The Unapologaytic Podcast Jason Jones I took my government to court — and won!

there are very few people that come to activism through inspiration they usually come from desperation when you had the 1988 section 28 past desperation kicked in and then activism kicked in storm was formed blah blah blah inspired activism is when you do it without the pushback without something sticking in your back without somebody pulling a gun to your head inspired activism is acting before it happens it's looking at the world around you and saying what can I do to make this a better place

for me and my community that's inspired and we need more inspired activists [Music] thank you hi everyone welcome to the Unapologetic podcast my name is Pierre and I'm your host and the founder of the ethical Gabe brand an Apple gate today I'm talking to Jason Jones an activist and human rights Defender originally from Trinidad and Tobago who has lived and worked in Britain for over 30 years so welcome Jason thank you thank you glad to be here thank you for talking to me I was going to read your

bio but then there's too much to read and I think it is better if you just got little by little sure but the main thing really and the main reason I knew was because you took the Trinidad and Tobago government yes I find that really evolving so well done and so what are you doing yeah at the word suing for the layperson that's close enough it's a civil matter it's a constitutional challenge so the constitution of Trinidad and Tobago the sexual offenses act has contained in the two sections that

criminalize adult consensual same-sex intimacy one is section 13 the bug react and the bug react is originally from our British colonial past it is based upon the British colonial buggery laws which were removed from England Wales in 1967 but when we became independent in 1962 We inherited all of the old British colonial era laws so that remained on our books when we became independent from Britain in 1962. on top of that our parliamentarians thought it was not enough to criminalize gay men the

y in 1986 created another piece of legislation called the serious indecency act section 16 of the sexual offenses act which criminalizes acts of lesbianism Between Women the buggery act carried with it a penalty of up to 25 years in prison and the serious indecency acts carried a penalty of up to five years imprisonment for me as an activist I've been working around LGBT activism for 35 years now and I realized after two decades that things were not shifting in Trinidad and in The Wider Caribbea

n things were not moving so you saw things like marriage equality happening in the United States you saw marriage equality happening in the United Kingdom new laws being passed around the world to to protect and support lgbtq plus people and in the Caribbean absolutely zero and Not only was it absolute zero there was actually a growth of homophobic sentiment being fed by American evangelicals the American evangelicals have been working tirelessly and spending literally hundreds of millions of US

dollars to spread homophobia across the Caribbean South America and the African continent so we saw in the Caribbean with the rise of evangelism and mainly black communities we saw alongside of it this rise in homophobic sentiment so I live in the UK I have dual citizenship my mother was a white British woman and my father is a black train begonian and even though I was born and grew up in Trinidad I had to leave there at the age of 21 to try and find a life that was open to me as a queer man a

nd being half English that gave me a passport and the ability to move here easily which I did in 1985 in 1987 Margaret Thatcher and the conservative government in power cast what is called section 28 section 28 was a law that prohibited the promotion of homosexuality and when that was presented in Parliament in 1987 many of us started marching against it and I was very active in the section 28 marches that was a really important moment for galvanizing the LGBT community in a way that we had neve

r seen since Stonewall riots in New York 20 years before and in those marches I discovered my voice as an activist and the fact that you can make a change by being active and getting out in the street and doing things to change how you live your lives this is what really led me to activism leaving Trinidad and Tobago to escape this virulent homophobia to then coming to a safe space and having the carpet ripped out in section 28. so that really was the start of my activism what gave you the coura

ge to take action I've been I was very active with the founding of the Commonwealth equality Network which is an umbrella organization that is the first ever in history LGBT organization to get Commonwealth accreditation out of the nearly 70 countries that still criminalize LGBT people around the world over 50 of them are former colonies of Britain and these are British colonial laws so Britain has and the Commonwealth are unique in the way that laws have been created to persecute LGBT people so

we founded this organization with Commonwealth equality Network to form an umbrella group to pull all the LGBT organizations that work in the Commonwealth together and try and fight using the Commonwealth mechanism so in 2015 I earned seven activists from around the Commonwealth went to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Malta and we delivered two LGBT specific discussions at the people's Forum during the chagam of 2015. of course this was quite historic first time in history it ev

er happened and I was I have to say I came away from the week there in Malta very disappointed I was on the plane going back to London and I just thought what the hell was that all for they communicate that comes out of chagam every two years that childhood has held usually says something about human rights and about how and Commonwealth is going to move forward in terms of dealing with human rights and they completely left out LGBT and to date the Commonwealth and the trogum has never mentioned

