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The music of One Love became notorious for homophobic hate. But a new generation of reggae artists is turning the tide.
Jamaican men pride themselves on machismo, but they tend to get all shy and giggly when they come across Etana.
"Etana is the strong one," one man tells us excitedly as she greets fans on a palm-fringed beach.
"I'm telling people I met Etana," another says, texting furiously.
The demure and constantly smiling mother of two is one of the rising stars of reggae, spreading a message of love and acceptance while challenging some of the anti-gay sentiments expressed by an earlier generation of singers.
"Anything that is positive and hopeful, I'll be a part of it," she says.
"Anything that creates divide and separation, I'm not a part of it."
From love to hate
Reggae came out the slums of Jamaica in the 1960s and within a decade reached a global audience.
It was widely seen as a soundtrack of social justice and its greatest anthem was One Love — the smash hit of Bob Marley that called on humanity to, "get together and feel all right".
But in the 1990s, a darker side of the island's culture came to the fore, particularly from a louder, more aggressive sub-genre of reggae called dancehall.
Stars like Buju Banton and Beenie Man performed and popularised songs that were blatantly homophobic.
Notorious lyrics in the Jamaican patois included:
Boom bye-bye
Inna batty bwoy head
Rude bwoy no promote no nasty man
Dem haffi dead
Translated, that means: "Boom, bye-bye, in a faggot's head, the tough young guys don't accept fags, they have to die."
They were a small minority but they tainted the industry.
LGBT rights groups began an international boycott of "murder music". Some of Jamaica's biggest stars were banned from touring the United States.
In 2006, Time magazine asked if the island was "the most homophobic nation on Earth". Jamaica's proudest cultural export had become associated with something shameful.
Today, reggae artists still suffer from the stigma of that period. US promoters often ask them to submit song lyrics for approval before sponsoring their visits.
"I've had one show cancelled because another artist was on it and he wasn't allowed to play," Tanya Stephens, a close friend and collaborator of Etana, said.
"I've had to reshape the way I book, I've had to refuse shows with certain artists. It made me boycott certain artists, some of whom have good messages too.
"A part of the message is bad, a big part is good and you lose everything. How are you going to teach them if you cut them off?
"So, this conversation needed to grow and I wanted to be a part of the growth of it."
Stephens and Etana are at the forefront of a push to turn the image of reggae around. We caught up with them in a crowded studio in Montego Bay where Etana was recording Stephens' new song, Queen of the Concrete Jungle.
"The people who spread homophobic messages don't represent all of Jamaica," Stephens said.
"They don't represent half of Jamaica. We've never been that bad."
One of her most popular songs, Do You Still Care? was a direct call for tolerance, with the refrain: "Why can't you accept me as I am?"
Etana believes they're taking reggae back to its roots.
"If you look at Bob Marley festivals, it was everyone. Black, white, gay, straight," she says.
"The only thing that I can say that I've done is to openly say that every man has a right to his own destiny, and to openly say that I have no objection with somebody's choice of how they want to live their lives."
But that can still be a controversial message in parts of the Jamaican community, where a heady mix of aggressive male sexuality and strict religious conservatism has been a dangerous recipe for intolerance.
Strong, proud and unashamedly sexual
Emancipation Park in the capital Kingston commemorates the end of slavery as well as Jamaica's independence from Britain in 1962.
The most striking feature is a giant statue of a naked man and woman at the main entrance.
It's a reflection of how many Jamaicans see themselves — strong, proud and unashamedly sexual. Within that pride is a deep certainty real men are heterosexual.
While Jamaica threw off colonial rule it retained the British prohibition on sodomy. Even today, it's punishable by 10 years in prison with hard labour. Any gay man reporting a hate crime to police risks finding himself arrested.
"The law really hangs over our heads just as a big shadow," gay activist Dane Lewis says.
"As one colleague framed it, it makes us all un-apprehended criminals."
Mr Lewis heads the LGBT rights group J-FLAG but even he struggled with coming out publicly. He only started using his real name in media interviews in 2013.
For five years he avoided going on television and told radio and newspaper reporters he was Jason McFarlane.
He says relations with police have improved but his office is still unmarked and doors remain locked at all times.
"We do have a security system just in case — a panic system — if we need to call and they're just about two minutes' away for them to respond," he says.
"There's no sign at the gate, just because we don't know."
One day, Mr Lewis hopes to be able to campaign for issues like same-sex marriage but says "that's light years away".
"We just have some fundamental issues, just about simple enjoyment of life," he says.
"Freedom to be who we are, when you think of the impact of bullying in schools, and the numbers of people who are constantly calling us being displaced from homes and communities because either their family members or community members have an issue with their sexual orientation and/or their gender expression. It really is cause for concern."
He says the experience of gay men varies enormously. Middle-class men from well-off families are often fully accepted by their families.
Even in the tough ghettoes like Trench Town where Bob Marley grew up, people will look after their gay neighbours as they would protect any of their own community.
But you can still hear a casual contempt for gay men in the streets and markets. Boys tease each other with derogatory names "fish", "faggot", "batty boy" and "batty man".
