Programs and Resources

GLBT Youth and Their Allies

Stories of GLBT Youth

Vigil honors transgender shooting victim
Karl Surkan, PlanetOut Network
Monday, October 11, 2004 / 04:36 PM

Approximately 130 people gathered in Minneapolis last Tuesday for a march and candlelight vigil for Tameka McCloud, a transgender youth who was shot repeatedly in the head and body at close range by a teen in the early morning hours of Wednesday, Sept. 29.

McCloud survived the attack and remains in serious condition at Hennepin County Medical Center.

Police arrested 16-year-old Carlos M. Harris shortly after the incident. Harris allegedly had a relationship with McCloud and shot her after learning that she was transgender. He has been charged in juvenile court with attempted first-degree murder, attempted second-degree murder and first-degree assault.

McCloud, 19, is one of many Twin Cities young people served by District 202, a community center for LGBT youth aged 21 and under. Ben Peterson, a District 202 youth activist, felt moved to organize others after he heard about the shooting.

"I organized the vigil for Tameka because something like this really shouldn't happen," he said. "It doesn't matter if somebody's gay, straight, transgender, male or female -- they're still a person. I wanted to raise awareness and bring togetherness in our community."

Peterson, who is also 19, said the shooting has affected everyone at District 202. "The youth are more afraid now than they were, but it's also been unifying. Everybody's a lot more connected."

Sunni, a transgender peer advocate at the center, sees youth looking out for one another more since Tameka was shot. Now 20, he started coming to District 202 when he was 12 years old after hearing about the center through a gay support group in his middle school. "Hopefully people will realize they can reach out more, that they don't have to be working here to help each other out," he said.

Transgender community leaders reacted with shock and dismay to the news of the shooting. Connie Kauppi, lead organizer of the Twin Cities Transgender Genderqueer Coalition, placed the incident in a national context of hate crimes. "This horrific attempted murder has brought the reality of anti-transgender violence to our local community," she says.

The Minneapolis shooting occurred just a week before House of Representatives negotiators rejected the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act (LLEEA), which would have added real or perceived sexual orientation, gender and disability to federal hate crime laws. The measure had passed in the Senate last June.

Scotty's Last Moments
The murder of a gay teen—allegedly at the hands of his best friends—has rattled a small Alabama town.
By Jen Christensen

The Advocate, September 28, 2004

© 2004 by LPI Media Inc.

Talk to the people in rural Pine Grove, Ala., who knew Scotty Joe Weaver and they’ll tell you one thing: The 18-year-old seemed to survive anything life threw at him.

At age 10 he fought off cancer through two grueling years of chemotherapy. At 15 he lost his father. Throughout his high school years in the nearby town of Bay Minette, he weathered the taunts and teases of classmates for being gay. “He always knew how to get through,” remembers his friend Justin Toth, who is also gay. “He had fun even at the worst times in his life.”

This time, however, Weaver did not survive.

He was brutally killed outside Pine Grove, his southern Alabama hometown of less than 1,000 people near the Florida panhandle. Some officials are speculating that it was a hate crime.

On July 22 a man driving an all-terrain vehicle discovered a burned body in a remote field about eight miles from Weaver’s trailer home. The autopsy showed Weaver had been beaten, strangled, stabbed multiple times, doused with gasoline, and set afire. Investigators believe the teen was tied to a chair and killed in his home. “It took a very long and painful time for him to die,” says Baldwin County district attorney David Whetstone, who believes the injuries didn’t all happen at once and that the severity of the wounds suggests Weaver was killed because he was gay.

One of the suspects charged in the case was Weaver’s best friend since the first grade—18-year-old Nichole Bryars Kelsay. Also charged with capital murder are Christopher Ryan Gaines, 20, and Robert Holly Lofton Porter, 18. As the three sit in jail awaiting their trial, the town is struggling to understand how the life of such a tenacious teen could end so horribly. “Scotty Joe was such a good and trusting boy, but after his daddy died I think he started going with people he shouldn’t—at least I think that now,” says his uncle Ewing Weaver.

Friends and family describe Scotty Joe Weaver as a smart kid who had no choice but to drop out of high school because he faced daily harassment for being gay. He got a minimum-wage job at a Waffle House and developed a growing circle of gay friends. He gravitated to local gay clubs and performed in drag competitions.

