The year was 1994. A gay-basher was hunting queers in the parks of Tyler, Texas--not the first, and certainly not the last, gay-basher to walk the streets of this small East Texas city.
But this particular night was different.
When the hunter located his prey, a gay man named Jay Gage who was cruising in the park, he probably thought it would unfold like any other bashing. But the hunter was in for a surprise. Although Gage was tall and lanky, he was not willing to play the part of the hunted. When it became clear that a gay-bashing was about to take place, Gage sprung into action. He fought back mercilessly. In short, he beat the living shit out of his would-be attacker.
As the fallen hunter laid bloodied and motionless on the ground, Gage added the final insult: "Now, go home and tell your mama you got whupped by a faggot."
Note: What you're about to read is based on the first half of a paper I wrote on the role of anti-gay violence in Houston's gay community. This is the section that I will be presenting at both the American Historical Association and Texas State Historical Association annual meetings in 2013. This diary is as much an attempt to better organize my thoughts as it is an endeavor to bring LGBT history to Daily Kos.
I begin with the above story because it illustrates something much larger. I located the story, originally published in the Houston Chronicle, while researching in an archive, and what initially struck me was the favorable reporting of Gage's resistance. The incident served as an introduction to a larger story on anti-gay hate crimes--a story that would not have been published just a decade or two before Gage's encounter with the unnamed gay-basher. Anti-gay violence has been increasingly visible since the 1990s, thanks in large part to an American culture that has become much more tolerant of homosexuality, as well as a mainstream media that has become much more willing to tackle these very real issues.
But this cultural shift did not happen on its own. It occurred largely because gays much like Gage, in earlier years, resisted and organized in the face of cultural oppression, police harassment, and widespread anti-gay violence. The Gage incident and its subsequent reporting did not come out of nowhere, nor was it a mere anomaly. Violence had long been a fact of life in the decades preceding the 1990s, but after Stonewall, gays began to resist this violence on a much more organized and political level. This collective resistance paved the way for Jay Gage to beat his anti-gay attacker to a pulp and then find himself cast in a favorable light in the Houston Chronicle.
My research shows that gays are not simply victims of hate crimes. Over the years, gays have also displayed a great deal of agency in responding to incidents of anti-gay violence and collectively fighting back--in spite of a society that did not place any kind of value on gay lives and a culture of police inaction when it came to investigating and prosecuting anti-gay hate crimes. I would like to examine one particular instance of anti-gay violence that took place in Houston, Texas, and how it prompted a response from the gay community that challenged the homophobia of the Houston Police Department (HPD) and the larger cultural acceptance of anti-gay hate. This incident has been lost in history, despite having been an enormously significant event in Houston's gay history.
The subject of this diary takes place in 1980. Although life was not particularly rosy for gays in 1994, 1980 was even worse. The AIDS crisis had not yet hit Houston, but gays faced many other challenges. By this time, Houston's gay community, centered in the Montrose neighborhood, had reached maturity. In addition to the bars, gay churches and newspapers existed, as well as the Gay Political Caucus (GPC). But gays were not yet taken seriously as a major voting bloc. And, at this time, Houston was not the liberal oasis that it is today; it was very much Texas. Harassment and violence were rampant in Montrose--so much so that a gay community organization, the Montrose Patrol, was formed to compile crime statistics and curb crime in the neighborhood. But the existence of the Montrose Patrol was also indicative of strained relations between the gay community and the HPD. Indeed, the police not only ignored crimes against gays--they often harassed gays themselves. In the week before the incident examined in this diary took place (and immediately before Houston's Pride Week), Mary's, a major Montrose gay bar, was raided by the HPD. This was such a common, almost institutionalized occurrence that This Week in Texas, a gay bar rag, opened its story on the raid with the following: "For the third year in a row, the City of Houston has held its annual pre-Gay Pride Week raid on a gay bar." To call relations between the gay community and the HPD "strained" is quite an understatement.
But those relations were about to get worse. On June 28, 1980--interestingly, eleven years to the day after the beginning of the Stonewall Riots--Fred Paez, a gay community leader, secretary of the GPC, and co-founder of the Houston Human Rights League (another gay organization, co-founded by Houston gay rights icon Ray Hill), was shot by K.M. McCoy, an off-duty Houston police officer.
This shooting must be viewed within the context of widespread anti-gay violence in Houston, rampant police harassment and brutality (not just against gays, but against all minorities), as well as heightened political sensitivity to the issue of violence against gays. Just a year before the Paez shooting, Dan White, the former San Francisco supervisor who shot and killed openly gay supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, was given a slap on the wrist, which provoked the White Night riots in San Francisco. Gays all across the country were becoming tired of violence directed against members of their community and the blind eye the police, the justice system, and society at large turned toward that violence. The Paez shooting would awaken the Houston gay community in the same way that Harvey Milk's assassination sparked anger from the Castro.
Much about Paez's shooting remains unknown. In an interview I conducted with Ray Hill, he claimed that Paez--who was his very close personal friend--told him of an affair he was having with a police officer. Hill believes this officer to have been McCoy. If this unsubstantiated claim is correct, the incident becomes complicated as both an incident of anti-gay violence and an incident of police brutality. But, regardless of the actual circumstances, Houston's gay community saw the incident as both.