LGBT rights so I came away from it very disgruntled and thank you that was a waste of a week in Malta very beautiful but I was there to work and I got off the plane in Gatwick and I said to myself all right this type of activism doesn't work our politicians are too lazy and too homophobic and they're not willing to do this work so the only way forward for me at that point that I could see was to take them to court at that point Belize had a case pending in their High code for decriminalization

and I met Caleb Roscoe who was a litigant in that case in Belize and I said I got off to play in a gap where can I call up an organization called the human dignity trust whose executive director Jonathan Cooper I knew very well I said jono I want to take should I to court and he said great come and see me on Monday morning and we met and for the next four months we worked together developing this concept of how we would take the government of Trinidad and Tobago to court and challenge these laws

in a court of law we did about four months of work and then I got a very odd phone call from Jonathan saying that HDT had dropping my case and that I was no longer allowed to say that I was Affiliated to them no reason was given of course I was hugely disappointed especially after putting in so much work on this and making the decision the very difficult decision to be the litigant in this matter as you can imagine this was literally putting me in the crosshairs of every religious Nutter and th

e vast majority of the population in the Caribbean are rabidly homophobic so this was literally cutting my head off for gay rights and I then decided okay I'm gonna go alone and that's when I started speaking knocking on doors trying to find lawyers to do this work for me pro bono because it's quite expensive work my case so far has cost close to three quarters of a million pounds all of that I have raised myself it's all pro bono worked at myself and my lawyers have done for this case I think w

hat was really important with my case was the fact that I was going alone so even though HGT me over and dropped my case it actually worked out in my favor because now I could stand up and say that I am doing this on my own I'm not the mouthpiece of a white organization I'm not the mouthpiece of gay people in the Western World this was me as a mixed race Caribbean man doing this on my own that power and the fact that I live in Europe and I was able to grab the resources here resources that are i

mpossible to access in the Caribbean so having a foot in both places is really what allowed me to do this work I could not have done this if I was in Trinidad there were no lawyers who would pick up a case like this and also it's very expensive work the fact that I have a put in both places is the fact that I'm biracial the fact that I'm bi-national these are all important factors in my ability to be able to do this work so in fact as scary as it is it really was a fact of I was the only person

capable to do this job and I'm very proud that I am that person and I think most of my life I'm coming up on 60 in a year's time I think much of my life has really led up to this moment because you know doing this work is not just about understanding the law and putting together a legal team and filing a case in court it's about the media coverage you have to be media Savvy you have to know how to deal with the community you have to know how to deal with the lawyers you have to know how to deal

with money you have to know how to deal with all these different elements that come into it I think the fact that I have I am multi-disciplined is has also been very useful in My Success I think everybody will tell you one of the most powerful things that came out of my case is the fact that when I won in 2018 this was the first ever of a case in Trinidad and Tobago's history as a democracy that a single citizen was able to change the Constitution so this is a huge step forward democratically an

d what was really interesting and a lot of it had to do with my media engagements and how I spoke to the nation through media channels was getting that point across that this was not about gay rights this was about the right of the citizen and the right of the citizen is what is key in these kinds of cases you have to separate the fact that it's about LGBT rights and make sure that our fellow citizens understand it's about your rights I had people come up to me and say oi I'm very impressed with

what you did how do I decriminalize marijuana they were able to take what I've achieved and now use it for their own purposes and this is where I think LGBT rights has been going wrong for the last two decades LGBT rights in the global North has been dominated by white cisgender tertiary educated middle class gays and lesbians so their advocacy has all been focused on heteronormative policies and assimilation tactics so looking at trying to make it look like we are one of you no we are not we a

re queer people we are different and we must celebrate our differences you know when your advocacy is constantly pursuing a line of trying to be similar to heterosexuals they're not going to buy it because they know you're different so why are we trying to pursue that Vision especially with a lot of the heteronormative institutions are collapsing things like marriage is collapsing in on itself heterosexuals are looking for something else as well these are the areas that we as queer people should

