LONDON (Outrage! Press Release) – Beverley Knight, the UK’s top-selling R&B singer, is supporting the campaign to rid dancehall music of homophobia.  She expressed her support in an exclusive interview on the BBC’s Newsnight current affairs programme, aired on Tuesday 17 August at 10:30 PM.

“It breaks my heart that people as talented as Buju Banton and Beenie Man feel the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of hatred for gays” Ms Knight told Newsnight.

The star, whose parents are Jamaican, endorsed calls for the police to investigate violently homophobic lyrics which incite and glorify the murder of lesbian and gay people.

“It’s just the most base thing you can do,” Ms Knight told BBC reporter Madeline Holt.

“As an artist, I am very passionate about people’s right to say as they wish, but as a human being I’m very passionate about people’s right to exist as they are and to be left in peace,” she said.

While the ‘Stop Murder Music’ campaign has been criticized for attempting to wreck artist’s careers, Beverley Knight argues that the artist has to take responsibility “first and foremost”.

“If you are prepared to go on record for eternity saying things that are hateful then you have to be responsible for the consequences of your actions,” she said..

Knight has dedicated her new album to her friend Tyrone Jameson, a presenter of the BBC’s ‘That Gay Show’, who died of Aids last year. She nursed him through his illness. She told Newsnight that the experience strengthened her rejection of homophobia, despite a strict Pentecostal upbringing by her Jamaican-born parents.

“Talking to Tyrone and to many other friends of mine who are gay and are black there’s quite a sadness, there’s a duality in their existence. They’re one kind of person to the world, very much a stereotype of what they think a black man should be, and then behind closed doors, the man that they truly are - gay and often very unhappy – because they don’t have the support, they don’t have the care, they don’t have anybody who understands, and that’s hard,” she told Newsnight.

“I think it was one of my friends who said, you know, the hardest thing you can be in this life is to be born black and gay, and to have a statement like that, to have somebody say that to you is kinda harsh.

“Most of the people that actually have all these homophobic thoughts and comments, if you sat them down and said ‘okay, so how many gay people do you actually know’, and converse with them, (they’d say) ‘I’ve never come into contact with, not many, if any at all’. And hopefully, by a lot more people, especially the young gay black men… being able to stand up and say “I’m black, I’m gay, I’m proud”, slowly but surely we might see a change in attitudes,” she concluded.

While there is no law specifically against inciting homophobic hatred in the UK, but, according to Newsnight, the government is understood to be sympathetic towards changing that.

The Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service are investigating seven artists - including Buju Banton, Beenie Man, Elephant Man and Bounty Killer - after they were presented with a dossier by gay human rights group OutRage! listing songs which incite the murder of lesbian and gay people. Incitement to murder is a criminal offence in Britain.

The artists are also facing new restrictions from sponsors, and a series of concert cancellations in the UK, Europe and the USA.

¡  Beverley Knight will be attending a candlelight vigil for those who have been lost to Aids, which is being organized by Gay Manchester Pride on Sunday August 30 at 9pm in Sackville Park.

Outrage! website

19 August, 2004