And there have been shocking cases of vigilante violence, with crowds turning on overtly gay strangers. One TV news report showed hundreds besieging a store where a man had taken refuge after being spotted putting on lipstick.
Life is hardest for people on society's fringe. Shaquille Abi Abi is a 19-year-old transvestite who lives on the streets after being thrown out of the family home.
"It is not One Love in Jamaica. Jamaican people are homophobic and that won't change," he says.
Obama 'going against what God says'
For many Jamaicans, the church is a place of refuge and reassurance from poverty and street crime. As well as having the world's sixth highest murder rate, the island boasts the highest per capita number of churches.
But evangelical and Pentecostal churches, the fastest growing in Jamaica, are a cold refuge for the LGBT community.
Pastor Randolph Samuels of the Equator Faith Mission Church makes no apologies for railing against gays and lesbians in his sermons.
"Homosexuality is wrong and the Bible condemns it," he says.
"God created Adam and Eve [to] multiply, be fruitful. Two males cannot have children. It is wrong and there is no doubt about it.
"But we don't condemn the person, we condemn the act of being a homosexual. God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of these moral things."
Like many churchmen, he was outraged when former US president Barack Obama met LGBT activists during a visit to Jamaica in April 2015.
"I think he is really going against what God says and what the scripture says pertaining to homosexuality."
While he acknowledges there have been violent attacks on gays, he says much of the violence has been perpetrated by homosexuals themselves.
"Most of time they are the ones causing the problem. They sometimes get jealous even more than women. They get jealous over each other, they kill each other," he says.
Stephens blames Christian leaders like Pastor Samuels for encouraging homophobia.
"The message coming from the church has taught them to speak and act like this. It's unfair that dancehall suffered and reggae suffered and not the church. Because that's where it started from," she says.
"And actually, if we really want to get rid of that kind of thinking we have to place the blame where it belongs and that's on the church."
'Rastafari is love, togetherness, oneness'
At first glance, Jamaica's second-biggest religion, Rastafari, followed by nearly one in 10 people, seems far more tolerant.
Many of its followers live in alternative communities in the forest and use marijuana in religious ceremonies. Bob Marley was a convert to Rastafari, and its ceremonial beat — the Nyabinghi — is the root of reggae's unmistakable rhythm.
Etana subscribes to many of its core teachings.
"Rastafari is love, togetherness, oneness, unity, unconditional love, fighting for the rights of the people, for the poor, the sick, the elderly, the needy, that's what Rasta is about — loving and caring and sharing," she says.
But strict followers of Rastafari, who believe Jesus was a black African and see themselves as the Bible's original Christian order, are no less disapproving of gays than Christian evangelists.
Robert Williams, a prominent deacon also known as Joseph, Birdeye and Scribes, told Foreign Correspondent men could only partner with women.
"In the beginning, the Bible place Adam and Eve and it say, 'So was in the beginning so shall it be in the end'," he says.
"And if you notice, in the end of the coronation of the king you see the king and his queen on his right hand. So, there is no man-to-man, no woman-to-woman, [only] king and queen."
'Hell, no, I want to live'
But for all the problems, LGBT people face, many say things are improving fast.
Sanjay Ramanand, an up-and-coming musician and TV personality, believes technology is changing attitudes among young Jamaicans.
"Once upon a time in Jamaica, you could never see a person come forward and say that they're gay. I mean, like that would never happen, so there was nothing to connect. You didn't even think this person was human," he says.
"We're exposed to things now, you can go on YouTube and you can see a gay person talking and you can even identify with some things that they are saying.
"You have more and more people that's been feeling more comfortable and coming out. The more that happens the more people realise that, 'Hey, they are normal'."
The internet has also forced artists who sang anti-gay lyrics to clean up their acts at home as well as abroad.
"One of the things is that with the age of the internet now, what is local and what is global become one seamless present," retired professor of reggae Carolyn Cooper says.
"So, you can't be in Jamaica and say I'm singing anti-homosexuality songs, but when I go abroad I will not. They either have to say, 'I'm going to take this hard-line fundamentalist Christian position,' or 'Hell, no. I want to live. I want to eat, so I'm going to forget about that'."
Reggae is never just background noise here. The messages of songs resonate. Partly because of Jamaica's strong oral tradition. But it also reflects the continuing economic struggle in the ghettoes where reggae began.
Male reggae artists can become role models — good or bad — for children growing up in poverty with single mothers. And almost everyone trusts the word of artists over their politicians.
"It is a big part of Jamaican culture," Stephens says.
"Reggae is the primary influence of everything."
And while reggae was once part of the problem, it's now at the forefront of the solution.
"We're growing more as a people. We're noticing things that are wrong and we're trying to right them. It's a struggle and it's a climb but the fact that we're actually getting up to climb is hopeful," Stephens says.
Mr Lewis agrees: "The reason we show up at work every day is because we're optimistic. We know that social change takes time and we know we're in it for the long haul."
Watch Foreign Correspondent's One Love on ABC iview and YouTube.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, music, dance-music, gays-and-lesbians, community-and-society, jamaica
First posted