The drive for legal equality for LGBTQ people has faced strong headwinds in the Caribbean in recent years. In February 2024, a court in St. Vincent and the Grenadines dismissed a challenge to the nation’s archaic antigay criminal codes, declaring the laws were justified on the grounds of public health and morality. And an appeals court in Trinidad and Tobago reinstated that nation’s anti-sodomy laws in March 2025, ruling that the colonial-era statutes were constitutionally untouchable.

But the winds have shifted in St. Lucia, where a coalition of community groups just won a stunning court victory, overturning laws that imposed long prison sentences for same-sex intimacy. This was the coalition’s fourth court victory since 2022, when it successfully challenged anti-queer criminal statutes in Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Barbados. A similar case in Grenada is pending.

A few days after the court victory in St. Lucia, I talked with Kenita Placide, executive director of the Caribbean Alliance for Diversity and Equality (ECADE), the organization behind the legal tempest sweeping across the islands. Placide, who is nonbinary, has been a queer activist for more than 15 years.

Placide’s passion for social change is driven by their desire to ensure a better future for queer youth in the Caribbean. Placide lost several close friends to antigay violence between 2005 and 2009. But it was the murder of a 17-year-old youth in 2016 that hit hardest.

“His mom asked me why, and I couldn’t answer because there are [anti-LGBT] laws and people think that taking the life of an LGBT person is technically preventing them from committing a crime,” Placide told me.

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