From: tchrist@convex.com (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: soc.motss,alt.politics.homosexuality,co.politics,co.general,talk.politics.misc,co.politics.amend2.discuss,boulder.general,csu.general
Subject: Colorado Amendment 2: The First Fatality
Date: 11 Nov 92 20:17:16 GMT
Article-I.D.: news.1992Nov11.201716.16445
Organization: Convex Computer Corporation, Colorado Springs, CO
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    From the front page of Colorado Springs' _Gazette_Telegraph_ 
		    Wednesday, 11 November 1992
		    REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION

	    Amendment's OK `last straw' for trouble gay man
		    Suicide note places blame
		by Angela Dire/Gazette Telegraph

A person gets from a symbol the meaning he puts into it.

Dying from AIDS, distraught over the death of a close friend, Marty
Wayne Booker put a lot of meaning into Amendment 2.

For him, it was more than a constitutional ban on laws protecting gays
from discrimination.  A powerful symbol, perhaps.  An excuse, maybe.
Whatever it was or whatever it meant to the deeply troubled 26-year-old
Colorado Springs man, it obsessed him in the final minutes before he
took his life.

``I refuse to live in a state where a few people can, at will, make my
life a living hell,'' he wrote in his suicide note the day after the
election.  ``Thanks to CFV, hell was delivered to my very front door!''

It was a reference to Colorado for Family Values, the Colorado Springs
group that drafted Amendment 2.  Leaders of the organization did not
return phone calls Tuesday.

``I suppose I'm weak,'' Booker scrawled as a postscript, ``but it took
a lot of courage before I would have to live through the `Auschwitz'
CFV has in mind for people like me!  I love you all.  I'm sorry my
crime in life was LOVE -- albeit to the same gender.''

And with the security chain fastened on his apartment door, and with a
box of Kleenex nearby, Booker loaded his stomach with a drug his
doctors had proscribed to calm anxiety.  That soon mixed with the
alcohol he'd already drunk.  A police officer and Booker's best friend,
Matthew Miller, found him the next day, lying next to a trash can full
of tear-strained tissues.

To some, Booker's suicide is an extreme example of the psychological
toll Amendment 2 has taken on gays and lesbians in Colorado.  ``This
kind of a law touches gay men and lesbians in the part of their lives
they struggle with the most -- the acceptance of their environment and
the people around them,'' said Alan Cook, a Colorado Springs
psychotherapist who counsels gays.

The day after the election, many of his clients called him in anguish
over the law.  But since then, he says, their despair has turned to
determination, and they've begun to take positive steps.  ``A number of
my clients that have been closeted have since come out and expressed to
family and friends and exposers that they're gay and they're concerned
about this law,'' he said.

But for Booker, friends and family say, the passage of Amendment 2
drove a desperate man deeper into despair.  ``It was the law stray,''
said the 28-year-old Miller, who had known Booker since high school.

Far from the tearful man who took his own life, Booker was known around
town as a partygoer with a smile.

``Everyone loved him,'' said his aunt Edna Minnick, who raised him from
age 12.

As a student at Wasson High School, Booker participated in theater,
sang in the church choir, and excelled in all his classes.  Minnick
recalls helping her nephew research a report on AIDS and how to prevent
its spread.  But years later Minnick would lament that his knowledge of
the subject didn't keep him from contracting AIDS.  He learned he had
the disease around 1990.

Booker tried to keep up his spirits.  ``He would say, `Honey, I'm going
to die with a cigar in one hand and a rum and coke in the other,' ''
Miller recalled.

Booker volunteered at the Lambda House for AIDS patients and was a
faithful participant in an annual marathon to raise money for those
with the disease.

But the disease began to take its toll.  He gave up his dreams of
finishing college and becoming a computer accountant.  ``What's the
point?'' he once told Miller, ``in getting a degree to die.''

One by one, he watches friends die from AIDS.  It got so when he opened
the newspaper, said Miller, he would turn to the obituaries to see if
he knew anyone.''

About four months ago, Booker had tired to kill himself.  Joe Brady,
owner of a local gay bar, the Hide and Seek, had a long talk with him.
Brady offered him a part-time job to try to lift his spirits and get
his mind off dying.  ``I told him, `Marty, there's some power higher
than you who wants to save your life.'  It seemed to make a lot of
sense to him at the time.''

Then came another blow.   One of Booker's lesbian friends, Wendy
McDowell, committed suicide by a drug overdose September 1.  They had
been the kind of friends who wore matching clothes, who scheduled their
classes together at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
With Wendy gone, said Brady, everyone worried that Booker would lose
his will to live once and for all.

``I love and miss my Wendy too much!'' he was to write in his suicide
note.

the last time Miller saw his friend was the day after the election.  As
usual, they met for cocktails at the lounge in the Satellite Hotel.
The two commiserated over the passage of Amendment 2.  Booker hinted at
suicide.  But by the time they left, Miller thought he'd cheered up his
friend.

``A person get from a symbol the meaning he puts into it.''

It was a former U.S. Supreme Court justice who once wrote those words.
And in the end, it was Booker how lived them.  Not even his best friend
or the aunt who raised him knew just how powerful a symbol Amendment 2
was for Booker.

``He cared a lot what others thought, and I think he got a lot of his
self-validation from other people,'' Miller said.  ``He embraced
everybody.  That's why it was so disappointing to him that he wasn't
equally embraced.''

As Booker sat in his small apartment, alone and outcast and
deteriorating from AIDS, the victory of Amendment 2 must have the the
ultimate rejection.  ``Prejudice and discrimination take many forms,''
said Miller.  ``There is a subtle form when they look down their nose
at you.  But this was very tangible, very real.''

<<END OF STORY>>

Typed in by Tom Christiansen <tchrist@convex.com>
All typos are mine.

Please pass this along to whoever you think can handle it.  The paper's
phone number is 719-632-5511.  You can at least call them and give them
your support for their having published this.  They get a lot of hatecalls
against this type of reporting, and are really pleased to get your calls.
I know -- I already did so.

You can also phone or fax in a letter to the editor.  If you want to
send a hardcopy letter, direct it to:

    Gazette Telegraph
    Box 1779 
    Colorado Springs 80901

    GENERAL: 		719-632-5511 (this is what i called)
    PHONE LETTERS: 	719-473-1919 (for letters to the editor)
    FAX: 		719-636-0202 (ditto)
    MODEM: 		719-636-0127 (dunno what this is for)


Most of the letters to the editor are from CFV and people of their ilk.
Today for example, was a CFV backer once again misstating that 
`Gays don't need special rights', which really isn't the case at all.
Amendment 2 denies gays rights the same recourse that anyone else has.
It singles them out to have fewer rights than other groups.  You
can read about this in some of the various newsgroups this was posted to.

If you want to go further than calling the paper, here's the 
Governor's office:

          Governor Roy Romer
          136 State Capitol Building
          Denver, CO 80203
          (303) 866-2471

And other agencies:

          Colorado Office of Tourism
          1625 Broadway Suite 1700
          Denver, CO  80202
          (303) 592-5510

          Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry
          1776 Lincoln Street Suite 1200
          Denver, CO 80203


-- 
Wherever, therefore, it has been established that it is shameful to
be involved in homosexual relationships, this is due to evil on the
part of the legislators, to despotism on the part of the rulers, and to
cowardice on the part of the governed. -- Plato, "Symposium"
Newsgroups: soc.motss