What we do know is that McCoy and Paez were in a warehouse parking lot, along with another off-duty HPD officer, where a struggle ensued. Supposedly, the officers were at the warehouse for investigative reasons. According to the official HPD statement on the incident, Paez attempted to touch McCoy between his legs, causing McCoy to try to arrest him for "public lewdness." Paez allegedly reached for McCoy's gun, at which point it "accidentally" fired into the back of Paez's head. Paez died shortly after the shooting.
If this story doesn't add up to you, you're not alone. The gay community, too, was highly suspicious of the official HPD story. Paez, after all, was an activist against police brutality and an expert on police procedure. It seemed highly unlikely to community leaders that he could have acted so stupidly during an altercation with police officers. In addition, the fact that a gun was even in play for a "public lewdness" violation struck many as strange. The widespread belief among gay leaders was that Paez was shot execution-style in an act of anti-gay aggression.
At first, the GPC wanted to suppress news of the incident until after Pride Week took place. GPC president Lee Harrington expressed concern that riots could break out after news of the beloved Paez's shooting reached the gay community at large. This attempt at suppression did not succeed, however, as the incident was reported in both gay and mainstream news sources. No rioting occurred as feared, but anger quickly spread in Montrose. This anger was mixed with grief, and participants in the pride celebration wore black armbands in remembrance of Paez.
In the weeks that followed, under pressure from the gay community, the HPD conducted an internal investigation of the shooting. But at the same time, due to the understandable fear that the HPD would let McCoy off the hook, gay leaders formed the Fred Paez Task Force, which conducted its own investigation. The task force consisted of not only gay leaders, but also Houston city council member Lance Lalor, Texas state representative Debra Danburg, and U.S. Representative Mickey Leland. In addition, the GPC and the National Gay Task Force pressured the Department of Justice to investigate. The Fred Paez Task Force eventually found bloodstained fingerprints on beer cans at the crime scene. It also secured testimony of a firearms expert who claimed that McCoy's gun could not have possibly fired accidentally. All of this contributed to even more intense anger in the gay community. Reviewing the letters to the editor in This Week in Texas, it is clear that gays took Paez's shooting as yet another example of police brutality and anti-gay violence that would probably go unpunished. One letter cynically proclaimed, "He shot a queer, so what?" Indeed, that cynicism was, to a large extent, grounded in reality.
The gay community's anger culminated with a march from City Hall to the HPD headquarters. Dubbed the March for Justice, organizers hoped to raise awareness of the Paez shooting as well as the broader issue of anti-gay hate and violence. Approximately 1,000 people participated in the march, singing songs of solidarity and carrying signs reading "STOP COP MURDER." Ray Hill recalls police officers standing outside of the HPD headquarters openly mocking and laughing at the marchers. This event took place during a debate on police pay raises, and the jeering of the police officers subsided when the marchers began chanting opposition to increasing officer salaries.
The March for Justice was a success in that it raised awareness through the Houston media of the Paez shooting. But this did not come without a price to some of the marchers. Gay Houstonian John Paine wrote to This Week in Texas to report being fired from his job the day after he appeared on TV in march footage. In spite of the danger of outing themselves, many gay Houstonians marched anyway, illuminating the extent to which the gay community was mobilized by the shooting.
Finally, in October, McCoy was indicted by a grand jury--but only on a charge of criminally negligent homicide, a class "C" misdemeanor. Nevertheless, the indictment was a major victory, because never before in Houston history had a police officer been indicted for a violent crime against a gay man.
But, as many had predicted, McCoy was acquitted at trial. He then voluntarily resigned from the police force and moved to North Carolina, where, according to Ray Hill (who has been keeping tabs on him), he became involved with a hate group.
Even after the trial and disappointing acquittal, Paez remained a symbol to Houston's gay community of anti-gay violence, police brutality, and the cost of hate. June 28 became "Fred Paez Memorial Day." The issue of violence was discussed more explicitly and openly by the gay community, and the Houston Human Rights League, invoking the memory of Paez, went on to directly target anti-gay violence and institutionalized homophobia in the HPD. The organization also moved its headquarters to a building it called the Fred Paez Community Center, which served as a center for gay and lesbian education and activism. Interestingly, Paez's name was also invoked in a kind of gay-bashing insurance plan sold by the Houston Human Rights League: FRED (Fast Release Emergency Defense). Those contributing funds to the organization could receive various protections, including up to $800 bail bond, up to $175 per week for hospital stays, and legal services.
Clearly, Paez was not easily forgotten by Houston's gay community. But the incident is particularly significant as an early example of resistance against anti-gay violence. This resistance would eventually morph into political demands for hate crimes protections for gays and lesbians, which would not come to Texas until 2001 and the greater United States until 2009. Hate crimes laws did not come out of nowhere. They were the result of years of collective gay resistance and organizing against anti-gay hate and violence. Although it is often seen as a mere fact of life for LGBT people that is tangential to the LGBT historical narrative, violence has actually played a central role in forging and strengthening queer identity and bonds of community.