Fate of Angie Zapata’s Confessed Murderer Goes to Jury
Allen Ray Andrade, on trial for the Murder of transgender woman Angie Zapata, awaits his verdict in Greeley, CO today. Prosecution goes for first degree murder. Andrade, already confessed to the murder, was deeply homophobic, according to statements from the jail to girlfriends, such as “Gay things must die.”
Justice Coming for Angie Zapata
Angie Zapata, 18, and alleged murderer, Allen Andrade, courtesy of ABC News
Denver, CO: Allen Andrade, 32, told investigators that he bashed Angie Zapata in the head twice with a fire extinguisher. He confessed that he thought he had “killed it” when Zapata roused, and then he clobbered her again, delivering the coup de grace. That was last July. Now he is slated to go on trial for bias-motivated murder in Greeley, CO where he carried out the crime because he found out Zapata, an 18-year-old male-to-female transwoman, was biologically male.
Angie Zapata
Born Justin Zapata, Angie had been living as a woman since the age of 16. She had striking beauty, attracting many admirers, though according to her sister, Monica, her loves ended by her boyfriends going back to biological women. Angie was a gentle, graceful, loving sister, who suspended her life in Fort Lupton, where she was raised, to come to Greeley to help her sister take care of her children. Monica found Angie’s battered corpse in her apartment, covered in a blanket.
For two weeks, investigators sought the killer, and finally arrested Andrade on July 30. He made an initial confession which a judge ruled inadmissible on a technicality. He has been held in jail without bond since his arrest for the murder. While behind bars Andrade made recorded phone calls to girlfriend claiming that when he discovered Zapata’s biological status, he “snapped.” In another conversation, he told his girlfriend that “gay things need to die.” The phone call transcripts and recordings will be admitted in evidence in the trial.
According to the Associated Press, Andrade is going to be the first person prosecuted for a hate crime under the sexual orientation section of Colorado’s hate crimes law. Colorado is one of 11 states to have hate crimes enhancements in their statutes. The comprehensive Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on April 2, 2009, would allow the FBI and other Federal Agencies to investigate such crimes, and to support the local authorities in carrying out their investigations, as well. Passage of the LLEHCPA remains a critical element of deterring and punishing hate crimes offenders for violence related to sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.
While nothing can bring Angie Zapata back to her family, friends and loved ones, justice for her and for all transgender victims of hate crime violence, which has been so long in coming, may finally be on the horizon. Stay in touch for further developments.
The Year in Review
As 2008 draws to a close, hate crime statistics from 2007 are finally coming into clearer focus. Both the FBI and various anti-violence programs are verifying hate crime increases perpetrated against the LGBT community-at-large. Sadly, the findings from 2007 have been corroborated by ongoing violent acts in 2008.
FBI Hate Crimes Statistics for 2007: Sexual-orientation bias related crimes are up 18%.* National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs disputes these statistics, claiming a 24% increase, at least. The official report says that in 2007, law enforcement agencies reported 1,460 hate crime offenses based on sexual-orientation bias to the FBI. Of these offenses:
- 59.2 percent were classified as anti-male homosexual bias.
- 24.8 percent were reported as anti-homosexual bias.
- 12.6 percent were prompted by an anti-female homosexual bias.
- 1.8 percent were the result of an anti-heterosexual bias.
- 1.6 percent were classified as anti-bisexual bias.
(*Note: Anti-transgender incidents are not reported in these statistics, since law-enforcement is not required by law to report them.)
Clarence Patton, Executive Director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project (NYAVP), noted the “dramatic increase in the number of anti-lesbian, gay and bisexual incidents reported—though the overall number of reports captured by the FBI rose only 8%, the number of reports impacting our communities rose at more than twice that rate.”
The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), a coalition of 30 member programs including the NYAVP, reported that gay bashing incidents actually rose 24% compared to 2006. 2007 also had the third-highest murder rate in a decade, more than doubling from 10 in 2006 to 21 in 2007.
Even these statistics hardly give the picture of the crisis of violence against LGBT people all across the United States. The true number of incidents perpetrated against queer folk is probably much higher, as Avy Skolnik, national programs co-ordinator of the NCAVP, reported:
“We know that the 2,430 people who called on our organizations in 2007 are only a small fraction of the actual number of LGBT people who experienced bias-motivated violence. Anecdotally, we constantly hear stories of LGBT people surviving abuse—sometimes multiple attacks per day when that violence comes from a fellow student, a neighbor, a co-worker, a landlord, or a boss.”
Richard Hernandez, butchered in his apartment bathroom
Dallas, Texas, boasting one of the largest LGBT populations in the country, saw LGBT people taking to the streets in protest of the alarming number of attacks. Two high-profile murders and several brutal assaults, including the “Silence of the Lambs style” dismemberment of gay man, Richard Hernandez, a 34-year-old citizen of Dallas, sparked street protests from United Community Against Gay Hate Crime to draw the attention of the public to the plight of LGBT citizens.
