I recently came across a series of paid content by LGBTQ+ travel influencer, Sion Walton-Guest on his @theglobetrotterguys social media accounts, encouraging LGBTQ+ people to visit Bermuda. The content was compelling and the message was unambiguous: Bermuda welcomes you.

I want to take that message seriously, because it matters to me in ways that are not abstract. I grew up in Bermuda's public school system and experienced homophobic bullying severe enough to leave lasting trauma that still affects me today. Every time I return to the island I love, I am often met with homophobia of both the interpersonal and institutionalized variety.

They are part of why I, like many LGBTQ+ Bermudians living in the UK, the US, Canada and elsewhere in the diaspora, find it difficult to imagine returning permanently, despite a bone-deep love for this island and her people.

I want to be clear that this is not simply a personal affliction. When a significant portion of a country's LGBTQ+ citizens are living abroad partly because home does not feel safe, physically or psychologically, that is a policy failure. It should be measured and named as one.

The Bermuda Tourism Authority has brought multiple LGBTQ+ content creators to the island in recent years, and the BTA has LGBTQ+ staff who, by all accounts, care genuinely about this work. I do not doubt their sincerity. What I question is what that work amounts to structurally, when it is not accompanied by any equivalent investment in the lives of LGBTQ+ people who actually live here.

This is pinkwashing — not the crude, rainbow-logo-in-June variety, but something more considered: the deliberate cultivation of a progressive image for external, revenue-generating consumption, while the internal apparatus of government continues to deprioritise and ignore the rights of LGBTQ+ Bermudians at home.

The evidence for that gap is not difficult to find. In February, 2025, OUTBermuda released Bermuda's first multi-issue LGBTQ+ policy manifesto. It was a practical document, not a radical one. It asked for inclusive curricula and enforceable anti-bullying protections in schools, which are baseline conditions for surviving a Bermudian education if you are queer. It asked for equal access to gender-affirming care, mental health support, and training for practitioners. It asked for legislative protections against discrimination in employment and housing.

All 100+ candidates were invited to engage. Across the three parties and numerous independents, the response was effectively silence, with only a few candidates expressing support privately and none supporting it publicly. We are, it seems, desirable as visitors. But as citizens, we remain inconvenient and irrelevant.

That silence does not exist in isolation. It sits within a broader pattern of who Bermuda’s political economy is built to serve. The island is aggressively marketed to the world as a luxury destination, and that positioning carries real costs for the people who live here year-round. Bermudians are being priced out of their own island. Housing, groceries, healthcare: the cost of daily life is not incidental to the tourism economy but partly produced by it. The infrastructure that serves visitors drives up costs that residents bear permanently, while the benefits of tourism revenue flow disproportionately towards those who already hold capital and property.

Pinkwashing slots neatly into this structure. LGBTQ+ travellers from affluent Western markets represent a premium demographic, being invited into a system that performs inclusion for revenue while offering little of substance to the queer Bermudians who are facing real and unique challenges. The rainbow, in this context, is not solidarity. It is a marketing instrument.

The racialised dimension of this cannot go unacknowledged. White LGBTQ+ Bermudians, those from professional backgrounds, and queer immigrants from the global north often find sufficient economic and social insulation to navigate life here without constant friction.

For many Black LGBTQ+ Bermudians, particularly young people without family support, the reality includes housing discrimination, inaccessible healthcare, and school environments where bullying goes unaddressed. Audre Lorde was right that there is no hierarchy of oppression. But hierarchies of survival operate in practice, and in Bermuda they produce measurable, racialised harm.

The story of us, honestly told

The Government recently published its Green Paper on full Caricom membership, titled, with some ambition, The Story of Us. It speaks of shared history, cultural kinship and regional belonging. It gestures, carefully but meaningfully, towards the kind of collective self-understanding that genuine decoloniality requires. I welcome that document and am supportive of its contents. Which is precisely why I want to apply its logic here.

In my piece on Burkina Faso last October, I drew a distinction between decolonisation and decoloniality. Decolonisation is the formal transfer of power. Decoloniality is the deeper, ongoing work of dismantling the hierarchies and structures that colonialism leaves behind, including those we have internalised and now enforce upon one another.

Bermuda's social crises did not emerge from nowhere. Gang violence, the increase in risk-taking behaviour within our community, the significant difference in education and employment outcomes between White and Black residents, and the marginalisation of LGBTQ+ people share a genealogy. The lingering religious and colonial hegemony that makes it politically costly to support queer rights is the same imported framework that is at the root of these other social ills. We did not end up here by accident, and we will not find our way out through inertia.

If the government is serious about The Story of Us as more than a title, that story must include LGBTQ+ Bermudians in full, not as a tourism asset, but as people whose safety, health and dignity are a government responsibility.

I wholeheartedly agree that becoming a full member of Caricom and the government’s approach to the consultation are a genuine opening for Bermuda to reflect and evolve beyond its current colonial limitations. But a regional bloc in which several member states still criminalise same-sex intimacy (alongside it many other flaws) also presents a risk, especially if Bermuda interprets closer Caribbean integration as permission to drift in a more conservative direction on LGBTQ+ rights rather than as an opportunity to model something better. This is a valid concern and question that’s worth an answer from the government.

The data we have been denied

There is one further dimension of this gap between performance and reality that deserves naming. LGBTQ+ Bermudians have been systematically excluded from the census and from the data collection mechanisms that shape government policy. When you do not exist in the data, it becomes considerably easier for government to act as though your needs do not exist either. Every deferred commitment and every manifesto met with silence has been made easier by the absence of evidence that would make indifference politically untenable.

This is why OUTBermuda's national LGBTQ+ survey matters as more than an advocacy tool. The Story of Us is being presented as an invitation for Bermudians to define, on their own terms, who we are together and where we belong. I want to take that invitation seriously and extend it inward. It is time for LGBTQ+ Bermudians to tell our own story of us, in our own words, counted and legible in a way the state has never allowed us to be. If you are LGBTQ+ and living in Bermuda, or a Bermudian living abroad, I am asking you to fill it out. Your experience is data. Your data is an argument. And that argument, rigorously made, is something the government will find considerably harder to dismiss than a manifesto answered with silence.

I should acknowledge, before I close, that I may be wrong. My experiences are real and they are mine, but they are individual. It is possible that the BTA's LGBTQ+ inclusive marketing accurately reflects the island's social reality, and that my encounters represent the exception rather than the rule.

The survey will tell us. If the data shows that LGBTQ+ Bermudians are thriving, that schools are safe, that healthcare is accessible and affirming, I will be genuinely glad to be corrected. But if it confirms what testimony already suggests, then Bermuda will have to decide, plainly and on the record, what kind of welcome it actually means to extend, and whether The Story of Us is a story it is prepared to tell honestly and wholly.

Find out more information and fill out the survey at https://outbermuda.org/survey/. Give feedback on the Caricom green paper at https://togetherforcaricom.gov.bm/consultation

• Taj Donville-Outerbridge is an award-winning Bermudian human rights activist, political commentator, and student studying a double masters of public administration and global affairs at The London School of Economics & the University of Toronto. He can be reached via Instagram @_king.taj_ and e-mail at tdonvilleouterbridge@yahoo.com