be creating new ways forward new ideas about gender new ideas about relationships new ideas about family units that's what we should be pursuing not trying to follow things that actually don't work for heterosexuals and I really like the idea of celebrating differences and also that's not what you said but that's what I hear that there is an almost educational aspect in what you're doing in so far as it's okay to be different and making space for differences doesn't take anything away from you

exactly and when you share the journey with people because I'm very open about my life and I'm very open with the media and when you share all of this with the general population that takes away the sting of it it's all he's not doing anything behind our backs there's no gay agenda he just wants what we want and when you speak that truth to power it's much easier for people to understand what it is you're trying to achieve and they know that there's no wizard behind the curtain who's pulling the

strings they know that it's just me wanting the same things that they want wanting to get married wanting to have a partner wanting to have kids I don't want anything well we as queer people don't want anything that straight people have already we just want the same thing and it's really important that our leadership and the voices that are speaking on behalf of our community speak in that voice and in that tone this idea of combatativeness has gotten us nowhere when you look at stonewall's adv

ertising oh some people are okay get over it that's such terrible language to use with your fellow people in society you don't tell somebody get over it that's not something to get over so we have to look at how we pursue activism we have to look at who are our storytellers because the vast majority of our storytellers are white we have to look at how we are going to be strategic about these things and then we also have to be very clear about what work needs to happen within our own Community th

ings like transphobia things like racism ableism these are all issues within the queer community that we need to address how can we be asking for equality from straight people when we don't have it within our community as a black man the kind of racism that you encounter within the queer Community to be fair I don't really experience that much racism it doesn't mean it doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist all I'm saying is I don't experience much and that's something you've mentioned before ab

out light-skinned privilege yes it's only for the last few years that I feel like I've awakened and I really noticed how people here treat me like a Frenchman who happens to be black yes rather than a black man yes and that makes a huge difference huge difference and you go to places like Jay why all the hip happening places here in in London security guards following black men around the room you go on grinder and we're still seeing these messages I'm not into blacks I'm not into fats I'm not i

nto fence it's just like who the are these people and why are we not addressing this as a community we're supposed to be unified against a common force and and trying to achieve common goals but we're not that is really important work that needs to happen now and I'm hopeful that with the younger generation who are not into that very old idea of who has the power and who has control there's a there's been a huge shift in younger queer people which I'm loving I'm really loving it you're quite act

ive with the next generation of activists yes I am uh it's one of my legacy projects because I think I grew up during the heads pandemic in Trinidad we were hit very bad by HIV AIDS between 1982 and 1992 Trinidad had the second highest mortality rate from HIV AIDS in the world second only to New York City so I lost dozens and dozens of people and of course I'm very lucky to be alive so I know what it was like to grow up with queer men who were mentors to me I also know that we have now skipped a

generation we lost a generation of gay men I feel it's really important for me to do that work of filling that Gap in terms of generate intergenerational work I just wanted to go back a little bit to I'm really curious about the moment the penny dropped so to speak and you realize oh my God I'm gonna take my government to go and when you realize the enormity of the task how did you feel that's an interesting story the night before I was going to put the file into the high court to hand it to th

e high court to say okay this is what I'm gonna do that evening I was staying by my friend Jacqueline's house sleeping on her couch and I took out an ad on Facebook to say oh this is what I'm gonna do about a challenging the queer laws the anti-gay legislation and within two hours I had two dozen death threats and properly serious death threats not all abundant that kind of this was if I see you in the street I'm going to do something to you and I said to Jacqueline I said Jacqueline this is not

right and she said people in China I like to blue Ultra and they like to throw hot air don't take it on but I felt something was up about the language it was too specific for the threats and a security guy came over and he had a look at it and he said we need to get you out of here right now and I moved out of Jacqueline within an hour and spent the rest of the time that I was in Trinidad hiding out at hotels moving every three nights because the threats were so overwhelming and some of them we

re in an Arabic script that even Arabic speakers could not decipher and Trinidad has the highest number I know it sounds weird that Trinidad has all these highest numbers Trinidad has the highest number of Isis recruits in the western world who went out to Syria so we have a very strong fundamentalist Muslim groups in Trinidad about three thousand to five thousand strong and these are rabid right-wing fundamentalist islamists these were people who were throwing gay men off the buildings in Syria

