The LGBT activism of Jason Jones

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.2.0105
• Pages: 105-127
• Published date: 22 December 2022
• Date: 22 December 2022
• Author: Jason Jones,Amar Wahab
• Subject Matter: Jason Jones,LGBTQ+ human rights,Trinidad and Tobago,United Kingdom,advocacy

Journal of Indentureship 2.2 December 2022

The LGBT activism

of Jason Jones

Jason Jones and Amar Wahab

Jason Jones is an LGBTQ+ human rights defender originally from

Trinidad and Tobago who has lived and worked in Britain for over

30 years.

Amar Wahab is professor of Gender and Sexuality in the School of

Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, Canada.

ABSTRACT

Scholar Amar Wahab, co-editor of the Journal of Indentureship and

Its Legacies, interviews LGBTQ+ human rights defender Jason Jones

about his advocacy spanning four decades in Trinidad and Tobago

and the UK. Jones shares his experiences about the intersections

of homophobia and racism to highlight the complexities around

LGBTQ+ human rights. He discusses his successful landmark legal

challenges against state-sponsored legal homophobia in both spaces.

KEYWORDS

Jason Jones, LGBTQ+ human rights, Trinidad and Tobago, United

Kingdom, advocacy

AW: I’ve followed your work for the last four or five years, so I

wanted to talk to you about that, but let me tell you a bit

more about how the interview is going to be situated. The

Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies focuses on the histo-

ries of indentureship, but also attempts to focus beyond

that, to think about how legacies of indentureship have

organized the current moment, not just in the Caribbean,

DOI:10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.2.0105

106 JASON JONES AND AMAR WAHAB

Journal of Indentureship 2.2 December 2022

but a more global picture of indentureship through its

diasporic anchorings and connections. We are focusing on

genders and sexualities, particularly queer sexualities, with

the goal of unsettling the current scholarship on inden-

ture, which reinforces a heteronormative lens. And so, we

are interested in conversations about LGBT activism more

broadly, as well as the connections of such activisms (in the

Caribbean and globally) with indentureship’s legacies.

This is how we would like to situate your own activist work

in relation to the journal.

Before I ask you about the 2018 legal case, would you be

willing to share a bit of background in terms of your own

work as an LGBT activist and your own ways of thinking,

the spaces that you’ve inhabited and how they have made

life and living possible and impossible in certain kinds of

ways.

JJ: I’m a child of independence, so I was born in 1964, two years

after our [Trinidad and Tobago] independence and, inter-

estingly, my father, Mervyn Telfer, was the TV announcer

that night in 1962 when we became independent. So, he

actually was the voice of independence. I grew up from a

very well-known background and my dad read the news

every night on the only TV station, so in many ways, my

father was better known than even the prime minister,

because he was in people’s homes every night at 7pm. He

trained Trevor McDonald, so he was the first black TV

announcer in the entire Global South, south of Miami.

There was nobody pre-1962 so I grew up very empowered

in my racial background, even though I’m mixed race and

my mother’s white British. I grew up very powerfully black

and very aware of black consciousness and black awareness,

especially in the 1960s when we had the rise of the civil

rights movement in the United States, which again was

fuelled by a lot of Trinbagonian people, you know Stokely