Gay Apartheid
Behind each number in these statistics are real people: victims, family, friends, bereaved lovers. This is the human cost of Gay Apartheid. The real target of these atrocities, however, is the idea of America, a country where all people may pursue their lives without fear of intimidation or violence. Until American laws and the attitudes behind them change to reflect the inclusion of all people in the constitutional rights and privileges afforded some, then this nation must be brought to face so-called “legal” acts of apartheid against the LGBT community.
Forty years after the Stonewall Uprising in New York, universally recognized as the birth of the LGBT Rights Movement, 29 states have constitutional amendments passed for the sole purpose of depriving LGBT citizens the same rights as heterosexuals. States have enacted bans against gay parenting and adoption. Not only has the Federal Government passed the “Defense of Marriage Act” (DOMA), and instituted the oppressive “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy for the U.S. Military, but 15 states have barred same-sex marriage, and 18 states have legislation limiting domestic partnerships and civil unions. The passage of Proposition 8 in California, repealing the right to marry given to its citizens earlier in the year, is just the latest act of apartheid in this country. Violence is following the law, not the other way around.
The definition of Apartheid is “a system of laws applied to one category of citizens in order to isolate them and keep them from having privileges and opportunities given to all others,” according to elder LGBT statesman, Herb Hamsher, writing for the Huffington Post. The Unfinished Lives Project cannot agree with Hamsher more when he says, “Our role is to hold a mirror up to the country and no longer allow it to shift the focus away from what we have become. We have become a nation increasingly devoted to an encroaching system of apartheid for a designated category of its citizens.”
When the tyranny of the majority goes unchecked, and the apartheid system apes the bias against LGBT people in communities and religious institutions, the American ideal of the protection of the minority from the excesses of their neighbors is exposed as a fantasy. An Apartheid America is not the nation of the free or the brave. Hate Crime murders and other violent crimes against LGBT people are hundreds and thousands of mirrors held up to the nation. We must continue to stand up, hold up these brutally frank mirrors to the disfigurement of America until our fellow citizens repudiate the travesty of the law these hate crime statistics represent.
José Sucuzhañay dead after Brooklyn hate crime attack
José O. Sucuzhañay
31-year-old real estate broker José O. Sucuzhañay died on Friday, December 12th, after spending five days on a ventilator in a brain-dead condition.
Sucuzhañay and his brother Romel were walking home arm-in-arm after a night of drinking in a Brooklyn bar when three assailants attacked the brothers, having mistaken them as gay. The attackers emerged from a maroon SUV, yelling, “Check out those faggots over there.” The attackers also shouted racial epithets. Witnesses said the murderers first smashed a bottle over Sucuzhañay’s head and then struck him in the head with an aluminum baseball bat.
Gay City News describes the attack this way:
According to police, one assailant broke the bottle over Sucuzhanay’s head. After the victim fell to the ground, another of the attackers began beating him with the bat. Romel Sucuzhanay managed to flee from the path of the first assailant who chased after him with the broken beer bottle. He finally prevailed on the men to stop beating his brother when he showed them that he had a cellphone to use to call police.
Sucuzhañay’s mother was still on her way from Ecuador when José died at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens. The family had hoped to keep their brother alive on life support long enough for their mother to arrive and say good-bye to her son.
A third brother, Diego Sucuzhañay, calls his brother’s death “a loss beyond words.”
Sources:
Gay City News: “Hate Crime Victim Brain-Dead”
Box Turtle Bulletin: “Capital Crime: Appearing Gay”
Newsday: “Immigrant dead in possible hate crime”
Box Turtle Bulletin: “Brooklyn Hate Crime Victim Dies”
Gay man murdered and dismembered in Dallas
Richard Hernandez
According to a September article published in the Dallas Voice, gay man Richard Hernandez was murdered in his Dallas apartment and then dismembered in the bathtub. After Hernandez failed to appear at his job, worried co-workers called the police. The police went to Hernandez’s apartment to investigate, and found large amounts of blood in the living room and tissue from the victim’s internal organs in the bathtub.
Purchases made on Hernandez’s credit card led police to a suspect, Seth Lawton Winder, who was then charged with credit card fraud and capital murder. Seth’s father, Robert Winder, has pointed to his son’s schizophrenic history as a possible explanation for the crime, but police have also recovered a digital camera containing images of the suspect inside the victim’s apartment which might suggest a different theory about why the murder occurred.
Friends of the victim say Hernandez was a valued friend. “Rich was probably one of the most sincere, sweet people you will ever meet,” says one friend. “Rich always had a smile and would drop anything to help anybody, and it’s very, very sad what happened to him. It’s a very gruesome, horrible thing to happen to someone so sweet and so generous.”
Richard Hernandez was 38-years-old.