“He’d borrow some of my makeup sometimes,” says Scotty Joe’s brother Lum, 24, the oldest of the four Weaver boys. Lum, who is also gay, remembers his brother performing Dolly Parton numbers in the Drag-o-rama at the Emerald City bar in Pensacola, Fla. The grand prize for the amateur competition was a week’s worth of paid bookings at the club. Scotty Joe took second place. “He was really pretty good, although I did tell him a couple of things that he could work on,” Lum says, sounding like a big brother.

Martha Weaver knew that two of her sons were gay and always said, “If you love your child, it doesn’t matter.” Still, she was concerned about Scotty Joe performing his drag act in public. “His mother told me she knew about his sexual orientation and the competitions, and she warned him to be careful,” says Whetstone. “She worried someone could really hurt him.”

At the Waffle House, Weaver was a hard worker, often taking double shifts—working at the cash register, serving meals, running the grill—all to earn a little extra money to be independent, coworkers say. With his new earnings he was able to afford a place of his own. Less than a month before his death Weaver moved into a trailer home. It was small and white with green trim, near his mom’s house, and had enough room for his best friend, Kelsay, and her boyfriend, Gaines. The couple were unemployed, and Scotty Joe paid the expenses. He didn’t mind. Weaver asked Kelsay to move in so she would have a stable home for her baby. She was in a custody fight with the child’s father, so Weaver offered to take care of her child as if it were his own.

Life seemed to be looking up.

On July 18, Weaver finished the graveyard shift and then dropped off money that he owed his mom, according to police officials. When Martha Weaver didn’t hear from her son for a couple of days, she filed a missing person report. She later told investigators that the roommates now accused of Scotty Joe’s murder had stopped by to say they hadn’t seen her son and that they encouraged her to contact police.

Officials with the sheriff’s department believe Kelsay, Gaines, and Porter robbed Weaver of the remaining $80 from his Waffle House take-home pay before killing him. Investigators have not officially ruled that Weaver’s sexual orientation was a motive, but Whetstone is convinced it was. “Overkill happens in these kinds of cases because of hate,” he says.

A statement released by Rusty Pigott, an attorney for defendant Gaines, points the finger at Porter, whom Kelsay allowed to sleep on the couch when Weaver was at work. Pigott says that Porter “spoke openly of wanting to kill the guy because he was gay” and “had been known to brag about assaulting homosexuals.” He adds that Porter tried to hit Weaver just two days before he was killed. Porter’s attorney had no comment, except to say that Pigott’s statements were misleading.

Lawyers for the state of Alabama don’t have to prove motive to apply the death penalty if the three are convicted, but Whetstone says the jury needs to know there were aggravating circumstances. Alabama does not include sexual orientation in its hate-crimes statue—and lawmakers have repeatedly defeated attempts to add it.

“I want to send a message to the community that it doesn’t matter how you feel about the status of a victim—you can’t hate anyone and hurt them,” Whetstone says.

About 250 people filled the tiny, rural Crossroads Church of God for Scotty Joe Weaver’s funeral. A dark blue casket dotted with tiny doves stood in the front of the church, draped with his favorite flowers—red roses and baby’s breath—and a picture of a young, happy Scotty Joe sitting in a kayak.

Lum Weaver describes the setting as beautiful, even though antigay rhetoric seeped into the service. Hearing the Reverend Helen Stewart’s fire-and-brimstone preaching, a few gay people walked out. “She made a lot of people mad, saying basically that Scotty Joe was in hell,” Lum says. “And while most of the congregation was gay or bisexual, she told us we were all going to hell if we didn’t change our ways.”

Family and friends quietly buried Scotty Joe at the McGill Cemetery near his grandmother. Lum has moved back in with his mother to help with the bills and to help her cope with losing a son.

These days Lum hears people talking about his brother’s death. It makes him happy to hear that there’s renewed talk by lawmakers of changing the state’s law to cover hate crimes based on sexual orientation. “They think this is going to drive us away, but it only makes us stronger,” he says

Adds District Attorney Whetstone: “People at church and on the street talk to me about this case. If there is a positive that can come out of something so heinous, it’s that these small-town people are talking to me about some of their own bad feelings toward [gay people]. They admit they’ve sometimes treated [gay] people badly. They’re now saying this isn’t right. You just can’t hate people. There is no excuse for something like this to happen in Alabama.”

