For the second year, Pride celebrations in Guyana will be held virtually with the Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD) holding a one-week online festival.
The 592 Virtual Pride 2021, which is being held under the theme #LiveOutProud, will begin on Monday June 7, coinciding with SASOD Guyana’s 18th anniversary, and will run until June 13.
“LGBTQ+ persons and allies alike can look forward to the Live Launch on June 7, the Pride Yoga session on June 8, the Queer Film Night on June 9, the Queer Quiz Night on June 10, Pride Games Night on June 11, Caribbean Inferno Pride Party on June 12 and a final Pride Inter-Faith Forum on June 13,” the association explained in a press statement.
Like last year, the celebrations are being held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking with Stabroek News, SASOD’s Managing Director Joel Simpson explained that this will be the sixteenth celebration of pride in Guyana.
He said the 2005 staging of the organisation’s first film festival, “Painting the Spectrum – A Celebration of Love,” was the first public celebration as it was the first time non-heterosexual relationships were presented to the Guyana public proudly rather than with shame or social stigma.
“It was in October 2005 but the next year 2006 we moved it to June to coincide with international pride month,” Simpson explained, before adding that the film festival has been held every year since until 2017, when pride celebrations were extended during the first every “Guyana Pride Festival”.
The festival was notable for the involvement of several leaders in the Christian community, who decried discriminatory laws against the LGBT community.
It was launched via an Inter-Faith service at the Catholic Life Centre on Brickdam, which was attended by religious persons, leaders of the faith-based organisations and LGBT persons.
Head of the Roman Catholic Diocese in Guyana Bishop Francis Alleyne, who co-hosted the service with SASOD, had said then that the issue of LGBT rights was a sensitive one.
“This topic is a volatile one. There is still a lot of fear and insufficient listening to expect an objective response from people,” Bishop Alleyne was quoted as saying in a SASOD statement.
The Guyana Presbyterian Church’s representative at that service was Reverend Patricia Sheerattan-Bisnauth, who observed that Guyana was still a far way from achieving that oneness that we long for, where we respect each other and strive to uphold each other’s dignity.
Buoyed by the success of the festival and the support received, SASOD and its partners subsequently started to plan the first ever pride parade in November 2017.
The parade, the first in the English-speaking Caribbean, was held on June 2, 2018 and received as much approbation as support.
The celebration was incident-free, with numerous supporters cheering for the participants along the route which stretched from Parade Ground to Square of the Revolution.
Those participants who spoke with Stabroek News said they were happy to be in public without facing attack.
The parade, they said, was a success because “nobody ain’t pelt no bottles or come out and try to do us something.”
Only a day earlier the Georgetown Ministers’ Fellowship (GMF) had described the parade as a blemish on the social fabric of the republic and a sad day for Guyana.
“The approval of the parade is wrong… it allows an expression of a sexuality in violation of the law,” Minister of the Gospel Marlon Hestick proclaimed.
When reminded that members of the LGBT community have sought only to enjoy basic human rights without discrimination, GMF representative Valerie Leung argued that “before we speak of rights, we must speak about what is right.”
“You can’t have a right to do what is wrong,” she repeatedly stressed before equating consensual homosexual acts with consensual incest and declaring them both perverse.
Pastor Loris Heywood further argued that there is no discrimination against homosexuals in the Guyanese workforce. “In fact,” he declared, “they sometimes get jobs easier than straight persons.”
Simpson disagreed with this position.
In fact he told Stabroek News on Friday that SASOD is still working to have “sexual orientation”, “Gender identity” and “gender expression” added to the Prevention of Discrimination Act 1997.
The Acts provides for the elimination of discrimination in employment, training, recruitment and membership of professional bodies and the promotion or equal remuneration to men and women in employment. Currently it prohibits discrimination in a place of employment based on: race, sex, religion, colour, ethnicity, nationality, social origin, economic status, political opinion, disability, family responsibilities, pregnancy, marital status or age. It does not address sexuality or gender.
Simpson noted that following work with two consultants paid by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), SASOD had presented the former Attorney General Basil Williams a draft bill which addressed their concerns. The bill was presented to the AG in 2019 and SASOD has been poised to meet with Parliamentary Committee on the matter the same week a No Confidence Motion was passed.
“We were asked to postpone those meetings so Parliament Office could focus on the No Confidence Motion. The motion was passed and the rest is history,” he lamented.
Simpson noted that since the new government assumed office, SASOD has engaged with several ministers but there has been no movement on amending any law.