Zapata tragedy unites community against hate
According to an article published this week in the Greeley Tribune, the tragedy of Angie Zapata’s hate-crime murder in mid-July has unified family, friends, advocacy groups, and supporters to condemn intolerance.
Gathering together on August 10th, over two-hundred people remembered Angie Zapata and celebrated her life and gender identity.
Kelly Costello, director of victim services for the Colorado Anti-Violence Program, said all people, despite their differences, deserve to live without fear. Remarks made by transgender activist Donna Rose underscored Costello’s comments: “It takes courage to live in a world that tries to force you into a box,” she said.
Zapata’s murder has also invoked the memory of other hate-crime victims, including Matthew Shepard. According to the article, “One person read a note from Judy Shepard, the mother of Matthew Shepard, who was killed near Laramie, Wyo., in 1998 because he was gay.”
Also in attendance at the Saturday vigil were Rep. Jim Riesberg, D-Greeley, and other lawmakers and community activists.
Monica Zapata, Angie’s sister, also spoke at the vigil. “She always knew she was supposed to be a girl. And we knew it too,” she said. “Don’t remember her as transgendered but remember her as a beautiful, loving woman.”
Monica also said, “You are who you are and you should never be ashamed.”
Greeley Police and the Zapata Family Speak about Angie Zapata’s Murder
View a Greeley Police press conference, where Police Chief Jerry Garner announces the arrest of Angie Zapata’s alleged killer.
In the video, Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck expressed how Weld County and the City of Greeley will dedicate their best efforts to prosecute the man who murdered Angie Zapata. Buck said, “It doesn’t matter who the victim is, or whether the victim is victimized because they are a certain race, religion, sexual orientation. It’s a crime, and in Weld County, in Greeley, we’re going to do the best we can to enforce the law. It [murder] can’t be tolerated at any level.”
Buck continued, saying, “I hope that if anything positive were to come of this we would develop a stronger relationship with the gay and lesbian, transgender, community so that they understand just how seriously we take crimes like this, and how vigorously we will pursue justice in a situation like this…. We are not tolerant of people who would do harm to the residents of our town.”
Excerpts of the press conference are reported by the Greeley Tribune:
In this video, members of the Zapata family speak about the death of Angie Zapata:
In a recent article, CBS Channel 4 in Denver published this photo of Zapata’s alleged killer, Allen Ray Andrade:
According to the CBS Channel 4 caption, “Allen Ray Andrade, 31, faces several charges, including second-degree murder in the death of Justin Zapata, 20, who was known as Angie Zapata. Her bloodied, battered body was discovered in her apartment by her sister on July 17.”
Justin “Angie” Zapata murdered in Colorado hate crime
Teenager Justin “Angie” Zapata was found dead in her Greeley, Colorado, apartment on July 17, the apparent victim of an anti-LGBT hate crime. Zapata, who was 18 years old, sustained wounds to the head and face with a fire extinguisher.
Kelly Costello, director of victim services at the Colorado Anti-Violence Program, served as Zapata’s family’s spokesperson and said this is not the first time transgendered persons have been targeted by violent crimes in Colorado. “It’s frightening but not necessarily surprising,” Costello said. “It does send out a ripple effect and lets everyone know how vulnerable they are.” Costello’s remarks appeared in a Denver Post article on July 25.
According to a July 31 Associated Press article, Zapata’s killer, 20-year-old Allen Ray Andrade, made remarks showing he did not afford his victim the status of a full human being. While speaking to investigators about his involvement in the hate crime, Andrade referred to Zapata as an “it”. Andrade said that after hitting his victim twice in the head with a fire extinguisher, he thought he had “killed it.”
Responding to the suspect’s remarks, Greeley Police Chief Jerry Garner said he felt disgusted by the comment. “It’s a horrible thing to say.”
After reading about her sister’s killer, Monica Murguia, told Denver’s KDVR-TV that Andrade deserved to remain behind bars forever. “He took a part of our heart, he did, when he killed her.”
Special Comment: Newsweek magazine and the Re-victimization of Larry King
by Stephen V. Sprinkle
If only journalists and their editors had a Hippocratic Oath to hold them responsible for the stories they tell about the dead. Medical doctors pledge, “First, do no harm.” If doctors proceed to do harm to their patients, then there is a professional society to hold them accountable. The editor of Newsweek, and the team who wrote the Cover Story on Larry King, “Young, Gay and Murdered,” for the July 28, 2008 issue have exercised no constraints on themselves, and unlike the backlash against Dan Rather’s reportage on President Bush’s military service record, there appears to be no one in the journalistic community willing to call their hand for re-victimizing an infamously murdered 15-year-old boy, Larry King. King, you will recall, was shot twice in the head by his alleged killer, 14-year-old classmate, Brandon McInerney.
