The Most Homophobic Place on Earth?

Brian wears sunglasses to hide his gray and lifeless left eye—damaged, he says, by kicks and blows with a board from Jamaican reggae star Buju Banton. Brian, 44, is gay, and Banton, 32, is an avowed homophobe whose song Boom Bye-Bye decrees that gays “haffi dead” (“have to die”). In June 2004, Brian claims, Banton and some toughs burst into his house near Banton’s Kingston recording studio and viciously beat him and five other men. After complaints from international human-rights groups, Banton was finally charged last fall, but in January a judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence. It was a bitter decision for Brian, who lost his landscaping business after the attack and is fearful of giving his last name. “I still go to church,” he says as he sips a Red Stripe beer. “Every Sunday I ask why this happened to me.”

Though familiar to Americans primarily as a laid-back beach destination, Jamaica is hardly idyllic. The country has the world’s highest murder rate. And its rampant violence against gays and lesbians has prompted human-rights groups to confer another ugly distinction: the most homophobic place on earth.

In the past two years, two of the island’s most prominent gay activists, Brian Williamson and Steve Harvey, have been murdered — and a crowd even celebrated over Williamson’s mutilated body. Perhaps most disturbing, many anti-gay assaults have been acts of mob violence. In 2004, a teen was almost killed when his father learned his son was gay and invited a group to lynch the boy at his school. Months later, witnesses say, police egged on another mob that stabbed and stoned a gay man to death in Montego Bay. And this year a Kingston man, Nokia Cowan, drowned after a crowd shouting “batty boy” (a Jamaican epithet for homosexual) chased him off a pier. “Jamaica is the worst any of us has ever seen,” says Rebecca Schleifer of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and author of a scathing report on the island’s anti-gay hostility.

Jamaica may be the worst offender, but much of the rest of the Caribbean also has a long history of intense homophobia. Islands like Barbados still criminalize homosexuality, and some seem to be following Jamaica’s more violent example. Last week two CBS News producers, both Americans, were beaten with tire irons by a gay-bashing mob while vacationing on St. Martin. One of the victims, Ryan Smith, was airbused to a Miami hospital, where he remains in intensive care with a fractured skull.

Gay-rights activists attribute the scourge of homophobia in Jamaica largely to the country’s increasingly thuggish reggae music scene. Few epitomize the melding of reggae and gangsta cultures more than Banton, who is one of the nation’s most popular dance-hall singers. Born Mark Myrie, he grew up the youngest of 15 children in Kingston’s Salt Lane — the sort of slum dominated by ultraconservative Christian churches and intensely anti-gay Rastafarians. Banton parlayed homophobia into a ticket out of Salt Lane. One of his first hits, 1992’s Boom Bye-Bye, boasts of shooting gays with Uzis and burning their skin with acid “like an old tire wheel.”

Banton’s lyrics are hardly unique among reggae artists today. Another popular artist, Elephant Man (O’Neil Bryant, 29) declares in one song, “When you hear a lesbian getting raped/ It’s not our fault … Two women in bed/ That’s two Sodomites who should be dead.” Another, Bounty Killer (Rodney Price, 33), urges listeners to burn “Mister Fagoty” and make him “wince in agony.”

Reggae’s anti-gay rhetoric has seeped into the country’s politics. Jamaica’s major political parties have passed some of the world’s toughest antisodomy laws and regularly incorporate homophobic music in their campaigns. “The view that results,” says Jamaican human-rights lawyer Philip Dayle, “is that a homosexual isn’t just an undesirable but an unapprehended criminal.”

Meanwhile, gay-rights activists say Jamaican police often overlook evidence in anti-gay hate crimes, such as the alleged assault by Banton in 2004. His accuser, Brian, says cops excised Banton’s role from their reports of the 2004 beating. A police spokesman denies that. But in dismissing the case earlier this year, the judge in the trial warned Banton to avoid violence and “seek legal recourses” when he has complaints against gays in the future. Banton refused TIME’s request for an interview. His manager, Donovan Germain, insists that the singer is innocent and that “Buju’s lyrics are part of a metaphorical tradition. They’re not a literal call to kill gay men.”

There are some signs that Jamaica may soften its approach. Jamaica’s ruling party last month elected the nation’s first female Prime Minister, Portia Simpson Miller, a progressive who gay-rights supporters hope will eventually move to decriminalize homosexuality. She hasn’t yet said that, but Jamaica’s beleaguered gays say they at least have reason now to hope their government will change its tune before their reggae stars ever do.