I don’t know why I chose to come to Jamaica given I was mostly roaming around the Spanish-speaking countries in South America. I’m heading off to London soon to get a CELTA and there were a few places on my list I had to see before I left the Americas. The connections from here weren’t too expensive and Jamaica is one of the most culturally influential countries in the Caribbean. I’m a gay traveller and I knew Jamaica was homophobic and having gay sex was illegal, but I came here anyways. I’m good at hiding these things, I thought. I’m an expert at bending the rules.
It’s not my fault, and it never will be my fault, and I have no one to blame except the person who tried to take advantage of me. And the hotel, they also suck. The management is the reason I feel like it’s all my fault.
And in their shaming I hear a little bit of my father, too.
If only you paid attention to the country’s laws…
A random guy messaged me on Grindr while I was in my hotel room. He was a bald twink, with an egg-shaped head and cute features. It’s rare for me to have fun with anyone given how hard it is to even see another person on the apps here. I thought he was messaging to meet because he was desperate for some action, and I’m a foreigner, and that always gets me more sex. I never thought gay men would want to take advantage of another gay man. I’ve had sex with men from all over the world, and they are looking to connect with someone from another country who might understand them, be willing to listen to them, and let them be themselves.
The guy wasn’t so talkative online, but that wasn’t a big deal for me. Not every gay person is talkative, just like not every person in the world wants to share who they are and to anyone. People vary. He said he’d come over in twenty minutes, and I prepared, mostly by making sure my valuables were in the safe. Then I went down and waited in the hotel café. Kingston is a vibe. I was facing a beautiful graffiti of Bob Marley, and on the other side is a restaurant with a full-blown Rastafarian troupe playing some easy-listening songs. I imagined that I had a blunt in my fingers rather than a straw for my drink and I bobbed my head and closed my eyes and pretended to be a much more laid-back and go-with-the-flow version of myself. But I was about to have a hookup with a local. I was about to add Jamaican to my list of thirty or so nationals that I’ve had the pleasure to sexually court.
The boy came. He asked if I could get him something to eat and drink, and since I was about to pay for what I already ordered, I didn’t offer him anything.
I wonder now if that was my mistake. I wonder if I set the tone for the whole encounter off.
Then again when we got back to my room, he was a little shifty and acting odd. First of all, he looked way different from his photos. In his photos he looked a light caramel colour and skinny. In reality he was a very black-skinned person, and he looked out of shape. Not fat yet, but he definitely didn’t have the abs he portrayed in his photos. All of that is fine and fairly common for online hookups. Most people who are dark skinned are obsessed with using lightening filters, and most of the pictures are a few years old. Even I’m a little bigger than what I look like in my pictures.
But it wasn’t just that he lied about how he portrayed himself. I could tell he was looking up and down every angle of my room, and when I caught him, he said to me, ‘You have a strong smell. Did you shower yet?’
I smelled my own armpits and there was literally no scent. I had just showered an hour ago. Still he made a sour face and fanned in my direction.
‘You really need to take a bath.’
I really felt like I didn’t. I was freshly washed and smelled neutral. Something about the whole thing was off. It felt all too scripted. He had even neutralised his Jamaican accent to sound as American as possible.
Luckily my bathroom was just on the other side of my bedroom. I took off my clothes, went into the bathroom, and had another shower, but kept the door open. It was easy to see the entire bed from the shower, and it was also easy to see him. If this were a properly horny man, he would have enjoyed seeing me naked, with all of my body right there for him to scope out and inspect.
But he looked down at his phone, not looking remotely engaged.
I wondered if we were even going to have sex.
I got out of the shower and came back in just my towel and started stripping him. He complied and took off his shirt, while I did the rest of the work. To be fair he did let me suck on his nipples, play with his belly hair, rub him off. He didn’t get that hard, and he didn’t touch me.
If this were another person, I would have just assumed our chemistry was off. But based on the entire way he was acting, I was starting to wonder if he was really gay.
I think he picked up on the fact that I wasn’t buying any of it, and that was when he started to perform more. He laid on top of me and thrusted himself around and rubbed my back and shoulders. I started to doubt my own doubts and was also getting into it, but just as I was starting to feel a little bit hornier, he said, ‘I came.’
‘You came?’ I asked in utter doubt.
‘Yes,’ and he showed me his penis, a little sticky. I don’t think I saw a single bit of cum. It might have been pre-cum, it might have been some saliva, but for someone who claimed to have shot he was surprisingly clean. He went to the bathroom to wash himself, and then he dressed.