I want to disclose fully. I am an out gay man who has been studying and writing on the stories of LGBT hate crimes murder victims. I am director of the Unfinished Lives Project that seeks to remember and honor the lives and deaths of women and men who have died violently because of whom others perceived them to be. Further, I am writing a book that will tell the stories of over twenty such LGBT people, and Larry King is one of them. I have spoken publicly at the Vigil for Larry King held in my hometown, Dallas, Texas. That is my “agenda”: to see that stories such as Larry’s are told in such a way that the society may encounter these murdered women, men and youths as human beings who are basically unremarkable from the rest of America, with the difference that as LGBT people, they belong to the last great group in our country it is still permissible to abuse.
Editor Daniel Klaidman, lead reporter Ramin Setoodeh, and team members Andrew Murr and Jennifer Ordoñez do not spell out their sexual orientations or their agendas for us to examine so that we can more fully evaluate how they tell Larry’s and Brandon’s stories. We are left only with their silence on these matters, antiseptic silence that suggests an objectivity that no one ever has when it comes to issues of society and morality. Journalists may have “trained subjectivities” they can bring to their tasks, but that is all they have, and to pretend anything else is dishonest. They do indeed have their agendas, and these agendas serve some end, but we are only left to speculate about what they may be.
The article is written from the angle that Larry’s story, being less “clear cut” because it is “more complicated than it had first appeared,” needs to be rescued from the LGBT people who are, in the words Setoodeh quotes from Larry’s father, using his son’s death as “a gay-rights issue, because it makes a poster child out of my son.” In brief, Setoodeh and his team write about Larry as “troubled,” “disturbed,” and quite possibly “a danger to himself.” The accounts of what growing up as a femininely-presenting boy of mixed race is like in grade and middle school are touched lightly, and the authors then go for their real goal: to pathologize Larry medically, suggesting that there was something sick about him. His diagnosis as ADHD is given, his history of therapy, and an assertion that runs throughout the article that Larry yearned for attention and didn’t know his own mind when it came to being LGBT. The authority for these statements is his father’s quotation of an anonymous “therapist” whose credentials to evaluate a gay youth are never given, and teachers most of whom by the authors’ own admission believed Larry to be a big problem. In contrast to the column space given to Brandon whose peccadilloes and flaws are presented minimally as the outworking of a troubled home, the dark star of the article is Larry who dressed provocatively, who cannot walk well in his heels, who sported glitter, spoke in a “roar,” was a “bully,” and sexually harassed Brandon and others in school. Setoodeh and his associates indict Larry without the benefit of dissenting voices. There is one mention of his being “gentle,” a gay stereotype. The accounts of classmates who claimed he was brave, unique, and nice are perfunctorily mentioned in the context of a school memorial service, leaving the unspoken assumption with us that memorials by grieving students are well meaning but shallow. The overwhelming assessment of the authors of the article is that Larry was a boy too hard for any parent or school to handle, who needed protection from others and himself like Britney Spears, and whose terrorizing behavior made teachers and students “not unsympathetic” to his killer.
The second irresponsible feature of the article is the way Joy Epstein, a lesbian, is put on trial as the alleged instigator of Larry’s outrages. She has an “agenda” of “gay rights.” Greg King, Larry’s adoptive father, is set over and against her, alleging that Epstein confused “her role as a junior-high principal,…asserting her beliefs for gay rights” in her dealings with his son. Even Epstein’s promotion to principal at another school because of her qualifications is portrayed as an attack on the King family. The lesbian school administrator is painted with a rather broad brush as a manipulating authority figure who is somehow the wicked puppet-master behind Larry’s excessive, needy narcissism.
The third and fourth irresponsible aspects of this article are the use of parentheses to soften the way Larry is indicted for his own demise, and the refusal to quote anyone who liked, taught or counseled him for Casa Pacifica. Editor Klaidman parenthetically whispers in his Editor’s Desk introduction to the Cover Story that, even though Larry’s behavior may have led to his death (nothing warrants his murder). The use of parentheses downplays the information encased in them. It is like an aside, and here it is used essentially to set aside the truth that should have been at the core of this article, not secreted away in punctuation: There is never an excuse for murder. Ever.
The absence of any voices from Casa Pacifica with the exception of a hearsay quote from Vicki Murphy is a failure of journalism on the part of the authors. Casa voices were not omitted in the cover story on the King murder published by The Advocate in its April 8, 2008 issue, and their omission in the Newsweek story raises the question of whether those people who knew Larry best in his last months have been silenced by attorneys, or were thought to have nothing to contribute that the authors wished to quote. The silence is provocative, and no reason for it is given. If Setoodeh spent five months rooting around Oxnard and environs, he surely could have written more than the scant, spare paragraph on Casa Pacifica in the article. If Casa Pacifica was the place where Larry was best able to explore his budding gay identity in security and acceptance, if indeed it was a time for him that “was the happiest of his life,” why leave it out? Why deal with the Ventura gay youth group meetings that were important during Larry’s residence at Casa in a single sentence? The interaction of the two main institutions in Larry’s life, Casa Pacifica and E.O. Green Middle School, is entirely left out, along with any insight on how this institutional interplay shaped the context of the murder.
