The Gringo the Next Island Over

OK—so all the talk of baseball didn’t work….

Or maybe it was the bad Spanish, which admit it, had to have been learned within the last months. But that’s hardly likely, since James “Wally” Brewster, Jr. only spoke two sentences (the first being, “¡HOLA, mi nombre es Wally!”)

Right—let’s get to brass tacks. What’s pissing off folks in the Dominican Republic about Wally, the new ambassador for the United States? The fact that his spouse is a guy.

Brewster, according to his account, grew up in a little Texas town; he went into business there and eventually moved to Chicago, where he started in 2010 a company called SB&K. Along the way, he raised funds for Obama, which is a nice way to get to be an ambassador. In fact, The Daily Mail reports that he raised more than a million dollars for the 2012 presidential campaign.

And he’s been active in LGBT issues as well: he’s now serving on the Board of the Human Rights Campaign Fund.

So the reaction to Brewster? Well, let’s put it this way: over 60% of the country is Catholic, so what did the cardinal, the top dog over there, have to say? Well, he referred to Brewster as a maricón (faggot) and gay people as “social trash.”

And then there’s this:

"He has not considered the particularities of our people. The United States is trying to impose on us marriage between gays and lesbians as well as adoption by these couples," said Father Luis Rosario, director of youth ministries for the church.

Then thousands of evangelicals took to the streets, and organized a “black Monday,” urging people to put black ribbons on their cars to protest. But not to worry, because the groups came out with this statement:

Expresaron que aman a los homosexuales y a los drogadictos, pero no  su actuación. “Si hoy aceptamos esa ley que nos quieren imponer, luego tenemos que aceptar una para patentizar las drogas”, señalaron.

(They expressed that the love homosexuals and drug addicts, but not their behavior. “If we accept this law that they want to impose on us, later we’ll have to accept one that patents drugs,” they said.)

Though homosexuality is legal in the Dominican Republic, there is—as you can tell—a strong cultural bias against it. Worse, the situation seems to be getting worse, and not better. Here’s what the French paper Le Monde had to say about it:

“En Haití, la República Dominicana, Jamaica y otros países de la región, los ataques contra homosexuales y transexuales han aumentado en los últimos meses. La homofobia no es nueva en la Cuenca del Caribe”, señala el reportaje.

(“In Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and other countries in the region, the attacks against homosexuals and transsexuals have increased in the last months. Homophobia is not new in the Caribbean basin,” the report indicated.)

Brewster isn’t the first gay ambassador—there have been five or six others. He is, however, the first ambassador to be named to such a homophobic country.

Good luck to him!