Christensen is a producer for CNN.

Preliminary Hearing in Alabama Murder of Scotty Joe Weaver Set for Aug. 27: GLAAD.com

Website Dedicated to the Memory of

Robbie Kirkland
1982 - 1997

I Wish You the Best     

I hope you'll remember me.
I will remember you.
I wonder if you see
that I must leave.
I just can not stay.
I did not want it that way.
So, I will leave.
I will leave you behind,
along with the rest of my life.
I will miss you.
Oh I will miss you,
but Don't look back,
for now I must pack
for my journey.
Good Bye Good Bye.
Please Don't cry.
I wish you the best.

Click here, to access the
Robbie Kirkland web site.

Why did Robbie Kirkland have to die?
Excerpts About the Catholic Connection
by Doreen Cudnik
Gay People's Chronicle
February 21, 1997

. . . Faith played a large role in determining how Leslie Sadasivan raised her children. A devout Catholic, she took her kids with her to St. John Neumann Church, a large suburban parish that was dedicated the same year Robbie was born. She involved them all in youth-related church activities, and considered the tuition that was paid to provide her kids with a Catholic education as an investment in their future.

"I saw it as a way to protect them and give them the best education," she said. "I also wanted them to be raised Catholic, because I do believe in the church. I don't believe in everything the church says, but I find my comfort and spirituality in the church. I wanted [my children] to have that foundation."

When Robbie was in the third grade at St. Joseph's school in Strongsville, he asked to be transferred to another school. He told his mother that the other kids were teasing him. He started the fourth grade at Incarnate Word Academy, the school that his sister Danielle was already attending. As he neared his last year at Incarnate Word, Robbie seemed to flourish academically as well as socially. He made friends and served on the student council.

But the poetry he wrote reflected a deep despair and sense of isolation that went well beyond the problems of most twelve year olds.

While Leslie does not know if the verbal harassment her son endured ever escalated to physical violence, a poem written by Robbie in 1994 appears to be a very chilling account of an assault:

I try to stand and walk
I fall to the hard, cold ground.
The others look and laugh at my plight
Blood pours from my nose, I am not a pretty sight
I try to stand again but fall
To the others I call
But they don't care . . .

As Robbie entered the eighth grade at Incarnate Word, he seemed, at least on the surface, to be surviving all the difficulties that accompany adolescence. Below the surface, however, Robbie had begun searching for answers to the nagging questions about his sexuality. . . .

After graduating from the eighth grade, Leslie let Robbie choose which high school he wanted to attend. He tested well enough to be offered a full scholarship to St. Edward High School in Lakewood, not far from his father's home. Instead, he chose St. Ignatius High School, a Jesuit preparatory school in Cleveland's near west side known for its academic excellence as well as its championship football program.

"He wanted to be a writer, and he felt that St. Ignatius was the best," Leslie said.

Choosing Ignatius also meant he would be going to school with Christopher Collins, and since Robbie had been having problems, Leslie felt that it would be best for him to be around at least one friend. Each day began with getting the boys off to school, and Leslie and Christopher's mom Sharon took turns making the 40-minute trek into the city.

Robbie's oldest sister Danielle is a sophomore at Miami University in Oxford. She remembered her women's studies instructor, Marcie Knopf, coming out to the class on the first day, and asked her about resources for Robbie.

"One of Danielle's biggest concerns was that she had gone to an all-girls Catholic high school, and she had a sense that for Robbie, entering the ninth grade at a Catholic all-boys high school was a really dangerous and scary thing," Knopf said.

"I'm familiar with the atmosphere at St. Ignatius," Danielle said. "They're very homophobic and driven by masculinity. The few guys that I did know that were gay had to really make a statement about it in order to survive. If a guy's sexuality was called into question, it was a very big deal. I just didn't think that it would be good atmosphere for [Robbie]."

Danielle was also concerned that Robbie always "had more girl friends than guy friends, and he wouldn't have them there."

Robbie's other sister Claudia, a senior at Magnificat High School in Rocky River, was also well aware of what her younger brother might be up against. She made the senior St. Ignatius boys that she knew promise not to harass Robbie.

"I told them, 'He's nice, he's sensitive, don't be mean to him'." . . .