The emotional impact of this irresponsible storytelling is that Larry King, the primary victim, the person who died with two bullets in his head, is actually the heavy in the Newsweek article. His killer, McInerney, who is undoubtedly the secondary victim in this tragic chain of events, is portrayed as confused and understandably violent toward this dangerous wild child. LGBT people are portrayed as agenda-driven and manipulative. Teachers, the superintendent, and the school board are treated sympathetically, and Casa Pacifica is essentially written out of the equation, along with the Ventura gay youth group Larry attended.
It is no surprise that Larry had his faults. LGBT hate crime murder victims are as noble and as ordinary as every one else. Even if the “pathology report” given about him was 100% true and accurate, what in any of this rises to the level of murder by two bullets in the back of the head in plain sight of all the youth in the classroom? Nothing. What is going on here is common in the treatment of the murders of LGBT people: discredit the humanity and character of the victim. Make bizarre behavior or drugs or a criminal record the lens through which the murderer is seen. Muffle the moral impact of the crime, downplay the hate crime aspect, and re-victimize the victim. After Satoodeh and his associates got done with Larry King, there was little left to mourn.
The Newsweek journalists and editors behind the “Young, Gay, and Murdered” story framed their article and selected their sources carefully to make a point about the equation of sexual harassment with male feminine-presentation and gender-variance in middle schools. This is not a neutral or objective piece, and it was not ultimately about Larry King at all. It was about changing the subject from a brutal school murder to “the limits of tolerance.”
When major articles invoke an inquiry into “the limits of tolerance” as the reason to publish them, we must ask whose sense of tolerance and which accounts of the range of acceptable expression dominate the story. The “tolerant” mercies of heterosexists are cruel to gay folk. California is stereotypically presented as the liberal incubator of gay rights by the authors of the Newsweek article. No one has paused long enough to ask how many murders and gay bashings lie behind these policies and laws in the Golden State. There have been so many, in fact, these laws were crafted and enacted to protect a vulnerable population from physical harm and a whole catalogue of discrimination. People are still being killed for being gay in the Bay Area, in Sacramento and environs, and in L.A. The report of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs for 2007 showed that one of the most alarming increases in anti-LGBT violence in the country took place in Los Angeles—100% in one year. The point is that limits of tolerance cannot be invoked if there is no place in America where tolerance is a leading virtue. However that may sound, it is true. LGBT people are treated as second-class Americans, and it is somehow permissible in this country for the sexual majority to impose “acceptable limits of tolerance” upon people whose lives they do not understand.
Larry King was a boy whose life is held up to a level of scrutiny his journalistic judges could not withstand themselves. If the “gay activists” are guilty of using Larry as a justification for their purposes, the Newsweek team is no better. The context in which to understand Larry King’s murder is not just the school culture of blue-collar Oxnard. It is the nationwide context of violence against teenage boys who present femininely in a dangerous world of fragile, macho egos. 15-year-old Larry King died brutally in the same two-month period of 2008 during which 18-year-old Adolphus “Beyoncé” Simmons in North Charleston, South Carolina was shot by a teenage assailant as he carried out his trash, and 17-year-old Simmie Williams, Jr. was gunned down by unknown assailants in Fort Lauderdale, Florida while he was wearing a dress.
Setoodeh and his team are irresponsible for a more basic reason than framing their story with too narrow a context. They took their eyes off of the two points of reference essential for telling a true story about what happened that morning in E.O. Green Middle School’s computer class. They took their eyes off of the back of Larry’s head, and off of Brandon’s hand wrapped around his pistol.
Larry King brought a Valentine card to school. Brandon McInerney brought a loaded pistol. After all the whys and wherefores of the case are debated, these are the undisputed facts, and no responsible journalist may ever forget them.
Stephen V. Sprinkle
Director
The Unfinished Lives Project
Read this response by Alex Blaze, or this Box Turtle Bulletin article by Timothy Kincaid, which also question Newsweek’s journalistic approach. For another perspective, read this Bilerico post by Cathy Renna that provides a different opinion about the Newsweek article.
About
If you are a first-time visitor to the Unfinished Lives Project website, we invite you to read A Welcome Message introducing you to our project. We are truly grateful for your visit.
The Unfinished Lives Project website is a place of public discourse which remembers and honors LGBTQ hate crime victims, while also revealing the reality of unseen violence perpetrated against people whose only “offense” is their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender presentation. LGBTQ people in the United States are suffering a slow-rolling decimation of terror and murder all across the country. Every locale and demographic of society are affected: First Nations, Anglo, Black, Latino and Latina, South and Southeast Asian, Transgender, Bisexuals, Gay men, Lesbians, disabled, young, and mature. Homophobia has a long, crooked arm, and it is reaching out to snatch the life away from women and men whose tragic stories are under-reported to begin with, and whose memories are swiftly forgotten.