and then coming back home to Trinidad these threats were not a joke this was serious stuff and at that point I I had to make a decision of what to do next and I stayed on but as long as I could and as long as my mental health and my money held out because I didn't want to be seen as running away with my Tails between my sites but at the same time you do have to weigh up your personal safety and it's sad that's the level of threat that there is in Trinidad and Tobago but unfortunately it is in t

he last five years I've had three of my closest friends murdered in their own homes three gay men murdered in their own homes between 2015 and today there's all there's been over 20 gay men murdered we think there's a serial killer who's targeting gay men a police officer contacted me and said oh he thinks there's a serial killer and he went to his commanding officer and said there's a link these all look like the work of the same person and the commanding officer said if somebody is killing the

then in the Lord's work when you have the police being endemically homophobic there's no safety there's no safety so I have to be very careful I knew going ill that this was very risky work I was very a very big fan of David Kato Uganda and LGBT activist who was murdered in his home in 2013. we've seen the murders of many activists across the world across Eastern Europe being murdered this work carries risk real-time risks and you do have to make a decision of whether you're willing to live lik

e that or not I'm lucky in a sense I was excommunicated from my family many years previously I did the first ever public drag show at a theater space in 1992 and I ended up on the front page of all the gutter press homo rules concert in Big Red Letters on all the major newspapers and I was made homeless by my family I didn't have family connections that I needed to worry about I'm single so I didn't have a partner to worry about so I knew that I was only putting myself at risk and that kind of g

ave me the freedom to do this kind of risky work and so you mentioned the Ugandan activists are there any other raw models oh God yes of course I've been blessed one of the great blessings of my life have been my parents my mother Monica yush was a journalist here in the United Kingdom and she wrote for a magazine in the 50s called Mirabelle which was like a People magazine U.S magazine Hello magazine and she was their star reporter so she was friends with Elvis Presley she gave Cliff Richard hi

s first Big Break Paul Anka if you were a star and you were performing in London you were interviewed by my mother and my father Melvin tulfo he was the first black television announcer in the entire Global South so everything below New York City he was the first black man on television reading the news and on the night that we became independent in 1962 that night at midnight as a Union Jack was lowered and our flag was raised he announced for that so my father was literally the voice of a nati

on and read the news every night at 7 pm my father was one of the best known black men in the entire Caribbean so I grew up surrounded by powerful black people CLR James was a close friend of the family when Nina Simone came to Trinidad in 1984 I spent three weeks with Nina Simone I know drove around the island singing songs to each other so and playing Carnival together had been very blessed with having access direct access to very powerful people who black people who have really helped shape w

ho I am and especially who I am as an activist when you experienced all those death threats Moon came to your rescue who's coming now to your rescue nobody I always tell people this when you're a leader don't look to your left don't look to your right that's what leadership is everybody is behind you it's like that you have to be able to operate on yourself because this work is so extraordinary and there's so many twists and turns that you can't expect somebody to be along for the ride with you

I have people that I am close with a circle of people but in terms of getting up every day and getting on with the work and getting over the hurdles that's my job and you have to know that going into this that it's up to you and nobody's gonna ride up on a white horse to save you what advice would you give to somebody who would like to get involved in activism or maybe activism might scare some people at least get involved in CB ripes and lgbtq rights helping with transphobia homophobia all thes

e kind of things what advice would you give to these people the first thing is know your history read and when you get fed up of reading read some more our history is so rich and there's been so much that has gone on in the past that you need to know that because that's your sword moving forward I was at an event earlier on this week and somebody was telling me Oh it's so terrible these days I said no it ain't all this when JK Rowling and transfer it's nothing in comparison to what was going on

in the 50s 60s and 70s those periods was a nightmare that was a period when you had corrective rape of lesbians when you had gay men being beaten by police officers when you had the raids on Spaces I remember coming to London and having bars raided by police and being escorted out of Bars by police I remember in Trinidad being at a gay bar and a bunch of thugs being outside stoning the building and cowering in the corners not knowing what we were gonna do the history that was where the real war