The family continued to stay involved in Robbie's coming out process, reading books that had been recommended by Knopf. They got in touch with Cleveland area resources for gay and lesbian youth and their families, and planned on looking into a church that would accept Robbie just the way he was. Robbie had begun to express his displeasure with the Catholic church. Whether or not he was aware that the catechism of the Catholic church had declared his desires "intrinsically disordered," and "contrary to natural law," he clearly understood that he was not accepted the way he was.

"A few months before he died," his mother recalled, "Robbie said, 'Do I have to go to church? The Catholic church does not accept me, why should I go to it?' At that point I said, 'Robbie, we can find a church that does accept you, that's fine, we can go to a different church.' But he still went with me [to Catholic church] with a little bit of protest at
the end." . . .

"I mentioned to him about Robbie being gay. I said, 'You must help these boys--you know you have other Robbies at your school.' He agreed that there were other gay students. I said, 'Please tell those who are not nice to gay people to change and learn to be kind and sensitive. Tell those who are already being nice that they are doing God's work.' He just listened to me, and said that the school teaches kindness to all people."

She also asked Father F. Christopher Esmurdoc, an associate pastor at St. John Neumann Church, to say that Robbie was gay and deliver a eulogy that would speak of the importance of being accepting of gay and lesbian people. For whatever reason, he did not.

In the following weeks, Leslie began the long and painful process of putting together pieces of the puzzle that might explain what had happened to push her son over the edge. She wonders if things might have been different if she would have gone into Robbie's room prior to his death. Instead, acting on the advice of the therapist, she was trying to respect her son's privacy.

"I would have found the suicide note. I would have found out how obsessed he was with this boy."

Robbie's therapist told her how he had said that getting over the boy had "left an empty spot in his heart."

"But truly," his mother said, "he was not over this boy."

Leslie was further grieved when Christopher told her about some rumors that had been circulating around the St. Ignatius campus. One of them was that the boy that Robbie had a crush on was telling other students that Robbie had written "Fuck you" to him in his suicide note.

"This boy never even saw the note," Leslie said.

The message that Robbie did leave for this boy was, "You caused me a lot of pain, but hell, love hurts. I hope you have a wonderful life."

Leslie called the boy's mother to find out if there was any truth to another rumor that Robbie had spoken to her son on the telephone at 3:00 a.m. the day he died.

"The mother was fearful that if it got out that Robbie liked this kid, it would ruin this kid's reputation--that if the [other] kids knew, then they might think that her kid was gay. Her concern was that her son would be perceived as gay and would be teased and ridiculed. I said to this woman, 'Please, I just buried my son. Please don't scream at me'."

Hoping to have some goodness come from Robbie's death, Leslie spoke with Rory Henessy, who is in charge of discipline at St. Ignatius, and the school's principal, Richard Clark.

"I told Mr. Henessy the same thing that I told Father Lewis at the funeral home--that there are other Robbies at their school. I told him that Robbie's therapist offered to talk to the school. I said I would come and read something about Robbie's life and about his being gay."

The school has politely declined Leslie's offers, and principal Clark reiterated that the "message of the school is kindness and tolerance." He also said that St. Ignatius is planning to do a mass that will focus on the issue of suicide.

"The funny part of all this," Leslie said, "is that Robbie would have wanted to stay in the closet."

"I see him laughing at me, saying 'Oh, mom, this is my mom--always trying to help people."

"I'm not a public person, but I would read on a loudspeaker if it would help one boy out there," she added.

Leslie feels no bitterness toward the school or the church, and wants only good things to come out of this tragedy. . . .

[Click here for the complete article.]

Top of Page

---

Jamie Nabozny's Shocking and Inspiring Story

On November 14th, kicking off CPCSM's 2001-2002 Speakers' Series in the church basement at St. Albert the Great Church in Minneapolis, Jamie Nabozny once again shared the same story he had shared all across the country over the past six years, including before President Clinton at the White House and before a crowd of 10,000 on the mall of the US Capitol in Washington, DC. However, ironically, this time Jamie was standing before his first Catholic audience. Jamie began his talk by saying how honored and grateful he was to speak for the first time to a Catholic group,

since he was raised Catholic and actually had had positive experiences with his local parish and in the parish elementary school that he attended in his early childhood and briefly in eighth grade. Following his talk, Jamie responded to a number of questions and positive comments from the audience.

