Unfinished Lives

Remembering LGBT Hate Crime Victims

Honoring Queer Heritage: A Thanksgiving Season Special Comment

Dallas, Texas – Queer tolerance is original on these American shores.  So, how do we honor our queer ancestors, and call upon them to aid our struggle for liberty here and now? That is what I thought last night, as my partner and I  watched Turner Classic Movies re-run of the mini-series, Son of the Morning Star.  First Nations people, also known as Native Americans, not only allowed gender variance and same-sex attraction, but they celebrated it–a tradition that offended the puritanical sensibilities of the first European settlers (our Pilgrim forefathers) in New England and Virginia.

As the NorthEast Two-Spirit Society tells us, of the approximately 400 First Nations tribes in North America at the time of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth, no fewer than 155 of these indigenous Nations had traditions embracing Two-Spirit people as well as people whose gender variance blended male and female roles and characteristics. Two-Spirit people acted as role models of harmony and balance, living examples of the way the Great Spirit blessed all manifestations of gender.  Two-Spirits were often honored as visionaries for the people, translators of customs and traditions between men and women, and the guardians of children, making sure children of the Nation were being reared humanely and well.  NE2SS says “When a family was not properly raising their children, the Two Spirit person would intervene and assume the responsibly as the primary caretaker. Sometimes, families would ask the Two Spirit person for help rearing their children. This unique role of social worker was specific to Two Spirit people, for they had an excess of material wealth as a result of the gifts they received.” Among the Lakota (Sioux) people, prior to going out to war, a great dance was held with Two-Spirit people in the center of the hoop, to show the honor in which they were held by the people.

The religious mediation performed by Two-Spirits keep the the spiritual health of the people strong.  They were communicators between the seen world and the unseen world, bringing the blessings of the Great Spirit to the Nation in a variety of practical ways.  Among the Navajo people, Two-Spirits were great artists, philosophers, and healers, the Renaissance people of the Nation.

Balboa’s dogs set on Panamanian “sodomites,” DeBry 1594.

But Europeans reacted to Two-Spirit and gender variant traditions among the First Nations with hostility and physical violence, condemning them for being “sodomites.”  As drawings and paintings of the 16th  and 17th Century pogroms against queer life among the Native Nations show, the colonizers exterminated Two-Spirits and banned dances and ceremonies honoring them whenever possible.  A notorious example is the 1594 sketch of  Balboa’s troops setting their dogs on Panamanian Two-Spirits, tearing them to pieces. David Stannard in American Holocaust records English horrors against the Pequots that followed the Spanish example: “blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives to seize them.”

Many native people eventually succumbed to the colonizers’ pressure, and forgot the old ways of their ancestors.  Many converted to the strict sexual and gender binary of Western Christianity.  The legacy of this cultural amnesia is especially grim among First Nations people today who continue to discriminate against the gender variant among them on the Reservation.  As the intolerance of the Navajo council leadership toward same-sex marriage recently demonstrated, the Two-Spirit traditions of the ancestors is on shaky ground. The hate crime murder of Two-Spirit teenager, F.C. Martinez Jr. in Cortes, Colorado is the direct result of anti-queer hostility aggravated by conservative Christian prejudices.

The good news is that queer life among our First Nations ancestors is regaining respect.  Elders of the people, and activists in the native LGBTQ community are reviving the knowledge of these practices.  As NE2SS reports, “In some nations that have revived this tradition, or brought it once again into the light, Two Spirit people are again fulfilling some of the roles and regaining the honor and respect of their communities.”

This Thanksgiving, as we move beyond and behind the mythology of the Pilgrims and Indians, it is important for us to remember that queer life was held in honor for thousands of years before the first European set foot on these shore.  Queer life in North America is original; hostility and religious intolerance towards gender variance are unwanted, illegal aliens.