The horror of these killings transcends the shock and bereavement of loved ones and friends. These are not typical homicides; they are not killings for money or drugs, incidents of domestic strife, or crimes of passion. The vicious nature of hate crimes against LGBTQ persons is extremely brutal, grotesquely violent, and egregiously hateful.
Each murder serves the LGBTQ population as a sobering warning about the actual level of danger in our communities. The message these killings send is that freedom and open life for LGBTQ people is a cruel dream. Every time we remember one of these victims, however, the intentions of their killers are frustrated. To remember these women and men is to begin the process of changing the culture that killed them.
Our Project Director
Dr. Stephen V. Sprinkle (Keith Tew photo).
Stephen V. Sprinkle is Director of Field Education and Supervised Ministry, and Professor of Practical Theology at Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth, Texas, a post he has held since 1994. An ordained Baptist minister, he is the first open and out Gay scholar in the history of the Divinity School, and the first open and out LGBTQ person to be tenured there. Read More…
Recent Social Justice Advocacy Activity By Dr. Sprinkle
Summer 2009 – Dr. Sprinkle responded to the Fort Worth Police Department and Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Raid on the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth’s newest gay bar, on June 28, 2009, the exact 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Dr. Sprinkle was invited to speak at three protest events sponsored by Queer LiberAction of Dallas. Here, he is keynoting the Rainbow Lounge Protest at the Tarrant County Courthouse on July 12, 2009. Read More…
Contact Us
Communicate with the Unfinished Lives project team:
info@unfinishedlivesblog.com
Schedule a Presentation
Dr. Sprinkle will gladly present his acclaimed presentation to your organization. To arrange an Unfinished Lives presentation for your organization or group, please contact us.
Dr. Sprinkle has given his Unfinished Lives presentation to these and other community groups and organizations. Read More…
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Publisher: Steve Sprinkle (Project Director)
Steve Sprinkle
Unfinished Lives: Remembering LGBT Hate Crime VictimsBrite Divinity School/Texas Christian UniversityFort Worth TXprofessor, minister, author, blogger, LGBTQ advocate
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Unfinished Lives 
Special Comment: Living Hope
by Stephen V. Sprinkle
A paraphrase of Edwin Markham’s poem, “Victory in Defeat,” goes something like this: “Defeat as well as victory can shake the soul and let the glory out.” We are here tonight to tell the history of hope, not hate: hope born out of the hateful deaths of two men ten years ago, James Byrd, Jr. of Jasper, Texas, and Matthew Wayne Shepard of Laramie, Wyoming. Their stories brought us all together tonight. A decade ago, in the United States of America, they each died brutally at the hands of men who had learned to hate someone different.
Dragged behind a pickup truck in the Lone Star State of Texas for over three miles, James Byrd, Jr. died dismembered in a ditch in the wee hours of a June Sunday morning. People going to church found his body, minus his head and right arm, lying in the road in front of a little cemetery. They called the police, and as the police were speeding on their way to the crime scene, other citizens flagged them down because they had found James Byrd’s head in a drainage ditch.
Bludgeoned into a fatal coma with the butt of a .357 Magnum pistol, young Matthew Shepard was robbed of his shoes, his wallet, and ultimately his life in the Equality State of Wyoming on a cold October night. High in the desolate prairie, Matt’s bloody, broken body was trussed to a buck fence where he was abandoned to freezing wind and unforgiving sun for over 18 hours. When his near-lifeless body was found, the deputy sheriff who cut him free from that buck fence testified that he no longer looked like a human being, but more like a beaten Halloween scarecrow, limp on the ground. She said that his face was slathered with blood except for the tracks of his tears on his cheeks where the blood had been washed away. A few days later, Matt’s heart gave out, and he lost his fight for life in an Intensive Care unit.
Yes, defeat can shake the soul. That is what the poet, Edwin Markham said. Markham was a youth in the American Civil War, and the cataclysm of war ravaged the country in the years of the poet’s childhood. African Americans know the earthquakes of hatred and defeat. Long after that awful war was over, new battles faced African Americans, new defeats challenged hope with hate. Jim Crow, Separate But Equal, Strange Fruit with so many thousands lost to the rope that a sinister new term had to be invented to describe it: “lynching.” Hanging from the limbs of southern trees, shot and cut by the Ku Klux Klan, bombed in their Sunday School rooms, cut down by gunfire on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel… in the defeat of death they lay like rows of grain chopped down in a grisly harvest. We remember their names: Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Emmet Till, the four little girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham: Addie May Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair. Their killings and the murders of too many others to recount tonight show us what hate crimes against a whole race of people can do to shake the soul.