As a student in the Ashland, Wisconsin public school system, Jamie suffered years of relentless physical, sexual, and verbal harassment for being gay. He was beaten to the point of requiring surgery, urinated on, called anti-gay epithets, and made to suffer repeated assaults and indignities. In July 1996, a precedent-setting federal appellate court decision spelled out the constitutional obligation of public schools everywhere to treat abuse of lesbian and gay students and of boys as seriously as any other abuse. Then, after a two-day trial in November 1996, a federal jury found school officials liable for not protecting Jamie. In a landmark settlement reached after that verdict, he was awarded over $900,000 in damages.

Jamie stressed four major points as he reflected on the meaning he has found in his story:

1. He is not anyone special, but just one person who was willing to stand up and say that the harassment he experienced was wrong and that he was not going to allow it to continue to go on in that school district -- which is all, he says, that is often needed in situations of injustice;
2. Homophobia, as was true in his case, is not as much based on fear of GLBT persons' sexuality as it is on their failure to conform to society's gender role expectations -- i.e., gay teens engaging in traditional female activities and lesbian teens playing traditional male roles;
3. Often gay-bashers are actually struggling with fears about their own sexual orientation and assault openly gay teens to make sure their straight peers do not have any doubts about their sexual identity (e.g., four of the 10 perpetrators identified at Jamie's trial are now gay men); and
4. Harassment of GLBT students does not just negatively affect those being harassed but also their families as well as the straight students, teachers, and administrators who witness the harassment and do nothing to intervene -- in short, it affects the community as a whole.

Jamie reports that many positive changes regarding GLBT persons have taken place over the past six years in the Ashland area because of his precedent-setting court case. In Jamies' former school district GLBT teens now report feeling safe about being "out," and some are even taking same-sex partners to school proms. Also, there have even been recent discussions about holding a pride festival in the Ashland area. Jamie still frequently receives words of gratitude from GLBT persons who currently live there and from their supporters.

Jamie's warm and friendly manner and confident and upbeat speaking style belie the post-traumatic scars with which he continues to struggle. However, he does report that after years of psychotherapy much healing has already taken place. He now lives in St. Paul and, in addition to lecturing on anti-gay harassment issues, is pursuing an undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Minnesota. His current career plans are to work with and on behalf of GLBT persons in the human services, especially continuing to help schools safe places for GLBT teens, as a consultant or an educator.

Jamie was an ideal person to inaugurate this year's CPCSM Speakers Series, for his story personifies the very theme of the series: The Sacramentality of Human Experience: Empowerment toward Prophecy. By sharing his inspiring struggle in which he courageously claimed his power in his search for justice and systemic change, Jamie's words have become prophetic as they beckon his listeners to follow his example and work for justice in their lives as well.

Thank you, Jamie, for gifting us with the sacramentality of your life's journey. We wish you all God's blessings in your future holy work.

To order a videotape of Jamie's presentation, click here.

For the complete story of Jamie's case, click on:
Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund Web Site
Lambda Legal Case: Nabozny v. Podlesny

For the full text of Jamie's successful July 1996 appeal decision, in which the court ruled that Jamie's rights of equal protection under the 14th Amendment
had been violated, see:
http://www.kentlaw.edu/7circuit/1996/jul/95-3634.html

Please note: Searching via www.google.com (under "Jamie+Nabozny") results in about 575 web articles regarding Jamie's story. The following are two of those articles, for your review:

National Association of School Psychologists Web Site
Gay Student Wins Sexual Harassment Case
With NASP Support
By Patricia Boland, NCSP

Million-dollar court case
sends a clear message to schools:
Protect gay students equally or pay
by Deb Price
The Detroit News, 11/29/96

---

Research Project of Collected Stories

This study, conducted and sponsored by the Safe Schools Coalition collected 111 stories of anti-gay harassment and violence in elementary, middle and high schools. Those who reported the stories included students, parents, and school employees. All 111 incidents happened in the 1990's on school property, on the way to or from school, or at a school-sponsored event, such as a dance. Also included in this story collection are 6 stories collected NOT as part of the study, but collected subsequently to round out the picture with examples of other forms of bias-based bullying in schools (racial, religious, disability-based, etc.) They have not been cleaned up, so be prepared. Some involve ugly name-calling. Some include beatings and rapes. Two involve completed suicides.

Top of Page.