November 21, 2012 Posted by | anti-LGBT hate crime murder, First Nations, GLBTQ, Hate Crimes, Heterosexism and homophobia, LGBTQ, religious intolerance, Slurs and epithets, Special Comments, Texas, transgender persons, transphobia, Two-Spirit people | , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Honoring Queer Heritage: A Thanksgiving Season Special Comment

The End of the Beginning: How the Passage of the Matthew Shepard Act Transforms Us

shepard_smallResearching LGBT hate crimes for four years has changed my life.  Now that the passage of the Matthew Shepard Act is imminent, I feel another sort of change coming: to my work, to the LGBTQ community, and to my country.  For decades, families, loved ones, law enforcement officers, and social justice advocates have prayed for, labored for, and agitated for a federal law extending protection to queer folk victimized by anti-LGBT violence.  Tens of thousands of Americans, straight and gay, have labored tirelessly for this result.  Our well-practiced shoulders are again set to the task, and with one more great heave, the first major expansion of legal protection against physical harm for vulnerable Americans in the 21st century will make it across the finish line.  The end of the beginning has come at last.  No more than that, and no less.

The dead are beyond further physical harm.  So many hundreds have died at the hands of the ignorant, the malicious, and the sincerely bigoted.  Gay Charlie Howard drowned in Bangor, Maine.  Lesbian Talana Kreeger, manually disemboweled in Wilmington, North Carolina. Navajo Two-Spirit youth, F.C. Martinez, Jr., brained with a 25-pound rock in a blind canyon in Cortez, Colorado.  African American transwoman, Duanna Johnson, shot down in a Memphis, Tennessee alley.  Pfc. Barry Winchell, murdered by a fellow soldier with a baseball bat at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on the suspicion that he was gay.  And the archetype of them all, young Matthew Shepard, pistol-whipped into a coma and left to die, tied to the foot of a buck fence in Laramie, Wyoming.  For every victim whose name is remembered, scores of anonymous others have died, their agonies unreported, their names forgotten.

What will change for all these victims of hate, once the Shepard Act becomes law?  And, what about their families, lovers and spouses—what will change for them?

For the dead, the change will come subtly, like a gift of dignity.  The Shepard Act is not only for the living.  Those who have died at the hands of hatred will finally receive a measure of vindication.  No longer will they be merely the debris of social history.  Their stories will be told with renewed passion, and more and more people will want to know who they were.  Their lives will take on a greater sense of meaning to the LGBTQ community, who will find encouragement to embrace these dead as their own—just as blacks, Jews, and other besieged peoples have embraced their fallen friends and family members.  As these LGBTQ victims have become my teachers in my quest to recover their stories and the meaning of their lives, the queer community will find new strength for justice by remembering them.

For the families and loved ones of these victims, perhaps a measure of peace will come at last.  Their loss, of course, is incalculable.  Their pain is beyond reckoning.  I have seen the furrows in their brows, the lingering sadness in their eyes.  As Ryan Skipper’s mother Pat said to me, there is no closure for her and those like her.  The change will come, I suspect, with a sense of honor, and a quiet assurance that their beloved will have not died in vain.  When the Shepard Act finally passes, I will think first of all about the valiant witness of the mothers—women who never sought the spotlight, but who fought back tears to learn how to speak out for their children and for everyone else’s children.  Signing day in President Obama’s office will be most of all for Judy Shepard, Pat Mulder, Elke Kennedy, Pauline Mitchell, Denise King, Kathy Jo Gaither and everyone else whose flesh and blood have consecrated the moment of passage.

Those who believe in justice will feel the change, too.  The LGBTQ community will be challenged to mature and take their place among communities of survivors, witnesses who understand that it takes hard work to make hope become real for everyone.  At the stroke of a pen, the entire LGBTQ community will experience the greatest lift since the Stonewall Rebellion forty years ago.  But that will not be all.  The America I know and love will encounter change on the day the Shepard Act becomes law, too.  Summoned by the angel of justice, the American people will face the challenge to make the promise of the Constitution come true for their transgender, gay, bi, and lesbian neighbors and friends.

