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Meet the LGBTQ Activist Fighting Jamaica’s Marriage Equality Ban

Maurice Tomlinson wants his home country to recognize his marriage to his husband, Canadian citizen Tom Decker.

Maurice Tomlinson never thought he would move back to Jamaica.

In January 2012, the 48-year-old activist began receiving death threats after he was outed on the front page of the Jamaica Observer after marrying Tom Decker, a Canadian national, in Toronto. A photo which accompanied the story showed Tomlinson and Decker smiling and holding hands as their marriage was signed into law. Although Jamaica’s constitution bans same-sex unions, marriage equality has been legal in Canada since 2005.

At the time, Tomlinson taught human rights law at the University of Technology, Jamaica, in Kingston. One of his students commented on the online version of the Observer story by listing Tomlinson’s class schedule and what kind of car he drove.

For two days, Tomlinson went into hiding while he waited for a plane out of the country. The day he left, Tomlinson had requested a police enjoy accompany him to the airport, but authorities never showed. A friend had to drive him instead, and Tomlinson spent the entire car ride looking over his shoulder, fearing the worst. On Decker’s first trip to Jamaica, Tomlinson recalls that the couple had to flee a public beach when a group of people shouted: “Here come the faggots—bullet, bullet.”

Courtesy of Maurice Tomlinson

Maurice Tomlinson (R) with his husband Tom Decker (L).

When he finally arrived at the airport, Tomlinson was not met with the hostile reception he feared. Instead, he ran into an ex-girlfriend who dumped him years earlier. She had read the article and wanted to know if the fact that she rejected him was the reason he married a man.

“You look back and laugh, but at the time, I’m literally running for my life and I’m scared shitless,” Tomlinson tells NewNowNext. “It was ridiculous.”

Tomlinson has spent seven years lobbying for LGBTQ rights in exile, but recently he has begun fighting Jamaica’s laws criminalizing same-sex marriage with the hope of returning to the island nation. His parents are in poor health, he says. His mother suffers from an enlarged heart and Parkinson’s disease, among other conditions, while his father has hypertension and diabetes. All of his siblings have left Jamaica, and there’s no one left to care for them.

According to Tomlinson, his hope is to spend six months of the year in Canada and six in Jamaica with his parents. The trouble is that under the law, his husband wouldn’t be able to join him, as the country does not grant citizenship rights to the married same-sex partners of Jamaican nationals. If Decker wanted to get a job, he would have to apply for a work permit, an expensive and lengthy process.

To ensure he and his husband aren’t separated, Tomlinson filed a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 2018 to review Jamaica’s same-sex marriage ban. The IACHR announced in July it would allow the case to move forward, giving Jamaica’s government three months to respond.

Although Jamaica is not one of the 20 countries over which the international human rights tribunal claims jurisdiction, Tomlinson hopes an advisory opinion from the IACHR will serve as a legal basis for further challenges to Section 18 (2) of the Constitution of Jamaica, which exclusively defines marriage “the voluntary union of one man and one woman.” He adds that the commission’s recommendations have “gotten Jamaica to change its laws in the past.”

“It will mean that those who thought we didn’t have a right [to marry] will have to contend with the fact that we do—and that Jamaica is acting in contravention of that right,” he explains.

The case is one of several legal challenges Tomlinson has filed in Jamaica in recent years. He has also challenged the country’s anti-gay laws criminalizing sodomy, which date back to British colonialism. Currently, any person convicted of engaging in same-sex intercourse faces up to 10 years of hard labor and is forced to register as a sex offender for the rest of their lives. Additionally, Tomlinson fought two television stations in Jamaica which refused to air an advertisement supportive of LGBTQ equality.

Tomlinson hopes these myriad appeals help improve the everyday lives of LGBTQ Jamaicans, who face extremely high rates of violence just for daring to be themselves. The same year he left Jamaica, the advocacy group J-FLAG reported at least 68 attacks on LGBTQ people in the country, including two murders.

Some of the more high profile cases include the 2017 killing of Dexter Pottinger (pictured in the tweet above), a gay fashion designer who was stabbed to death in his Kingston apartment as he screamed for help from neighbors who ignored his pleas. Dwayne Jones, a transgender teen, was murdered by a mob in 2013. She was dancing with a gay friend at a street festival when a member of her church spotted her and outed her to the crowd as trans.

“They shot, stabbed, ran over her with a car, and threw her body in the bushes,” Tomlinson says. “Then they went back to dance.”

The fear of violence forces many LGBTQ Jamaicans into the closet or into marriages of convenience. Before Tomlinson came out, he was married to his best friend from college for four years. “Picture it like Will & Grace,” he explains. The two thought if they prayed about it and engaged in regular intercouse that he would magically be cured of his homosexuality. But even after their son was born, it didn’t change that Tomlinson was living a lie.

Tomlinson recognizes that he’s one of the lucky ones, though. After he and his wife divorced, Tomlinson met Decker in 2009 at a conference of the international LGBTQ advocacy group ILGA. Now a chaplain in the Canadian army, Decker worked at the time as a liaison with Toronto Police Department training officers in LGBTQ sensitivity.

Courtesy of Maurice Tomlinson

Tomlinson (R) and Decker (L) at their wedding.

As Tomlinson discusses the couple’s meet-cute over the phone from their Ontario home, his husband advises him from the background to tell the “clean version.”

“I found him cute and I also found him smart,” Tomlinson says, diplomatically.

Although Tomlinson’s parents didn’t approve of the relationship at first, he says they’ve come around. Tomlinson and his father didn’t speak for many years after the Observer article was published, as his father claimed the attention brought “shame” on the family. But after persuading him to come visit them in Canada, Tomlinson’s father and husband got a chance to spend time together and found out they share a great deal in common. They’re both deeply religious men named “Tom,” for starters.

“Since then, my parents see us as a couple, as their son and son-in-law,” Tomlinson says, joking that their newfound support has come with its own set of heteronormative baggage. “Now when my father calls, one of the first things he asks me is ‘What have you cooked for your husband?’”

Tomlinson hopes he will get to repay his parents’ love and generosity by caring for them in their time of need. But for now, he is waiting to hear if Jamaica will break his family apart just to keep it together.

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