From: gina@rintintin.Colorado.EDU (Gina Cherry)
Subject: Suicide blamed on amendment
Followup-To: amend2-discuss@cs.colorado.edu
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Distribution: usa
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 17:28:28 GMT


From the Daily Camera, Nov. 12, 1992

SUICIDE BLAMED ON AMENDMENT

The passage of an anti-gay rights amendment iin Colorado has prompted
a string of protests throughout the state to fight the measure. For
one gay man that fight was too much to bear.

"I refuse to live in a state where a few people can, at wwill, make my
life a living hell," read a suicide note written by a 26-year old
Colorado Springs man the day after the election. "Thanks to CFV
(Colorado For Family Values), hell was delivered to my very front
door."

Marty Wayne Booker was dying of AIDS and was distraught over the death
of a close friend. For him, Amendment 2 was more than a constitutional
ban on laws protecting gays from discrimination.

It obsessed him in the final minutes before he took his life.

Colorado for Family Values, based in Colorado Springs, drafted
Amendment 2. Members of the organization could not be reached for
comment.

"I suppose I'm weak," Booker scrawled as a postscript. "But it took a
lot of courage to get out 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 prescribed to calm anxiety. That soon mixed with the
alcohol he had 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-stained tissues.

Some see Booker's death as an extreme manifestation of the
psychological toll Amendment 2 has taken on gays and lesbians in
Colorado.

"This kind of a law touched gay men and lesbians in the part of their
lives they struggle with the more - the acceptance of their
environment and the people around them," said Alan Cook, a Colorado
Springs psychotherapist who counsels gays.

Fortunately, he said, for most the anguish has turned to determination
as the community has banded together to fight the law.

"A number of my clients that have been closeted have since some out
and expressed to family and friends and employers that they're gay and
that they're concerned about this law," Cook said.

But, Miller said, for Booker it was the last straw and a final nudge
into the deepness of despair.

Booker had not always been troubled. He was known around town as a
party goer with a smile.

As a student at WWasson High School, Booker participated in theater,
sang in the church choir and excelled in all his classes.

Booker learned he had contracted AIDS in 1990.

But he 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 and Booker
began to give up on things.

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