Another slow-rolling holocaust swept the United States from the time in the late 19th century when the term “homosexual” was first coined by doctors who said it was a disease. Who someone loved had already been contested ground in America. In 1958, Mildred Jeter (a woman of white, African-American and Native American heritage) and Richard Loving (a white man) fell in love in the racially mixed, low-income farmland of Caroline County, Virginia. Because of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, they traveled to Washington, D. C. to get married. Shortly after their return to Virginia, police burst into their bedroom at 3 a.m., arrested husband and wife, and carried them away to jail. The Lovings pleaded guilty to being married; they were sentenced to one year in prison. Though the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Virginia law against “miscegenation,” or interracial marriage, in 1967, there are haters who still believe loving someone is a crime worthy of death.
Though silent and hidden for much of the 20th Century, loving someone of the same gender, or seeking to live into a different gender than the one assigned at birth by a doctor, or even being perceived as belonging to such an orientation has often meant assassination and terror. The defeat of death has shaken the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community, with thousands of fatal attacks throughout this land of the free. Their homes have been desecrated, their bars bombed and burned. They are shot in their classrooms before the eyes of their fellow students, beaten to death with fists and clubs, mutilated with knives, and immolated on stacks of kerosene-soaked tires down lonely, desolate roads. Their lives were counted as less worthy than the lives of other citizens, and scriptures have been endlessly quoted to justify their extermination. We remember their names, tonight, too: Harvey Milk and Diane Whipple, Larry King and Simmie Williams, Billy Jack Gaither and Scotty Joe Weaver, Talana Quay Kreeger and Sakia LaTona Gunn, Paul Broussard, Nicolas West, and Kenneth Cummings, Jr., Fred C. Martinez, Jr., Amancio Corrales, and Gwen Amber Rose Araujo.
The ground of hope on which we stand tonight still shakes with the defeat death brings to African Americans and LGBT Americans. Too many times our respective communities have been shaken apart by differences. As the Dallas Voice has said, it would be hard to find lives of two men more different than the lives of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard. James Byrd was a 49-year-old black man, a father and a grandfather, living in Southeast Texas. Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old white man, a son of privilege going to school at the University of Wyoming.
One of them was a political science major, longing to advocate for the poor and oppressed, ready to launch out into life for the very first time. One of them was unemployed, living on disability checks, and like the Black Church tradition sometimes says, “tryin’ to make a way out of no way.”
But if they are indeed united in the defeat of death, the souls of the Byrd Family and the Shepard Family shaken by the earthquake of terror that only a hate crime can effect, we believe James Byrd and Matthew Shepard are united in something far wider and more vast than the shadow of death. They are forever united in the history of hope, a living hope, a hope worth living for.
James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard represent living hope. As Rev. Karen Thompson, Senior Pastor of MCC Austin at Freedom Oaks has said so well, “It is important that we not let our lasting images of these two men…be images of them as victims of hate. Rather,” she goes on to say, “we are called by their memories to do all we can to ensure that hate will not be the final word.” Ignorance and fear would have us accept defeat in the face of hate, but we cannot do that, because we cannot permit the killers to own the stories of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard.
When the intense spotlight of publicity glared down on the families of these slain men, the Byrd Family and the Shepard Family showed the way to healing and not hate.
Ten years ago, Diane Hardy-Garcia, former executive director of the parent organization of what is now Equality Texas, approached Stella and James Byrd, Sr. to ask that a Hate Crimes act be named after their son. As she recounted recently to the Dallas Voice, “[James Byrd, Jr.’s] mother was so gracious to us. I explained the history [of the Hate Crimes Law in Texas] to them, and how it had failed before and how we wanted to present it this time as a whole package. And I told her, ‘I’ve got to tell you the truth. I think they will pass it if it is just about race. The hang up is including sexual orientation.’
“I had given [Mrs. Byrd] my card,” Hardy-Garcia remembered, “which clearly said Lesbian Gay Rights Lobby.” After about a minute of silence, Mrs. Byrd said, “Follow me,” and took Hardy-Garcia into a room filled with condolence gifts from all over the world. Then Mrs. Byrd said, “I sent Matthew Shepard’s mother a note. We don’t have a problem.” Though the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Act went down to defeat the first time, as Hardy-Garcia predicted it might because of the inclusion of sexual orientation, the Byrd Family never wavered in their steadfast support.
The Byrd Family kept on calling for healing, not hating, and went on to establish the James Byrd, Jr. Foundation for Racial Healing. Ross Byrd, James Byrd, Jr.’s son, has chosen to oppose the death penalty, and he has campaigned against executing the very men who bludgeoned, spray painted, and chained his father to the back end of a pickup truck, dragging him to his death—all because he and his family believe in hope, not hate.
Matthew Shepard’s parents, Judy and Dennis Shepard, chose hope, not hate, and spoke out against the execution of the two young men who killed their son. Along with Matt’s younger brother, Logan, the Shepards became active in educating against hate through the Matthew Shepard Foundation, an organization they founded to erase hatred through programs of diversity and education.
