Decriminalizing ‘Colonial’ Laws in the Anglophone Caribbean – ‘Buggery’

The moment I stepped foot back on the island, I was no longer the 14-year-old boy who once proudly wore his school uniform to Wolmer’s Boys High School—the oldest school in the Caribbean—and to Maranatha Gospel Hall, my local church. I had become something else entirely in the eyes of the state: a criminal. An illegal presence. A deviant in my own country. Technically, I should be in prison.

Childhood Home in Kingston Jamaica

Childhood Daycare and Preschool in Jamaica

In the summer, I traveled to Barbados for research, I moved freely. In the winter while in Jamaica, I was “unnatural.” I adjusted my appearance—baggy clothes, longer shorts. I carried a carefully worded research proposal centered on constitutional reform among political elites. I knew that speaking openly about my real focus—LGBTQ+ rights—could put me in danger.

As I near graduation, I reflect on my return to Jamaica not just as a research trip, but as a reckoning. After seven years away, I reunited with family, walked familiar streets, and tried to make sense of the place that raised me. Friends showed me yellowed newspaper clippings announcing my admission to Harvard, their pride palpable, their joy heartwarming. But beneath the celebration, a quiet dissonance lingered. I had come back not just as a scholar, but as a man whose very existence is still criminalized under Caribbean constitutional law.

At the start of 2025, 63 countries criminalized homosexuality. While LGBTQ+ rights have expanded in some parts of the world, reactionary movements have simultaneously gained momentum. This is particularly true in former British colonies, which account for nearly half of the countries where homosexuality remains criminalized. One region has seen a higher acceptance towards LGBTQ+ norm diffusion: the Anglophone Caribbean. Currently, ACNs are witnessing a strong ‘wave of decriminalization’ alongside other Commonwealth nations.

However, are we now seeing a reversal? The number of states that criminalize homosexuality has since risen to 65 following recent rulings by the constitutional courts of Mali and Trinidad and Tobago, which reinstated anti-LGBTQ+ laws. This surge reflects a troubling global backlash against LGBTQ+ rights, often framed in the language of “pro-family” values and opposition to so-called “gender ideology.”

When I began this project, I never imagined I would engage so directly with such a contentious issue—one often deemed “risky” not only because it centers on a criminalized group, but also because many of the attorneys and litigants I interviewed have faced political and physical violence, blackballing, and social isolation. But I grounded myself in the fact that the Caribbean is my home—and that this research is ultimately about the communities that raised me.

I set out to answer this question in my thesis: What explains the variation in decriminalizing homosexuality between postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean states, specifically Jamaica and Barbados, through governmental, legal, and policy frameworks? With support from DRCLAS, I traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, to conduct interviews and archival research. I had a three-pronged focus: archival legal records and court documents from the 1860s onward; interviews with legal scholars, government officials, and LGBTQ+ activists; and contemporary political efforts related to constitutional reform.

Inside the Archives

Much of my time was spent navigating the Jamaican National Archives and the National Library. Initially unsure of how to locate relevant legal documents, I relied on Jonathan Dalby’s Crime and Punishment in Jamaica and support from Clayton Covington, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Harvard University. At the National Library, the head librarian had prepared a folder marked “Homosexuals” before my arrival, a quiet but surprising testament to the country’s archival transparency.

Pamphlet from the Gay Freedom Movement which was the first LGBTQ+ movement in the Caribbean in the 1970s, thank you to Matthew Chin’s work which revealed Jamaica’s transnational history in the Anglo-Caribbean to create LGBTQ+ networks.

The archives and libraries in Jamaica included a handful of legal cases about sodomy and buggery laws but were far from comprehensive. This selective preservation underscores a broader reality in postcolonial archives: they can simultaneously preserve and silence. In many cases, marginalized identities are rendered invisible by the very systems meant to record history. Yet, in this context, the presence of legal records criminalizing homosexuality affirmed the existence of queer subjects—albeit through a criminalizing lens.

Table of ‘Sodomy’ and ‘Buggery’ Cases retrieved from the Jamaican National Archives (December 2024 – January 2025).

