One of the victims, Ryan Smith, was airbused to a Miami hospital, where he remains in intensive care with a fractured skull. Last week two CBS News producers, both Americans, were beaten with tire irons by a gay-bashing mob while vacationing on St. Islands like Barbados still criminalize homosexuality, and some seem to be following Jamaica's more violent example. Jamaica may be the worst offender, but much of the rest of the Caribbean also has a long history of intense homophobia. "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. 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. Months later, witnesses say, police egged on another mob that stabbed and stoned a gay man to death in Montego Bay. ![]() 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. Perhaps most disturbing, many anti-gay assaults have been acts of mob violence. 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. And its rampant violence against gays and lesbians has prompted human-rights groups to confer another ugly distinction: the most homophobic place on earth. The country has the world's highest murder rate. Though familiar to Americans primarily as a laid-back beach destination, Jamaica is hardly idyllic. "Every Sunday I ask why this happened to me." ![]() "I still go to church," he says as he sips a Red Stripe beer. It was a bitter decision for Brian, who lost his landscaping business after the attack and is fearful of giving his last name. 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. 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. Brian, 44, is gay, and Banton, 32, is an avowed homophobe whose song Boom Bye-Bye decrees that gays "haffi dead" ("have to die"). Follow wears sunglasses to hide his gray and lifeless left eyedamaged, he says, by kicks and blows with a board from Jamaican reggae star Buju Banton.
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