Passage and signing the Matthew Shepard Act into law will not magically stop the killing.  Record numbers of LGBTQ Americans, especially young transgender people of color, are dying violently all across the land.  But the high water mark of hatred will be scotched with the stroke of a pen on the day President Obama keeps his promise and signs the bill.  The end of the beginning of full equality for my people will come.  And we who believe in justice will not rest until it comes.

~ Stephen V. Sprinkle, Director of the Unfinished Lives Project

October 16, 2009 Posted by | Hate Crimes, Legislation, Matthew Shepard Act, Politics, Remembrances, Social Justice Advocacy, Washington, D.C. | , , , , , | 3 Comments

Fight Hate Crimes Campaign Launches Effort to Pass Matthew Shepard Act

hrccapitol-hill

The Human Rights Campaign has launched its big federal legislative push to enact the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, also called the Matthew Shepard Act, named in memory of the most widely recognized LGBT hate crimes victim in American history.  Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by two Laramie, Wyoming men in October 1998.  Both pled guilty, and are serving life sentences for their crime.  Visit the HRC site for more information: www.hrc.org/sites/hatecrimes/index.asp.

Martinez casket header for Denver Post article on F.C.'s murder

Martinez casket header for Denver Post article on F.C.'s murder

Fred C. Martinez, Jr. (1985-2001), a sixteen-year-old Navajo, is featured in the HRC campaign.  He was one of the first subjects of research for the Unfinished Lives Project, and will figure prominently in Dr. Sprinkle’s forthcoming book, Unfinished Lives: Reviving the Memory of LGBT Hate Crimes Murder Victims. The book is still in the writing stage at this point, with a projected completion date of September 2009.

"Dance to the Berdache," George Catlin, ca. 1830

"Dance to the Berdache," George Catlin, ca. 1830

Martinez was a Two-Spirit person, also called a berdache. F.C., as his friends called him, suffered harassment in the Cortez, CO public schools for his transgender identity.  In June 2001, on the night of the Ute Mountain Carnival and Rodeo, Shaun Murphy, a resident of Farmington, NM, lured F.C. into a narrow, deep canyon cut diagonally through the south part of Cortez, and cracked open his skull with a 25 pound rock.  Murphy left him to die of exposure and blood loss, bragging the night of the murder that he had “bug-smashed a joto,” slang for “fag.”  At the time F.C.’s body was discovered by small boys playing on the canyon floor five days after the homicide, his remains were so decomposed that his mother could identify him only by the blue bandana he wore when he left her home.

fredmartinezjr

Shaun Murphy, F.C.'s killer

Shaun Murphy, F.C.'s killer

Murphy, 18, was sentenced to 40 years for F.C.’s murder.  There is little to indicate that F.C., the most famous person ever to live in Cortez, had ever existed.  Neither Colorado nor the United States has enacted anti-hate crime legislation.  His mother, Pauline Mitchell, still works as an advocate for LGBT people and for the memory of her son.  She visits his grave often, kneeling on the grass, talking to him in Navajo and English, thanking him for understanding that things are taking so long to change.

F.C. and his mom, Pauline Mitchell

F.C. and his mom, Pauline Mitchell

There is strong medicine in the F.C. Martinez, Jr. story.  As a nadleeh, as Navajo people refer to their Two-Spirits, he was a sign of the balance between the feminine and the masculine in us all.  He walked the Way of Beauty.  As the Navajo Blessingway Chant says:

Earth’s body has become my body

by means of this I shall live on.

Earth’s mind has become my mind

by means of this I shall live on.

Earth’s voice has become my voice

by means of this I shall live on.

navajo

April 2, 2009 Posted by | Bludgeoning, Colorado, harassment, Hate Crimes, Heterosexism and homophobia, Legislation, Native Americans, Perpetrators of Hate Crime, Slurs and epithets, transgender persons, Uncategorized, Washington, D.C., Wyoming | 2 Comments