Public misunderstanding is also widespread, as buggery is commonly thought to apply only to consensual male-to-male sex. However, the law also covers non-consensual acts and extends to male-to-female non-procreative anal sex, whether consensual or not. The law’s ambiguity raises questions about how it has been applied and how it should be decriminalized. I was interested in how local movements and transnational influences capitalize on this ambiguity to either reinforce or dismantle the framing and legality of the buggery laws. By analyzing 19th-century buggery cases, I uncovered a critical lack of legal clarity around the term “buggery.” As Covington argues, colonial legal systems used vague language that framed homosexuality as a moral and social threat. Dalby’s findings further expose how consensual same-sex acts were collapsed into “venereal affairs,” with no distinction made between consent and coercion. How can a society criminalize an act without fully understanding the legal rationale behind its original imposition as a tool of social and political control by the state? These legal ambiguities, rooted in colonial governance, persist today, continuing to reinforce discriminatory legal systems across the Caribbean.

Fortunately, before conducting my fieldwork, I studied abroad at Oxford University, where I accessed the British National Archives. There, I encountered more detailed records, including colonial communications discussing the transplantation of British penal codes into Jamaica’s legal framework. Unfortunately, due to a Caribbean-wide moratorium on reproducing knowledge from national archives, I was unable to photograph or digitally reproduce these materials—an obstacle that reflects ongoing tensions around knowledge ownership and postcolonial sovereignty.

Beyond the Archives: Engaging with Jamaica’s LGBTQ+ Community

Beyond my archival work, I had the opportunity to live among and engage with Jamaica’s LGBTQ+ community, gaining a deeper understanding of how they navigate daily life. In my experience, many gay men and lesbians in Jamaica are critical players in the government, financial, cultural, and development sectors. I met some of the wealthiest individuals on the island and government officials who are part of the LGBTQ+ community. They shared how their socio-economic status and job afforded them protection from discrimination and allowed them to contribute meaningfully to Jamaican society while navigating certain cultural and societal expectations of Caribbean masculinity – this is a type of respectabiltiy. This privilege allowed them access to elite political and professional spaces, where their identity could be tolerated—if not fully accepted—so long as it remained discreet.

I worked with key pro-LGBTQ+ organizations on the ground, including Equality Jamaica and its Executive Director, Glenroy Murray. Glenroy has become more than just a professional contact—he has become a friend, helping me navigate spaces within Jamaica that I was unfamiliar with, especially since I left at the age of 14. Returning as an adult was a transformative experience.

Reclaiming Myself in the Shadows of Empire

This project is more than academic—it is a resistance to colonial legacies and legal ambiguities. It demanded fluency across disciplines: Commonwealth and postcolonial constitutional law, queer theory, sociology, international human rights, political theory and African studies. As a postcolonial subject, I live the paradox of being both “free” and criminalized—celebrated abroad, yet still silenced at home. To reclaim myself in the shadows of the empire is not just an act of scholarship—it is an act of survival and resistance.

Lady Phyll is a British political activist known for her work for racial, gender and LGBT+ equality. She is Co-Founder and Chief Executive of UK Black Pride and former executive director of Kaleidoscope Trust.

Why now? In a recent interview for the Harvard-Cambridge Scholarship, an interviewer asked, “Why should I, as a ‘White guy,’ care about colonialism?” The backlash I study is not abstract—it’s personal. At that moment, I felt small. But the truth is: we all should. Because (de)colonialism isn’t just history—it’s structure. It’s the lingering laws, the inherited prejudices, and the institutions that continue to define who deserves dignity. You cannot look at countries like Trinidad and Tobago, which decriminalized buggery laws in 2018 only to recriminalize them in 2025 and tell me this work doesn’t matter. However, what if the decolonial process was incomplete, as the Caribbean’s legal and jurisdictional right to constitutionality is still in the hands of the British Government and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, restricting their fundamental rights and freedom? This journey has forced me to confront the incompleteness of the decolonization process in the Anglo-Caribbean. Despite achieving formal independence more than half a century ago, many of our legal and institutional frameworks remain tethered to colonial foundations. Colonial courts still pass down judgments. Colonial laws like the buggery statute endure. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London remains the final appellate court for several Caribbean nations. These structures are more than legal relics; they shape how we view ourselves, how we govern, and whom we exclude.

I believe the Caribbean deserves a future in which no one must choose between being free and being home. Going to archives, whether in Kingston, Barbados, or Britain, scattered across former colonial capitals, I am struck by how LGBTQ+ Caribbean lives flicker in and out of view. They are invisible in official documents and their experiences silenced, yet hyper-visible by the law and the public’s ocular scrutiny. The archive, like the region itself, is a place shaped by both erasure and resilience.  Working in these archives has taught me that recovering these stories is not just about documenting the past, but also about imagining a freer future. When will the Anglo-Caribbean truly be free? Perhaps when we begin to see freedom not only as legal independence, but as the right to be fully known and fully human, at home.