He's told the story many times. It flows now, where maybe the first time he would have wept, the narrative would have been halting and broken, and the terror and shame of it almost more than he could bear.
On June 19, 2004, Gareth Henry - the man I'm talking to in the easy safety of the more or less 100-per-cent gay Church Street Starbucks, the man who will be grand marshal at this weekend's Gay Pride Parade in Toronto - stood with a handful of friends mere metres away from a crowd in Montego Bay, Jamaica and watched that crowd "beat and chop and stone to death" a friend of theirs, a gay man called Victor.
They had first watched Victor being beaten by three Jamaican police officers. They saw a crowd gather. They saw the cops tire and turn Victor over to the mob. They watched the crowd kill him.
"It hurts," he says. "We couldn't do anything. We were helpless."
They knew if they tried to intervene, they would die too, and for one simple reason - they were all gay men, in one of the most homophobic countries on the planet.
The story doesn't end there. Less than a year later, on Valentine's Day, he found himself in a pharmacy, being beaten by four police officers, with a hostile crowd gathering outside.
"I immediately remembered Victor's situation," he says. "... And I said to myself, 'This seems to be it for me.' It's too similar for the same thing not to happen."
The same thing didn't happen. Mr. Henry says he was stronger than Victor, stood up to the police, used his cellphone to call for help, managed, finally, to escape, bruised and beaten but alive.
This past January, he fled to Canada. He is only 30, but 13 of his friends in Jamaica had been murdered. He is awaiting a decision on his application for refugee status.
He is not an effeminate man and he does not dress extravagantly. It may seem Jamaican thugs must have a more highly developed gaydar than most gay men, but it's more likely that it isn't easy to keep secrets in a small island society.
There are scarcely more than 2.5 million people in Jamaica (about 600,000 in Kingston), and you may become suspect simply by being seen talking to or hanging with the wrong person. That's what happened to Mr. Henry. He grew up in St. Mary's, a small town on the island's north coast, his mom still a teen when she gave birth to him, his father a man he doesn't want to talk about.
He was a studious, quiet lad who didn't like sports. He knew he was attracted to men and tried to stifle his desires by becoming a devout church member. It didn't work.
In his teens he befriended an older man who turned out to be gay, who became something of a mentor, and then, Mr. Henry remembers, the rumours started. It was whispered that the older gentleman was a "batty man" (a patois insult for gay). The whispers began to mention Mr. Henry, too. Though his family was far from supportive at the time, they decided, for his own safety, he should move to Kingston. He was 15.
He continued his schooling, got a college degree in social work, slowly discovered the underground that is gay life in Jamaica and saw the birth, in 1998, of J-FLAG, the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays. He began volunteering for the organization; would eventually become its co-chair (after the 2004 murder of its first public figure).
