Dear Editor,
I cannot register enough how shocked I still feel about Dr Faith Harding’s death. I interviewed her on three occasions with over four hours of wise words and bytes from this learned woman. I reproduce some of what Dr Harding said during an interview – never published before – where she shared her thoughts and support for the LGBT community in Guyana and elsewhere.
Dr Faith Harding believed the issue was “totally misunderstood.” She said, “I think a lot of the principles are based on the thoughts that we’ve had for centuries, that are unrealistic and are supported by mistruths and misunderstanding.”
She recalled that many years ago while working at a health facility in New York, “I met what I thought was a man, and because of the way she dressed and the way she behaved, her whole persona; so she asked me something, and I said, ‘Yes, sir’, and she said, ‘I am not a man’, and I said I was sorry.” Dr Harding said that when she checked the person’s records, “she could have either been male or female, because she had both organs and also had the voice of a man; she could have chosen either direction, but she chose a woman, and that made me know something I could not understand because [of the way] I was brought up… in my experience, it was a degrading and demoralizing attitude that we had towards people that were different.”
The incident, she added, reminded her of an area in Watooka, Linden in the 1970s, where only males were allowed. “If you were Black, you had to be made to go into work with those people, and people were not allowed to go in and live in Watooka, because they were seen as different; nobody understood what those differences meant.”
She also mentioned the Rosa Parks story who, when arriving on a bus, could not sit, because she was Black. “If you were a woman [in the US southern states], as late as the 1960s and ’70s, you could not vote, and if you were Black, you couldn’t vote, because you weren’t seen as human.” Similarly, the LGBT community in Guyana, “is not different…They are God’s children – God made them all, we say. Who am I to reject; who am I to say that they are not human and that they don’t deserve human rights in our society. Who am I? Am I above God?”
Dr Harding stated that all LGBT people in Guyana have human rights just like those who do not belong to that community. “We have to respect them and help them to grow just as we have our children who may be different to them. They [LGBT] might be superior to us, like we found so many Black people superior to other races.”
She noted that there are many people in the LGBT community in Guyana, “who are smarter, brighter, kinder, and can give more to a nation than people outside of that community, so we had better begin to give respect to our sisters and our brothers and our children…we didn’t know; we didn’t put their genes together, God did it and let us work for him in providing the kind of services and respect for people in this community.”
The psychotherapist was optimistic that laws would be enacted in Guyana to protect the LGBT community and create a deeper atmosphere of tolerance and acceptance. “I think we will get there with enough education and understanding…and enough people who recognize and admit that they have children who are in this community unknown to them. The churches, if they could only recognize how many of their members are in this community and still serving the church and secretly operating in the community.”
She had seen many of them and knew how they hurt, “because they are living an untruth; they are saying in the church that they are not [LGBT] but they are, and so you have the suicides; you have the anger; you have the alcohol abuse or drug abuse; you have a lot of fear and children are having nightmares. More of our children are saddened by their feelings by the time they get to be 16; they confirm that they are and they are not guessing – they know!” And those children are unaccepted in their families, “and I think that eventually as we accept them; as we see that they are people too; as the government puts the correct laws and changes laws that recognize that the LGBT community deserves also human rights, I think that people will gradually come to terms with the differences as they came [to terms] with the differences of being Black; with the differences of being a woman… It took decades in the other areas of social injustice and civil rights; it took many deaths.”
She noted her regret as it related to the events that transpired some time ago in Georgetown, “So much vulgarity with the murders that took place, but it does happen also in people outside of the LGBT community… We are seeing murders every day, almost so often, there is so much domestic violence between people who refer to themselves as heterosexuals; murders, abuse and vulgarity; stealing, corruption – all those things that destroy a nation and its people, and we need to change it in all the communities… We need people to respect each other; to regard the laws of the nation and to be given preference for healing in the emotions, because people in the LGBT community are being so destroyed emotionally. We need to set up special programmes to help them to cope, just as we need [in the case of] other communities that are in distress. This community needs as much help as can be given to develop the persona to help, because the kind of degradation that I see being meted out to the LGBT community is painful to watch; they are human beings just as we are; they are Guyanese, and I would like to know that special programmes can help the healing to start and to educate people of our nation and people within that community.”
Dr Harding, who worked very closely with SASOD, stated that she appreciated their work. “I really do appreciate the persons who work in it and I do work along with them. I do a lot of counselling for many people in this community, to try to move them into acceptance and how to help their parents and relatives to accept them; how to live harmoniously in our society.”
May dear Dr Harding’s soul rest in peace.
I would have never guessed that that day would have been the last day I would see and talk to her.
Yours faithfully,
Leon Suseran
