“Our own gayful rest”: A Postcolonial Archive

This article examines a privately published newsletter, The Jamaica Gaily News, in circulation from 1978 to 1984, as an archive of gay and lesbian community building initiated by the Gay Freedom Movement (GFM). Contending that recent efforts of organizations like the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG) to redress legal and social discrimination against sexual minorities continue the efforts of the GFM to create, in Benedict Andersen's famous words, an “imagined community,” I argue for a historical understanding of the print-mediated community generated by the Gaily News. This history is of relevance to Jamaican and other postcolonial sexuality based movements existing under threats of archaic colonial statutes criminalizing homosexuality. The article further argues that an understanding of sexual activism in Jamaica can serve as a supplement to transnational histories of sexuality which often dismiss postcolonial gay and lesbian activism as “undertheorized” and “politically immature.”