The Victims

The one thing these victimized people share is an unfinished life: love foreclosed, potential ripped away, relationships brutally terminated, and future contributions stolen away from us by outrageous, irrational hatred. The stories of these unfinished lives must not remain untold. Human dignity and decency demand they be told and remembered. To date, claiming the victims of anti-gay hate crime violence has happened only sporadically, and in fragmentary, short-lived ways. The LGBT community deserves to hear these stories, so that they may remember their own and honor them. How we, the living survivors of violence, remember and honor our dead largely determines the strength and character of our humanity. Unless stories like these are told, regardless of the pain, the killers of the dream of freedom from fear will diminish our community.   Those we remember and claim as our own:
Andrew Anthos ( 1929– 2007). 72-years-old, bludgeoned to death with a pipe near a bus stop in Detroit, Michigan, after affirming to his assailant that he was gay.
Gwen Amber Rose Araujo (1985 – 2002). A male-to-female transgender woman from Hayward, California, murdered with a skillet and a can of tomatoes, and buried in a shallow grave.
Gregory Beauchamp, 21
Gregory Beauchamp (1981-2002), 21, shot to death from a car window in Cincinnati, OH by a man shouting anti-gay epithets.  Beauchamp was on his way to a New Year’s Eve party.
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Tiffany Berry (1985-2006).  21-year-old African American transwoman, murdered in Memphis, TN, by a man who said he didn’t like the way she touched him.
Paul Broussard (1964 – 1991). 27-years-old, gay banker beaten to death by a gang of ten teenage boys as he left a gay nightclub in the Montrose area of Houston, Texas.
Bill Clayton (1978 – 1995). A seventeen-year-old bisexual man in Olympia, Washington, who was assaulted in a gay bashing incident, became an outspoken advocate for hate crimes laws for a short time, and took his own life barely a month after the attack.
Amancio “Dalia” Corrales (1982 – 2005). A Mexican-American cosmetologist and gifted female impersonator who was stabbed to death and thrown in the Colorado River in Yuma, Arizona.
Kenneth Cummings Jr. (1960 – 2007). Southwest Airlines attendant in Metro Houston murdered in his own home by an ex-con who claimed God commissioned him to kill gay men, “like the Prophet Elijah.”
Roberto “Pancho” Duncanson (1987 – 2007). 20-years-old, stabbed to death by an assailant shouting anti-gay epithets, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York.
Bella Evangelista (1978 – 2003). 25-years-old, transgender Latina, shot to death by a transphobe in Washington, DC.
Daniel “Dano” Fetty (1966 – 2004). A deaf and homeless gay man from Waverly, Ohio, stripped naked and literally thrown away in a dumpster.
Billy Jack Gaither (1960 – 1999). A gay man, brutally murdered and immolated near Sylacauga, Alabama at a secluded site on Peckerwood Creek.
Edgar “Eddie” Garzón (1966 – 2001). 35-years-old, gay Colombian emigré who worked as a theatre set designer, beaten into a coma outside a gay bar in Queens, New York, and died three weeks later.
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Michael Scott Goucher (1987-2009).  21-year-old U.S. Army veteran, ambushed by two assailants and stabbed over 45 times on the side of a snowy road in Price Township, Pennsylvania.
Sakia LaTona Gunn (1987 – 2003). An African American lesbian from Newark, New Jersey, stabbed by assailants at a bus stop, while defending her girlfriend.
Richard Hernandez (1970 – 2008). 38-years-old, gruesomely dismembered in his North Dallas, Texas, apartment.
Charles O. “Charlie” Howard (1961 – 1984). A gay student drowned after being thrown by his assailants into the Kenduskeag Stream in downtown Bangor, Maine, while begging that he couldn’t swim.
duanna-johnson
Duanna Johnson (1965-2008). 43-year-old African American transwoman, famously beaten by police in June 2008, was fatally shot in the head “on her usual corner” in North Memphis, TN just a few months later.  Johnson had a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the Memphis police at the time.
Sean William Kennedy (1987 – 2007). Fatally assaulted by an 18-year-old in Greenville, South Carolina who received less of a sentence for the murder than if he had killed a dog, according to Greenville municipal statutes.