was fought and the freedoms that we have today were fought by those people and you must learn who those people are Bayard Rustin find out who all these people are who did this work Marshall P Johnson Sylvia Rivera storm a find out who these people are these are the people that fought for us and we have so much Freedom now because of what they did thanks to them yep I don't know that's why as a brand I really make upon to as often as I can to reference those people because they did the work for u

s today hey you did they have your lifting you did the heavy duty yeah orders to party we need to get right when it started at the riots yes absolutely and also find somebody to Mentor you I'm doing a lot of mentorship now with young activists this is wonderful young gay man who's a firefighter and we ran into each other a pride event last year and he said I really want to do what you're doing and I said great and now we have a wonderful relationship mentoring each other and he's now developing

a whole program of activism for the fire service and it's just this is what needs to happen find one of us old farts and have a chat with us this is one of the other issues we have a terrible ageism problem within the LGBT community I had a friend who was on the dance floor at fire a couple years ago and some twinkle him get off the dance floor pops it's our time I just say no you you understand so because of people like him so we have to address the ageism within our community as well if you se

e Elders out go and talk to them going to hear their stories go and have tea with them mix and mingle with the ages because you're gonna learn something right find an awkward person going to speak with them right seek them out because when they die they take that history with them so you need to speak with them oral history is the most powerful tool in passing on these gifts so find all Queer people talk to them get their story and then you now have that power what do you think of the current tr

ansphobic climate I my impression is I mean I was a child in the 80s but I still remember the way gay men were great and it looks like he's very similar tactics that are used the tactics never change so I'm not concerned about it at all and what I would say is this I think within our own Community we need to do the work because there's terrible transphobia within our own Community the LGB alliances transphobic LGB Alliance is trying to remove tea from the LGB community two of their founding memb

ers are two white gay men who were founders of Stonewall and when Star War was founded in 1988 they did not include trans people in their remit it wasn't until 2014 that Stonewall included trans people in their policy now if you had the largest LGBT organization then Britain ignoring trans people for most of its history until 2014 you have helped plant the seeds of transphobia within our own Community two of your Founders have gone on to head a transphobic organization that's trying to destroy a

nd separate our community right we need to call this out and I don't hear anybody calling it out within our community we are major cleanup within our own ranks we need to pull out the transforms and get them the out of our community that's where it needs to start because what they're trying to do is divide and conquer so if they get rid of the T then they will come for the rest of us and the gay and lesbian people who are transphobic need to learn this lesson they have to the trans but they're c

oming for you next don't fool yourself they are coming for you after they've gotten the trans people over so learn this lesson it's divide and conquer and that's what the right-wing are trying to do with us and they've infiltrated using internalized transforms within the queer community on that note are there any reasons to be optimistic about the Future Part of course of course my case alone wink wink I was told that my case would fail and so LGBT organizations across the world did not support

my case they were all advised by lawyers at HDT including the executive director Taya Braun that my case would fail and of course I won and not only did I win but I won on the broadest Spectrum of a judgment that there has ever been in the history of decriminalization and that judgment in my case has now been used to decriminalize India since it's Nevis Antigua Barbados when my case has heard of the privy Council which is our Supreme Court in the next three to five years that judgment will help

decriminalize 11 countries across two continents so yes there's a lot to be happy about what we must not be complacent about is after decriminalization because if you look at what happened in the United Kingdom they decriminalized in 1967 and for 30 years there were no laws passed to support LGBT equality so they throw you a bone of decrim but then nothing happens so the word can must start immediately after you have a court case how do you explain the fact that for 30 years nothing happened two

things happened after decriminalization firstly it was only partial decriminalization so it was only England and Wales and it was only between consenting adults over 21 and it could only be two men in private so if it was three men you've broken the law if it was in public you've broken a law if it was under 21 even if you're of equal age let's say two 16 year olds you've broken a law and the police clamped down immediately after decriminalization 1977 and the incidences of arrest of gay men qu

adrupled immediately after decriminalization so that kind of stifled any idea of there being Freedom moving forward and then of course I think LGBT activism has always been very dodgy because there are very few people who I would say this in my interviews there are very few people that come to activism through inspiration they usually come from desperation when you had the 1988 section 28 past desperation kicked in and then activism kicked in stone was formed blah blah blah blah inspired activis