No one has been more courageously outspoken for the passage of state and federal hate crimes legislation than Judy Shepard, who has said to all who will hear her:
“Matt is no longer with us today because the men who killed him learned to hate. Somehow and somewhere they received the message that the lives of gay people are not as worthy of respect, dignity and honor as the lives of other people. They were given the impression that society condoned or at least was indifferent to violence against gay and lesbian Americans.”
She went on to say, “Today, we have it within our power to send a very different message than the one received by the people who killed my son. It is time to stop living in denial and to address a real problem that is destroying families like mine, James Byrd Jr.’s, and many others across America.”
If we are to rise to the challenge these two great families give us, to shake the soul of Texas and the nation, and to let the glory of a better, more just America shine through, then we have to get real about what it means to live out the hope we proclaim tonight.
We can’t talk about crimes like these tonight in the abstract. What does hate crime look like in the year 2008? Here is what it looks like:
What must we then do, if we are to move through the manifold defeats of hate crime violence in this land, to a land of hope, and not hate? Like you, I take courage from the leadership of the Byrd and Shepard Families. Like you, I need that courage tonight, to rededicate myself to healing and not hating, to hope, and not hate.
I believe we must first move past our personal feelings of powerlessness and denial, beyond the natural psychological barriers we all face when we stare into the mirror of such violence, and see our own part in it. Oh, yes, though it would be convenient to lay the blame exclusively somewhere else, we in the LGBT and Racial/Ethnic minority communities still have much understanding to learn, and much forgiveness to ask of each other, if we are ever to move beyond being defeated people ourselves, and find our way together into a better future for all our people. Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-female Black a capella choir, say it this way in the lyrics of their song, “Rise in Love”:
We have much work to do if we are to live into the hope we long for and talk about. We must renew our efforts to name, claim and reject the racism that too many LGBT people harbor against people of color, and to name, claim and reject the homophobia and heterosexism that too many racial/ethnic communities still hold against gay folk. We have to get over it! In a paraphrase of the Good Book, how can we say that we love justice and harbor ill will against others of us? We have to get “shook up and shook a-loose” ourselves if we are ever to lead our nation to a better society.
And finally, we must move beyond just feeling bad about injustice. Americans are good about feeling bad. Perhaps we get angry, perhaps we get mad enough when we hear the outrageous stories of hate crimes in our community that we pay attention for a news cycle or two. Perhaps we attend a rally like this, and even write a little check to an advocacy group. And once we are past the first flush of emotion, then the economy gets our attention, or the fine Texas autumn, and we go dormant until hate strikes again, for hate surely will strike again if we do not act. Yes, Americans are good at feeling bad, until we start to feel better.
We cannot afford to let emotion alone motivate the work of justice. We who believe in justice cannot rest! We who believe in justice cannot rest until it comes! (An homage to “Ella’s Song,” by Sweet Honey in the Rock.) When memory shakes the soul like an earthquake, we have the obligation and opportunity to remember James Byrd, Jr., and refuse to rest until Texas perfects the hate crimes statutes it has, and applies them not just nine times, but all 1800 times.
We who believe in justice cannot rest! We who believe in justice cannot rest until it comes! When a mother like Judy Shepard challenges us to send a different message to America than the one delivered by the men who killed her son, we must embrace that memory with all its pain, and break out of defeat into action. We must join Judy Shepard in agitating our lawmakers and opinion-makers until the Matthew Shepard Act is passed in the new Congress, and signed into law by a new President of these United States.
We who believe in justice cannot rest! We who believe in justice cannot rest until it comes! Until Black folks and gay folks, women and men, Latinos and Latinas, and all the citizens of this nation can live free and love without fear of acts of violence, until hate is overcome by acts of love and forgiveness and hope, until the glory of this land of the free and this home of the brave shines on all people without distinction and without discrimination.
Not another ten years! Not another 12 months! This very night, each one here must find the courage and resolve to lift up Byrd and Shepard as signs of our hope, a hope worth working for, a hope worth agitating for, a hope worth staying shook up about…
For we who believe in justice cannot rest! We who believe in justice cannot rest until it comes!
Stephen V. Sprinkle
Director
The Unfinished Lives Project
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October 20, 2008 Posted by unfinishedlives | African Americans, Anglo Americans, Anti-Semitism, Beatings and battery, Bisexual persons, Bludgeoning, Decapitation and dismemberment, gay men, Hate Crime Statistics, Heterosexism and homophobia, Latino and Latina Americans, Law and Order, Legislation, Lesbian women, mob-violence and lynching, Native Americans, Neo-Nazis and White Supremacy, Politics, Racism, Remembrances, Special Comments, Texas, Torture and Mutilation, transgender persons, Uncategorized, Vehicular violence, Wyoming | 2 Comments