This essay argues that the 2005 documentary Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story uses narrative strategies that link it with the 2004 Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. The film tells the story of a Caribbean-born boxer who killed his Cuban-born opponent in the ring for allegedly calling him a homosexual.
This essay seeks to cross temporal, scalar, and disciplinary boundaries while revisiting tropes of queer invisibility that mark representations of same-sex desire in the Caribbean. Cycling from the world described in the 1901 erotic novel Une nuit d'orgie à Saint-Pierre, Martinique to field notes taken in 2010 among men who frequent Les Salines, this essay unites, in a provisional way, a scattered archive of same-sex desire on the island, while relating these desires critically to place.
