Gary Younge in the Guardian has a very good piece on the problems facing gay Jamaicans. He does a good job of setting Jamaican homophobia in context:

A lot of people die violent deaths in Jamaica. Last year there were 1,674 murders. That is more than double the UK murder rate in a population less than one-third the size of London. The sources for this violence are many. Both the US and the Eastern bloc armed rival political parties during the cold war with guns that then went to enforce the drugs trade and gang control. Meanwhile Jamaica spends far more servicing debt - much of it foreign - than it does on health, education or policing. Unemployment stands at around 15%; inflation at 12%. In global poverty rankings, Jamaica sits between Syria and Kazakhstan but also has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world. And if the trade subsidies for sugar and bananas are removed, as the World Trade Organisation threatens, the economic situation will rapidly deteriorate.

"In a community without a safety net, the gun represents the safety net," says Sobers. "The gun is power, money and manhood."

Homophobic attacks have to be viewed within that general context. "The victimisation of homosexuals is part of a continuum of violence in Jamaican culture in much the same way that predial larceny (stealing crops) is often punished illegally by angry mobs who take the law into their own hands and lynch the apparently guilty," argues [Carolyn] Cooper in her book Sound Clash, Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large. "Homosexual behaviours, or even the suspicion of intent, do put the individual at risk." So while large numbers of people are vulnerable regardless of their sexual orientation, gays are particularly at risk because of it.

But ignore the economic and historical roots of this violence, say some, and you just find one more way to pathologise Jamaica as a land of yardies, drug mules and bigots. The country certainly gets a bad press. Over the past year articles in the British press that mentioned Jamaica included the word "crime" 240 times and "drugs" 204 times, as opposed to "economy" and "employment", which appeared in just 39 and 16 articles. What we know in the UK about Jamaica stems primarily from what we are told; if we are told only bad things, then inevitably we will gain a bad impression. "Xenophobia is no less a phobia than homophobia. But all phobias are not created equal," writes Cooper.

The photo? That's Peter King, who was murdered in Kingston recently for being gay.