Yahoo News Brilliant ‘batty boy’ challenging Caribbean homophobia

Paris (AFP) – He’s brilliant and charismatic and should be one of Jamaica’s heroes up there on the pedestal with Usain Bolt and the reggae and dancehall stars who stand in the long shadow of Bob Marley.

But Jamaica has trouble embracing the novelist Marlon James, even after he won one of the world’s top literary prizes, the Man Booker, last year, the first Caribbean writer to do so since V S Naipaul 45 years ago.

The reason is simple. “I’m a batty boy,” James told AFP, using the derogatory island slang for gay.