-----Original Message-----
From: Ariel Herrera <aherr...@aiusa.org>
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 12:17 PM
To: OUTFrontSC <outfron...@aiusa.org>; OutFrontHRAC <outfronth...@aiusa.org>
Subject: A "call to love"

Some of you might not have met Gareth - he is the co-chair of J-FLAG. We
worked with him on our campaign against homophobic violence in Jamaica,
including organizing a speaker tour for him and Karlene, the other J-FLAG
co-chair. He is now in Toronto and has applied for asylum. I'm sure this
was a very difficult decision for him because for a long time he was
determined to stay in Jamaica to do his important work.

===============================================

A Different Kind of Valentine's 'Call to Love'

by Anthony Reinhart

A Jamaican gay advocate and Canadian refugee used Valentine's Day as a
platform to urge religious and political leaders to renounce hate crimes in
and outside Jamaica.

Friday 02.15.08

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080215.GAY15/TPSto...

There are certainly more inviting places to spend Valentine’s Day than in
an old church in east-end Toronto.

Still, Metropolitan Community Church was a damn sight safer for Gareth
Henry yesterday than where he spent the previous Feb. 14 - inside a
drugstore in Kingston, Jamaica, as 250 people stood outside shouting
anti-gay slurs and calling for him and three other men to be beaten.

Instead, Mr. Henry said, the police who were called to break up the mob
wound up doing its dirty work.

“I was physically abused by four police officers,” Mr. Henry, a 30-year-old
Jamaican gay activist now seeking refugee status in Canada, said yesterday.
“I was slapped in the face, beaten with guns and left on the floor of the
pharmacy while they escorted the three guys out. Their thing was that I
talked too much.”

In Jamaica, where anal sex is still punishable by 10 years of hard labour,
and some dancehall singers win fans by advocating violence against
homosexuals, Mr. Henry was among a handful of souls audacious enough to
demand the right to live in peace.

His own treatment, along with a string of gruesome killings and assaults on
others, have since pushed him to the reluctant conclusion that a life in
exile offers the best chance to make change - and to stay alive.

“It was a hard decision,” Mr. Henry said of his move to Toronto late last
month, where he promptly filed a refugee claim. But it was a choice between
“a different environment that would allow some level of comfort and
security, or staying there and constantly living in fear. At some point in
time, you’re going to get exhausted, because you’re fighting a battle that
seems impossible to win.”

Mr. Henry opened a new front on the battle yesterday, with the high-profile
help of Rev. Brent Hawkes, the Metropolitan Community Church pastor who was
instrumental in winning key rights, including marriage, for gays and
lesbians, and Helen Kennedy, long-time activist and head of Egale Canada, a
gay-rights group.

Dubbing their Valentine’s Day effort the “Call for Love,” they held a news
conference to urge political and religious leaders in and outside Jamaica
to renounce hate crimes against homosexuals, which they said are too often
exacerbated by an apathetic, and in some cases complicit, police force.

Later, they delivered a letter to the Jamaican consulate-general in
Toronto, asking the Caribbean country’s government to ensure police “uphold
their sworn duty to equally protect and serve all Jamaican citizens.” The
consulate did not respond yesterday to a request for comment.

Mr. Henry said he’d wished for that kind of protection many times, as he
saw friends and acquaintances attacked just for being themselves. As
co-chair of J-FLAG, a gay-rights group, he offered support to the victims’
friends and partners, and for his trouble, began to attract police
attention himself.

In 2005, when a friend and HIV/AIDS activist named Steve Harvey was
abducted and shot in the head, Mr. Henry went to identify the body.

“The police officers said, ‘Why are you crying? You’re gay, a man crying
over another man,’ “ he recalled. “For my own safety, I had to leave the
scene of the crime, and the next morning, there were police officers
outside my apartment. I said, ‘What crime have I committed?’ “

In another case, in the north-coast resort city of Montego Bay in June of
2004, Mr. Henry and a few friends watched helplessly as three police
officers roughed up Victor Jarrett, a man in his early 20s whom the
officers had accused of looking at a teenage boy on the beach. When the
officers were finished, a crowd that had formed chased Mr. Jarrett into the
city.

“The five of us were standing there, hoping that he may be safe; that he
would find somewhere to run to and somewhere to hide,” Mr. Henry said. But,
the next morning, the Western Mirror newspaper carried a front-page
headline: “Alleged Gay Man Chopped To Death In MoBay.”

“In the time that he needed us the most, it was the time we were actually
turning our backs on him,” Mr. Henry said, describing how he and his
friends feared they would have met a similar fate had they intervened.

The case, documented by Human Rights Watch in a damning 2004 report titled
“Hated to Death: Homophobia, Violence, and Jamaica’s HIV/AIDS Epidemic,”
weighed heavily on Mr. Henry in the drugstore a year ago, as he watched a
similar situation shaping up - with himself in Mr. Jarrett’s place.

“What went through my head was, what happened to Victor 2½ years ago, this
is what is going to happen to me.”

The police took Mr. Henry to a station away from the waiting mob and
released him. He went into hiding shortly thereafter, moving from place to
place in an effort to keep up his work with J-FLAG. But police, along with
threats, continued to find their way to him.

“At this point in time, I need to take this break,” Mr. Henry said, adding
that his growing preoccupation with safety had overtaken his ability to do
his work.

“I will not be there physically,” he said, “but I will do what I can.”