m is when you do it without the pushback without something sticking in your back without somebody pulling a gun to your head so for example my activism came out of nowhere it was just like why is this guy doing this these laws are not used punitively against us that's not the point the point is the laws exist and because the laws exist it allows people to be bigoted in other areas so a landlord to say oh I'm not gonna let two queer people because blah blah blah that law exists or the police offi

cer will say I don't care if you've been beaten in the street by a bunch of thugs it's illegal to be gay you have to be inspired in your activism and I really want to press that into people's heads Be Inspired don't wait until something happens to you to then react that's desperate activism inspired activism is acting before it happens it's looking at the world around you and saying what can I do to make this a better place for me and my community that's inspired and we need more inspired activi

sts if you look at Peter Tacho he's a desperate activist he's always reacting to something and it's always angry and it's always look at me what a terrible victim I am no that is not the way forward we have to be more inspired and we have to be more dignified in our activism I launched in the brand to talk about shape so when you were talking about desperation and stuff like that I couldn't help but thinking about the potential link between the shame of being growing a guest the shame stops the

inspiration yeah because if you have internalized shame and internalized homophobia that prevents you of dreaming or because then you don't feel that you deserve you don't deserve something positive yeah exactly and I think one of the things one of the gifts that people knowing and speaking with people like Cielo James and gosh so many real mighty sparrow calypsonians Calypso Rose Queen of the Calypso World Calypso roses are proud lesbian woman knowing and speaking with people like them it reall

y was the kind of switch that went off in my head that said oh you know what I can be powerfully a person of color and I could be powerfully a queer person I could see the two things happening in the same space even though their fight was civil rights and about black power for me it was very easy for the switch to go off in my head that wait a minute if I can be powerfully black I can be powerfully queer do you think personally the fact that you are both queer and personal do you think that give

s you a sort of advantage in your activism yeah for sure I think one of the benefits of all of the mixing up of my background is the fact that I have a great sense of empathy and I can see both sides of the coin I think you have to enough compassion for your enemies and empathy for your enemies in order to defeat them you have to understand where they're coming from especially when I believe you need to convince them because they're in power just like for the abolition of slavery it wasn't given

to us we had to convince people exactly exactly I was on the Queen's Jubilee parade last year I am absolutely anti-monarchy I'm totally a republican the sooner we can get rid of Monica the better but from the activism point of view when they invited me to be on that parade representing the LGBT community of Britain and this was being watched by half a billion people across the Commonwealth I knew aha here I am flying the pride flag at the Queen's Jubilee and I'm being watched by all the homopho

bic people across the Commonwealth that is activism that wasn't me supporting monarchy that was me being an activist in a space where I was invited lots of activism and this is what I'm trying to get to you inspired activism doesn't look the same to everybody inspired activism for that crowd on that day it was one of the most amazing things I really thought we had a 50-foot long pride flag progress pride flag right and there was about I think there was about 20 of us holding the flag walking alo

ng the Parade route and I really thought we were going to get booze and hisses because this was they've all loved the queen and love monarchy and love white Britain so I really thought this is gonna be a hard two and a half miles absolutely the opposite we were shared there were people in the crowd in tears hugging us because it was such a visceral moment of visibility in one of the highest ranking spaces of British history and yeah it was completely the opposite of what I expected and it just c

onfirmed why it was important to be in that space and to occupy that space as a queer person what what you just said reminded me of learning another language to speak to be understood by other people and really once again find a way to convince them yes I really like the idea of building bridges yes and the only way for us to accept each other is to understand each other for example I got married in Spain and at the time once again the right-wing parties were threatening to overturn gay marriage

I remember that in France before they introduced equal marriage there was some they were the equivalent of a civil partnership and they were saying that what turned out was that most straight people used civil Partnerships than gay people yes talk about a sign about the institution of marriage to begin with yes but anyway so people against gay marriage in France was saying there are more straight people who use it so why do you want to get married so I thought okay you know well I'm gonna get m

arried so that bums up the numbers yes but during the wedding my father said to me oh thank you so much for showing me that it's only a wedding what I got out about is see we just need to show that it's only a small difference I mean absolutely want the same thing absolutely and when you do the angry activism what are you left with after you win all you're left with is an angry person and an empty Victory we have to live together after these victories so to do Angry activism and to make enemies

