also celebrate Pride Month in June, we have an increase in LGBTQ influencers and we have planned for some to be hosted soon.”
They don’t care
This is the sort of approach that every Caribbean destination should adopt, argued Maurice Tomlinson, a Jamaica-born consultant with the Toronto, Canada-based HIV Legal Network, an advocacy organisation that promotes the human rights of people living with, at risk of, or affected by HIV or AIDS, including the LGBTQ community.
However, he is convinced that the OFB report will have no impact on policy towards the gay community in the region because neither the travellers nor the governments care about the well-being of LGBTQ people.
“They really don’t care. And it is this level of apathy towards the human rights of vulnerable people in countries that tourists visit that causes the governments of these countries to retain the laws, because they know most travellers will not care,” Tomlinson told The Sunday Gleaner. “Should they care? Yes, they really, really should.” ~ Jamaica Gleaner ~
