To Colin, with love

Earlier this year, Trini-Canadian professor Andil Gosine was invited to join a group of scholars composing letters to past feminists.

He chose to address former Newsday columnist, sexual justice advocate, poet and self-described feminist Colin Robinson, in tribute to whom Gosine recently curated an exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York.

Robinson, founder of CAISO: Sex & Gender Justice, died of cancer in 2021 at 59.

Dr Gosine was scheduled to read his letter to a New York audience on October 16.

Dear Colin,

Look, I send the man a letter three times, three times, and every letter say the same same thing: “Your Honorable Grace etc etc, we are so very pleased to invite you to The Plural of He, the very first exhibition of art built around a Trinidadian poet, maybe any Trinidadian, at a New York museum.” Is big ting!

In the first letter, the museum ask for a lil change, but they ask in a real nice way: “On July 17, we will spotlight artists that Colin Robinson inspired…in conjunction with the exhibition celebrating his life as poet, critic, and unsung hero of social and sexual liberation movements...The Leslie-Lohman Museum…respectfully requests $900 in financial assistance to go towards honoraria, and roundtrip airfare and accommodations for Colin’s friend the writer Ms Shivanee Ramlochan.”

You lived in New York, so you know how $900 is peanuts here. Is pocket change for the consulate, the way that them is be sponsoring all kinda thing.

But not a word in response.

Next time, I forward the letter myself, with a nice nice note inviting them to the opening party. Nothing. Hundreds of people line up to see this show on opening night, but they can’t even find the energy to decline the invitation.

Then, eh, eh, I get invited as a plus-one to one of the receptions they sponsor. Was a real nice film about calypso (though not one made by a Trinidadian). Before the film even start, I start to realise what happening.

That consulate team was real uncomfortable around me, suddenly. Was like night and day from when they came to my first exhibition in New York, in 2022. You shoulda see all the loving-up from the big one, they take pictures for so. Even the last exhibition I had in New York, I was late to invite His Excellency to the private dinner, but the man himself call to apologise for not being able to make it on short notice. But them two exhibitions wasn’t gay ting and is only then I realise that they only just realise I like man (not that I have one right now, steups).

Is not that any of them probably have a specific problem with my being gay, I think. I doubt it’s personal. Is more that for them to engage with a gay exhibition in an official way that is the thing. I eh know what the government tell them they can or cannot do, this government that now begging Britain to bring back a colonial anti-sodomy law that a Trini judge done throw out.

I could feel the change because I feel it plenty times before. I know you know exactly what I mean. You bounce up some Caribbean people and they well love you, especially if you have a lil light shining on you. But the minute them realise you comfortably gay, you gone from favourite son of the nation to troublesome little weed.

As I was writing this letter, I hear about that sweet little boy Jayden Lalchan. I looked a little like him, and he could ah well be you or me, one of them nice boys that is gentle and kind, and bright for so, but this one thing, this one thing no one can control, is enough for we own people to want us gone, if only to ease their own shame, their own issues about themselves.

Is that why you left TT when you were just a little older than Jayden? In the 1970s, there you were, one of the brightest teenagers in Trinidad, announcing to everyone that you were gay, and receiving their disappointment over and over again: a teacher’s, the priest’s, your mother’s.

“We love you so much, but this thing, this thing makes us uncomfortable, so we would prefer that you don’t be that thing.”

Among the many letters that struck me in your archives were the ones you got from gay organisations in New York just as you were getting ready to come to America to study. Each one detailed answers to your question: what might life be like for a young gay man moving to the city? How you must’ve thought, if my community doesn’t want me, here’s another who might embrace all of me.

For 25 years, during the AIDS pandemic, during the hardest of hard times to be gay man, you fought for us. You worked for nearly a decade at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, created or co-ordinated so many advocacy groups, including the Audre Lorde Project. You made your Brooklyn apartment a gathering space for queer black folks, and you channelled artistry to build community, whether as a producer for Marlon Riggs's film Tongues Untied, or managing the landmark periodical Other Countries, or through your own poetry and prose. And yet, after all of this, you could not find that feeling of home here. The minute you get your green card, was back to TT you went.

“I wasn’t sure what I had in America any more,” you had said.

Then you put all of you into the fight for people on the margins in Trinidad, and you had so much patience. If you want other people to join your battle, you used to tell less patient activists, you also have to work with them on theirs.

I only mention the exhibition to the consulate staff the night I went to their movie reception. Just a little chit-chat, hello and how nice to see you, etc.

I give it a few days and then I write the man, because like you, I so want to believe in us.

“Dear Your Eminence,” I wrote, “Lovely to see you at that wonderful screening last week. I just wanted to double check that you received this e-mail. Over $100,000 was raised to make this show happen, but this small request from you is also in tribute to Colin's devoted national identity as a Trinbagonian, and deep involvement in many aspects of cultural associations there. There's plenty of time before the event happens of course, so no rush for an answer, but I would like to know that the request was received.”

But not one word.

With all the service you have given to your people in the all-too-brief six decades we got to have you with us, is just that one thing stopping the official recognition and celebration of you from your people. Is in fact the very same reason Jayden only got to live in Trinidad for only about as long as I did.

It have plenty noise right now about holding the bullies and the principal and teachers at his school responsible for this tragedy, which I don’t think the word “suicide” fairly characterises. The bully and the staff get their direction from the top and running all through the top hierarchies of communities across TT and, indeed, in many of our families: If we make you uncomfortable, we don’t deserve acknowledgment of existence – we might not even deserve to exist. That’s the message Jayden likely got, at a moment in life he was too young to know better.

I eh know how you keep up these fights for decades, for literally all of your adult life. I eh know how you watch your friends die, and you find the energy to fight, how you face disrespect and push back over and over and over again and you still fight the fight. I think about how much devotion you had to Trinidad, how much you gave to this place, how many of its governors prefer still, even after you gone, wants to pretend that maybe you were never here.

I doh have your stamina for the fight, but I tell myself, let me at least write this down. For you. For Jayden.

Andil Gosine is professor of environmental arts and justice at York University, and literary executor and custodian of the Colin Robinson Archives.