of people that you then have to live cheap by jowl with makes no sense to me it really doesn't now let me tell you if they send the Army and they said we're going to round up all the gays of course I'm the first one with a rifle and I'll be in the trenches shooting their balls off but we're not at that stage so we have to design our activism so that it serves the purpose it's meant to do but it also serves the purpose beyond the victory what happens after the victory how do we live together afte

r the victory if you look at World War One what we did to the Germans after their defeating World War one was what precipitated world what so if you defeat your enemy in such a demoralizing way that attacks everything about who they are then you're actually compounding the problem and you're extending the problem so what's next or Jason chip well the government of Trinidad and Tobago have appealed my case at the high court which we all knew I knew going into this it would take 10 years of my lif

e because I knew that the government would appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court so I wanted the high court then I have the appeal court this October 6th of October I'm at the appeal court in Trinidad if you could put the link for my fundraising because I do this all on my own new organizations helped me not Stonewall nobody helps me and I have to pay all the out-of-pocket expenses so flying my lawyers down to Trinidad their hotel all the court costs my photocopying bill alone photocopier i

s 4 000 pounds just to photocopy so that everybody in the case gets a copy of the documents four thousand pounds so I have to raise all of that myself so I have a just giving campaign I'll post a link for well I have to raise 50 000 pounds for the appeal court because they've added on a lot of extra costs and of course because things have gone up since covid-19 airfares and hotel Etc so after the appeal court whoever loses there will then appeal to our Supreme Court which is the privy Council he

re in London and the privy Council that judgment has the possibility to decriminalize 11 countries across two continents so we're very hopeful it all looks very positive so that's going to be the big thing and then after that I hope to retire to a little beach bar and just like Lola I'll be sat in the corner singing show tunes faded feathers in the hair and serving margaritas playing the flag flying the flag yeah I'm very hopeful that I live to see a quiet retirement on a beach somewhere so wher

e can people find you I am Trini JJ on all the major social medias that's t-r-i-n-i-j-a-y-j-a-y on all the usual platforms and yeah drop by and say hi I love talking to people is there anything else you would like to share the thing that stood out for me with this interview was about community and emphasis on the unity of the community we have to do a lot more work on Unity when I see these pictures of the cute white boys on holiday at Glastonbury or Ibiza and they have no black friends I'm just

like Honeywell they have the token what or they have the token Hispanic they have the token Brazilian I am just like don't you know anybody else so it really important for us to start the community work Unity work if you see an older person at a bar go up and say hello if you see a trans woman sitting alone at the bar go and say hello to her if you see a black person a group of black people go across and say hi it's my little Fair as I leave this interview I'm going to meet a friend and so and

yeah if I see somebody on their own I walk up to them and I say hi I'm Jason how are you doing and it's dead easy to do and I tell you your world will change by taking that courage to go and meet new people and open up your circle stop letting your circle just be a mirror image of who you are and what your social background is what I'm saying is you may find that by being more diverse in your community that you find a greater sense of acceptance because it's one thing to be accepted by people wh

o know you and like you and come from the same background as you but it's something completely different to be liked by somebody who is completely not from your background yeah and not even light but just they don't mind they don't actively look at Twitter you know yeah exactly exactly we need to do that work more and yeah the one thing that came out from this conversation with me is that more Focus needs to happen on so watch your space uh you've triggered something in my head oh Watch Out Worl

d I it's actually going to involve you because with your business with the merchandise and t-shirts Etc I think that is a great way to open up the dialogue because if it's on your T-shirt someone speak to me I'm open to communication it leaves it open for people to come and talk to you yeah let's talk about that we are coming for you thanks again for talking to me though I've really enjoyed thank you very much good luck yes look out for the news they've promised me a judgment within three months

so we'll know by the end of the year if I've had another victory at the appeal court we are expecting the victory it's very hard for Trinidad judges to overturn our judges especially with a judgment that was used to decriminate India my judgment was cited twice in the Indian supreme court judgment to decriminalize 75 million Indian LGBT people so to overturn that would be yeah they will be the one going through the death threats oh yeah it would be very embarrassing for the Judiciary to overtur

n I quietly hopeful once again best of luck thank you so much thank you and all the best in this yes and thank you so much everybody for listening or watching please share comment and send some love share some love look after yourselves bye foreign