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Lawrence Fobes “Larry” King (1993 – 2008). A fifteen-year-old in Oxnard, California, shot in the head with a small calibre pistol brought to class by a 14-year-old schoolmate who had harassed him for his feminine presentation for months.
Talana Quay Kreeger (1957 – 1990). A lesbian carpenter, manually disemboweled by a long haul trucker in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Fred C. Martinez Jr. (1985 – 2001). A Two-Spirit Navajo lured into a Cortez, Colorado, canyon and killed with a twenty-five pound rock by a man who bragged that he had “bug-smashed a joto.”
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Thanh Nguyen (1962 – 1991). A gay Vietnamese American who fled to Dallas, Texas, for freedom, only to be shot and killed in downtown Reverchon Park.
Michael J. Sandy (1977 – 2006). An African American gay man, beaten and forced on foot into freeway traffic in New York City.
Allen R. Schindler Jr. (1969 – 1992). A United States Navy Seaman from the Chicago area, stomped to death by his shipmates while deployed in Japan.
Matthew Wayne Shepard (1976 – 1998). A gay student at the University of Wyoming, pistol-whipped and tied to a buck fence in Laramie.
Adolphus Simmons (1990 – 2008). An 18-year-old, femininely presenting teen, shot to death while carrying out his trash in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Satendar Singh (1980 – 2007). A gay Asian Indian American mobbed to death in Lake Natoma, California, by Russian evangelical Christians shouting homophobic slurs.
Ryan Keith Skipper (1981 – 2007). Stabbed nineteen times and left to bleed out on a lonely dirt road by two assailants in Polk County, Florida.
Emonie Spaulding (1978 – 2003). 25-years-old, African American transgender woman, beaten and shot to death in Washington, DC.
Brandon Teena (1971-1993). A 22-year-old female-to-male transgender person, raped and murdered in Humboldt, Nebraska.
Juana Vega (1965 – 2001). 36-years-old, Chicana Lesbian shot to death in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, by her partner’s brother who disapproved of her sexual orientation.
Jeremy Waggoner (1971– 2008). Popular 37-year-old hair stylist, found savagely bludgeoned and stabbed to death in a field near Royal Oak, Michigan.
Arthur “J.R.” Warren (1974-2000). An African American learning disabled  gay man from Grant Town, West Virginia, butchered to death and then run over multiple times to mask the murder.
Scotty Joe Weaver (1986 – 2004). Brutally tortured and murdered by roommates while pleading for his life in Bay Minette, Alabama.  His murderers urinated on his mutilated body before immolating it in a secluded field in rural Baldwin County.
Nicolas West (1970 – 1993). 23-years-old, shot 20 times and left to die in a clay pit outside Tyler, Texas.
Diane Whipple (1968-2001). A lesbian LaCrosse coach from Moraga, California, mauled to death by her neighbors’ dogs in the infamous San Francisco Dog-Maul case.
Ebony Whitaker (1988 – 2008). 20-year-old male-to-female transgender woman, shot to death by an unknown assailant in Memphis, Tennessee.
Robert Whiteside (1950 – 2006). Noted Fabergé artist, found shot to death in his bed-and-breakfast in Mount Vernon, Texas.
Julianne “Julie” Williams (1971 – 1996). A lesbian gunned down with partner Lollie Winans on the Appalachian Trail near Luray, Virginia.
Simmie Lewis “Beyoncé” Williams Jr. (1990 – 2008). A seventeen-year-old African American transperson, snuffed out clothed in a dress on Sistrunk Avenue in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Laura “Lollie” Winans (1970 – 1996). A lesbian gunned down with partner Julie Williams on the Appalachian Trail near Luray, Virginia.
Barry Winchell
Barry Winchell (1977 – 1999). A United States Army Private First Class from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, fatally bludgeoned with a baseball bat.
Daniel Yakovleff (1988– 2008). Well-regarded hair stylist found brutally stabbed to death in his Boston, Massachusetts, apartment.
Angie Zapata (1988– 2008). 20-year-old Latina transgender woman, murdered with a fire extinguisher by a date who discovered that she was biologically male in Greeley, Colorado.

June 30, 2008 Posted by | | 74 Comments

   

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