Guest Columns

Superhero comics were created to boost the image of whites as the world’s progenitors and purveyors of justice, peace and security. Likewise, Hollywood has earned its reputation as the quintessential flagbearer of American cultural imperialism for well over a century. The two cultural agencies have had a long, intimate relationship. …

“So I have to ask the question: is this a coincidence? And why now? After scrolling through social media and seeing that many people believe that a lot of Trinis only dressed in their African garb for the ‘likes’ and the attention, I’m forced to ask another question. However, this …

When I read last Sunday about the government’s intention to build a housing development on lands allocated to the St Augustine Nurseries, it upset me greatly. In the days that followed, I became privy to the Acting Housing Minister’s full statement on the matter as well as the Minister of …

I must apologize, I forgot to share the etymology of the word “sodomite.” Etymology is getting the backstory on how a word came to be what it currently is and to mean what it now does. A local example is when we trace the history of the word “doubles” back …

There is nothing in the Torah, Old Testament, Talmud or New Testament that says the Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because the men were all homosexual. Remember the medical definition of homosexuality we are sticking to is extra-biblical, 19th Century, medical terminology for sexual orientation. It would …

John Lennon had already said it back in the last century. And when earlier this year Jimmy Fallon converted Bob Dylan’s old 1964 lyrics into a 2018 message “Your silence speaks louder than those who condone,” Trinidad and Tobago, you needed to be listening; Messrs Lennon and Fallon/Dylan were speaking to …

Someday in the future, when Trinbago nationalism becomes a common experience across our multifaceted demographic, February 1970 will surely be memorialised collectively as the month that precipitated the most significant events in the history of the two-island state since Emancipation. I am motivated to write this piece not only because …

Pop culture anthropologist Jessica Joseph attempts to show that the modern Bible is misinterpreted in relation to the LGBTQI movement in Part Two of her response to a Letter to the Editor from Akilah Holder: Let us then move on to 1 Corinthians 6:9 which reads: “Know ye not that …

Akilah Holder’s impassioned column—in which she took umbrage at a gay man sharing his feelings of self-acceptance and his spiritual certainty about being loved and accepted by God—generated a lot of buzz, most of it negative and condemnatory. While I agree with those who pointed out the poor reasoning skills—the …

The return of the Kings and Queens to Sunday’s Dimanche Gras made for a good show. Calypso won as, although there were too many props, there was no excess of lame melodies, thank God, and no overdose of prosaic lyrics. It was refreshing to hear music back in our calypso; …

On 8 October, 2013, Newsday published a letter to the editor, headlined “Say no to gay marriages” and signed by Valentine Young, with which I fully agreed. Young’s position was that the legalisation of same-sex marriages had brought God’s wrath upon the United States of America (certain states anyway) because …

There was change at the top of the calypso pyramid last night as 24-year-old Helon Francis was crowned the 2018 Calypso Monarch with “Changes”—a powerful social commentary about Trinidad and Tobago’s need for introspection and revolution of thought to address corruption and crime in the two-island republic. Much of the …