Winter 2005 Amnesty International Magazine

AI Win 05 p. 17-19

11/02/2005

12:58

Page 17

New York Daily News/Joseph Ambrosini

FEATURE

BRUTALITY

Homophobia can wear a badge and carry a gun, according to a new Amnesty International report on police brutality against lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders. The research shows how stonewalling perpetuates the problem.

By Walter Armstrong

IN

The crowd attempts to stop police in the infamous 1969 Stonewall Inn nightclub raid in New York City. The routine police raid sparked a spontaneous rebellion and helped ignite the gay rights movement.

Blue

In 1997, after a suicide attempt, Edward Thompson finally had “the talk” with his wife. He told her that the man she married felt that inside she was a woman. And he would rather die than go on living in a male body.

His wife took it hard. She kicked him out of the house he’d built and launched a take-no-prisoners divorce suit. He also faced hostility in the community as he explained his breakup and began his physical transformation to a woman. Friends who were judges, lawyers and police officers—pillars of the Lehigh Valley, Pa., community where they lived—turned on him. A court ruled that he was “a potential danger” to his 10year-old daughter and barred almost all contact. He lost his job managing a major construction site. “I went from living in a half-million-dollar house to living out of my truck,” says the 49-year-old transgender activist and painter, whose first name now is Rachel.

On Christmas Eve 1998 Thompson—who had by then been living full-time as a woman—was driving to see her daughter for the first time in a year. Her 18-year-old son from a previous marriage came along. The three were planning to spend the holiday together.

Then a police officer pulled her over. “I was on hormones and wearing—by court order—a suit and tie, so I looked like an effeminate gay guy,” Thompson says. “The cop started right in with vicious comments. ‘Hey faggot, is that your boyfriend?’ he asked. I told him it was my son. ‘Looks like a f—-in’ queer to me,’ he said.”

Seeing that Thompson’s auto registration had just expired, the officer ordered her out and the truck impounded. “But the officer’s abuse threw me into shock. I couldn’t move,” Thompson says. “The cop grabbed me and dragged me out. I was having a breakdown. He laughed, hurled insults and kicked me as I lay on the street sobbing. My son, the brave kid, argued with him that I needed to go to the hospital.” Instead, the police officer simply stared as a dazed Thompson rushed into incoming traffic.

Twenty minutes later she made her second suicide attempt, jumping off a bridge into frigid water. “I was heartsick. I knew I’d never see my daughter again,” she says. “But the cop was what sent me over the edge. Just because I looked different in a way that pressed his buttons, he was having fun treating me like a piece of human garbage.”

Walter Armstrong, the former editor in chief of POZ, the nation’s leading AIDS magazine, is now a freelance editor and writer.

winter 2005

amnesty international 17