I also dressed, and he asked, ‘Will you take me somewhere to go eat?’
That really turned me off. I didn’t know why he thought it was in my place to feed him after a hookup. To be polite, I told him, ‘I literally just ate.’
He had the nerve to ask after, ‘Then why don’t you give me some money so I can go back to my place?’
I was starting to wise up to what was really happening. This wasn’t a hookup. This was a stickup.
I put on a smile and chose my words carefully.
‘You know what, let’s go out. I think there’s a restaurant up the street. We can go eat there.’
The problem was that I’m not really a good actor. He caught on to the fact that I just wanted to get him out of the hotel room.
He eyed my computer and said, ‘You give me some money, or I’ll take that.’
At that point I ran towards the door, opened it, and screamed, ‘Help!’ The guy came and tried to wrestle my fingers away from the door. He almost closed it but I was still shouting, ‘Help! Help!’ and, ‘Police!’ I didn’t know why no one was responding. In the meantime this guy was prying my fingers away, and had I not had part of my body wedged in the door, he would have easily shut it.
He was eventually going to close the door. And once he did there was no telling what he could do to me.
Luckily the manager finally appeared, shouting, ‘What is going on here?’ He started yelling at my barely dressed robber in Creole. It might even have been English but I was so stressed by the whole thing that I wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying. I was mostly hoping that he’d confront the man and kick him out.
Instead the manager said to me, ‘This man is telling me he is a prostitute, and you owe him money.’
I was so paralysed by the audacity of what I was hearing that I didn’t know how to respond. The manager explained again. ‘You asked this man to come have sex with you, and you aren’t giving him his money.’
I looked at these two guys and just didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say very clearly that we had found each other on an app, that the encounter had been posed to be consensual.
But I was also in a country where gay sex is illegal, and I could be facing a prison sentence.
Then again, so could he.
The manager said, ‘You have to pay the man a hundred dollars.’
The guy from the app croaked out, ‘Two hundred.’
The manager repeated, ‘You have to pay the man two hundred dollars.’
At that point my anger cracked.
‘Two hundred dollars? I just found the guy on an app. He said he wanted to come and have sex with me. I didn’t say anything about money, and neither did he.’
The guy from the app said, ‘He is lying. He just don’t want to pay.’
‘I don’t want to pay because I owe you nothing!’ I exploded.
The manager put up a finger. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Stop. Give this man the money he is owed. Then he will go, and we can all move on.’
I looked at the manager incredulously. I observed how somber they both looked, with body language that refused to budge. There was none of the smiling or laid-backness I associated with the people of the Carribean.
This was business.
I unlocked the hotel box with all of my valuables and counted the money out. In the meantime, the guy on the app and the manager started talking to each other. Were they friends? Acquaintances? I couldn’t tell, but I wondered how interlinked the crime in this city was. Maybe he was pretending to be gay, trying to get money out of me, and he was going to split it with this hotel manager.
I handed over the money and both men counted it out loud. The manager opened the door and the guy from the app left with the two hundred bucks in hand.
The manager took one long stare at me. Then, looking frustrated, angered, and depressed, he said, ‘You should be ashamed that you are doing these things at all.’
He slammed the door shut, and I thought, there it was. At least I wasn’t going to prison, at least I wasn’t being fined, but there was that judgment, the sort I had received all my life, just for wanting to meet men, just for wanting to have sex with them, just for trying to get closer to people who I wanted to understand me.
I sat on the bed and stared into nothingness for some time. Somehow I didn’t cry. I stood up and threw some fists against a wall.
During my past year in the Americas, I have learned I like to teach. I want to pursue that more. Hence the CELTA I’m going to get in London. But I’ve learned I don’t care about any of the countries I’ve seen. I’ve covered eighty percent of what is between Mexico and Argentina, and not a single culture really spoke to me. And after this experience I know I can say it: I hate the Americas. There’s a lot of crime and carelessness in this part of the world. I don’t think I’ll come back soon.
It’s been some hours now, and I’ve cooled off. I’m accepted that I’ve lost the money, and I’m actually grateful I didn’t have it worse. But some thoughts are really resounding in me.
It’s time for me to do something more positive in my life that has nothing to do with sexual conquests or hopping across borders and exploring random cultures of the world. I need to figure out how to get myself more rooted with a career and where I can find stability.
I need to find another way to get along with life on this earth.