Not Bad For Some Immigrants, Ep. 3: Sometimes You *Can* Go Home Again
When actor and musician Mark Clennon decided to go home to Jamaica to shoot the music video for his song, “Kingston,” in 2022, he wasn’t sure how it was going to go.
The video, which became the first featuring two male romantic leads to be shot on the island, required some strategic planning, he says: “Jamaica is such a homophobic country that something as simple as two men on a bike could potentially gather some looks.”
But his experience ending up being affirming—and reminded him not only that change is happening in his homeland, but that queer Jamaicans have always existed, and have been working toward liberation for decades.
“Even though I'm Jamaican, I was born and raised there and I go back often, I still have a lot of anxiety about how homophobic Jamaica is, for good reason,” he says. “But I'm often surprised by little moments where things will be said or done. Again, I'm not trying to minimize the difficulties that LGBT Jamaicans have, but the fact that you have active LGBT organizations that are hosting events and on television and giving interviews is tremendous.”
In this episode of Friday Talks: Not Bad For Some Immigrants, Mark chats about leaving Jamaica as a teenager, the ways ‘immigrant stories’ often don’t reflect the nuances of his own experiences, and what it means to go back home and be unapologetically himself.
Hosted by Friday Things founder and editor Stacy Lee Kong, Not Bad For Some Immigrants is a six-part video series about the stories we tell about immigrants in pop culture, media and real life. It rejects the focus on striving—to succeed, to assimilate, to be judged worthy of belonging in, and to, our new homes—that so often infiltrate stories about our experiences, and instead makes space for complicated, nuanced and joyful conversations about what it actually costs to build a new life, the stories we learn to tell about ourselves and what it really means to belong.