'I can't eat love': How sex, money, and transnational space shape Haitian gay men's cross-border connections and intimate relationships


Carlo Handy Charles, University of Windsor

Since the 1950s, Haitian transnational migrants have ensured the socioeconomic survival of many nonmigrants in Haiti by sending billions of US dollars annually to their families, kinship networks, and friends back home. While Haitian migrants are often perceived as having a positive economic impact on Haiti, some are criticized for engaging in homosexual behaviours, seemingly infringing on ‘traditional’ Haitian family values in a largely conservative ‘Christian’ society. This revives old debates about migrants’ role in using their money to normalize same-sex identity and practices and pervert sexual morality and ‘acceptable’ gender norms among nonmigrants in Haiti. Accordingly, men in Haiti are involved in same-sex intimate transnational relationships with migrants across the Haitian diaspora because of their precarious socioeconomic status in Haiti and not necessarily because they may be gay. Although homosexuality has always existed in Haiti and same-sex intimate relationships among men in Haiti and those abroad have long existed, these relationships have rarely been studied in the literature on sexualities and transnational migration. To fill this aforementioned gap, my paper uses a mixed-method qualitative approach consisting of eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork, forty-four semi-structured interviews with men in Northern Haiti, and social media data to show how homosexuality intersects with socioeconomic inequality and transnational space to organize and shape how men in Haiti connect with migrants across the Haitian diaspora in the United States, Canada, France, Brazil, Chile, and the Dominican Republic to develop same-sex intimate cross-border relationships. I use my ethnographic field notes and social media data to empirically describe the characteristics and types of transnational spaces gay men use in Northern Haiti’s socio-cultural, economic, and political contexts to meet men across the Haitian diaspora and develop intimate cross-border relationships with them. I use the interview data to account for how sex, money, and transnational space shape Northern Haitis gay men’s perceptions, perspectives and experiences of same-sex intimate cross-border relationships with migrant partners across the Haitian diaspora. More importantly, the interviews allow me to delve into participants’ sense-making, which is essential to understanding how they make sense of these relationships in the Haitian context of stigmatization and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. The substantive finding I will discuss in this paper is that homosexuality is a dimension of power (Foucault 1978, 1991; Rubin 1984) that intersects with money and transnational space to organize cross-border connections among Haitian migrants and nonmigrants and shape their intimate relationships. Research on immigration and sexuality has shown that sexuality is a dimension of power that shapes and organizes how LGBTQ+ people migrate and incorporate into their host societies (Luibhéid 2005; Manalansan 2006; Cantú et al. 2009; Carillo 2017; Tamagawa 2020; Murray 2020). By arguing that sexuality is a dimension of power, Luibhéid uses a queer theory approach to demonstrate how sexuality thoroughly “shapes families, communities, state institutions, and economies as well as how sexual norms, struggles and forms of governance always articulate hierarchies of gender, race, class and geopolitics” (Luibhéid 2005). From this perspective, Luibhéid and other queer migration scholars show that sexuality not only motivates the migration of LGBTQ+ people but also shapes how they incorporate into their host societies. Drawing on this scholarship, this paper shows that sexuality is a dimension of power that shapes cross-border connections and intimate relationships involving gay migrants and non-migrants. Furthermore, building on research on intimacy and money (Kempadoo 1999, 2004; Zelizer 2000, 2009; Illouz 2007; Hoang 2015; Parreñas 2020), I discuss how the porous boundary between sex and money in the socioeconomic context of Northern Haiti, as in many other countries, significantly shapes these same-sex intimate transnational connections and relationships. As Haitian migrants are key to the survival of many non-migrants in Haiti, developing a successful intimate transnational relationship with Haitians overseas is seen by many non-migrants as an enterprise that can lead to an immediate improvement of their socioeconomic status in Haiti and/or to their potential emigration projects. In this paper, I show how sex, money, and transnational space intertwine to shape how gay non-migrants in Haiti seek to develop and maintain intimate transnational relationships with gay migrants across the Haitian diaspora. I conclude by discussing the significance of my research findings to the literature on sexualities and transnational migration.

This paper will be presented at the following session: