Antihomosexuality and Nationalist Critique in Late Colonial Jamaica: Revisiting the 1951 Police Enquiry

Abstract:This essay examines discourses of homosexuality in late colonial Jamaica through an analysis of the 1951 Police Enquiry, which leveraged accusations of homosexuality among Jamaica's foreign police officers as a key component of its investigative work. With information from Jamaican state records, news media, literature, and social science studies, the essay argues that the inquiry mobilized divergent discourses of homosexuality across the Atlantic to enact an anticolonial nationalist form of sexual regulation. The inquiry drew not only from Jamaican figurations of homosexuality as the preserve of wealthy white foreign men but also from the Wolfenden Committee proceedings that led to the decriminalization of homosexuality in England and from the "Lavender Scare" that purged homosexuals from federal government employment in the United States. Despite its failing to reform Jamaica's police force, the inquiry nevertheless foregrounds how sexual regulation operates through the interconnected workings of race, class, gender, and nation.