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Pride ’89: Gay Rights, Shelby Connected
By Janelle Lavelle
Twenty years after the first rebellion at
Stonewall, gay people in North Carolina are
Gghting for the right to be protected from
harassment, intimidation and murder based on
their sexual orientation. And they are even going to
have to battle Sen. Jesse Helms’ efforts to block the
legal documentation that such anti-gay activity
exists in an upcoming vote in the U.S. Senate.
Pride ’89 will focus on three related events —the
1988 N.C. Human Rights Fund report on
homophobic behavior in the state, the acquittal of
a white supremacist in Shelby, N.C., for the
murder of three men perceived to be gay, and the
upcoming national Hate Crime legislative battle
—as gay men and lesbians from across the state
convene in Raleigh for a march and rally on
Saturday, June 24, according to Pride ’89
organizer Mandy Carter. The Pride leadership will
hold a press conference on Thursday, June 22, to
highlight the relationship between the March and
these issues.
Shelby: A Lack of Physical Evidence
The battle against anti-gay violence was given a
new urgency with the acquittal of Douglas Sheets
for the murders of three men, the wounding of two
others and the fire-bombing of the Shelby III adult
bookstore, a known gathering place for gay men
from six rural N.C. and S.C. counties. The January
17, 1987, murders were the most obvious and
frightening incident of anti-gay North Carolina
violence in generations. The local prosecutor’s
office in Shelby has decided to drop charges against
a second man charged in the attacks, according to
the Raleigh News and Observer (6/3/89). The
evidence against the second man, Robert Eugene
Jackson, “is the same evidence that we used
against Sheets,” said Cleveland County District
Attorney Bill Young.
Response from the gay community and their
civil rights allies was immediate. A coalition of
gay-supportive groups, including the North
Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence
(NCARRV), the N.C. Human Rights Fund,
Wilmington’s umbrella gay and lesbian organiza
tion GROW, the N.C. AIDS Service Coalition,
and the N.C. Coalition for Gay and Lesbian
Equality, united to present a petition to Governor
Jim Martin on Friday, June 2, in an attempt to
prevent further anti-gay violence, according to the
Durham Morning Herald (5/29/89).
“We need to stand and voice our protests
demanding protection from hate violence,” said
Eleanor Holland of NCARRV. The petition asked
Martin to make anti-gay violence a major part of
the agenda of the governor’s task force for racist
and religious violence. The task force, headed by
Eddie Knox of Charlotte, is in disarray; the group
recommended several important legislative changes
this session, but none were passed or even seriously
considered in the 1989 General Assembly.
Mab Segrest, who monitored most of the trial
for NCARRV.said that it was never disputed even
by the defense that the murders and the
firebombing had been committed by Nazis. “The
Nazis were just arguing about which one did it,”
she said, adding that the trial and verdict pointed
out the continuing problem with hate crime
violence in the state.
As the all-white Shelby jury deliberated for 5-Vi
hours, vigils were held in Greensboro, Winston
Salem and Durham to call attention to the
importance the state’s gay and lesbian community
placed upon the outcome of the trial. In the closing
arguments, the defendant’s lawyers emphasized
that the trial was not about Sheets’ political beliefs.
“Sheets admitted he had undesirable associates,
but he’s not on trial for that,” defense attorney Les
Farfour said, according to the Durham Morning
Herald (5/26/89). “It’s a dangerous thing when
we put people on trial on the basis of things they
may or may not believe.”
District Attorney Young and NCARRV’s
Segrest both said that the absence of physical
evidence, and the inability of the state’s witnesses
to identify the attackers, weakened the state’s case
against aneeis.
As the defense attorneys left the courtroom, one
victim’s mother, Betty Godfrey, screamed at them,
“I hope they have children and someone murders
them like he [Sheets] murdered my son. I hope you
go through the same thing I did.” Other family
members, some of whom believed from the
beginning that the trial should have been moved
from the Shelby community to a more neutral
area, were equally bitter about the verdict.
The primary evidence against Sheets was his
alleged confessions to other prison inmates and
fellow white extremists of his part in the murders.
The district attorney said after the trial that he
would have been happier if he had had a few
“Sunday school teachers” rather than convicted
felons as the witnesses for the state.
One of the most bizarre aspects of the trial
testimony was the first introduction in a North
Carolina trial of the beliefs of the religion to which
Sheets subscribes. Identity Christianity, a fast
developing extremist fundamentalist sect in the
western and southwestern parts of the country,
teaches that homosexuals should be put to death,
according to Identity pastor Peter Peters of
Colorado. Identity adherents also believe in racial
purity and the tenet that the U.S. government is run
by a cabal of Jewish Zionists, one-world
advocates, and communist infiltrators determined
to destroy U.S. integrity.
Identity teaches that the Jews are not really the
“chosen people” of the Bible, and that the Aryan
race was the true recipient of the mantle of special
selection by God, using a complicated explanation
revolving around ancient Saxon warlords and
other representatives of pure white blood lines.
Identity is a unifying theology for white
supremacists across the country, including the
Order, the Aryan Nation and others involved in
violent hate crimes against gay people, blacks and
Jews. It is just beginning to make inroads into
traditional fundamentalism in the Southeast.
This religious underpinning for hate-group
violence was extensively reported by Public
Television’s Bill Moyers in a special three-part
series in 1987, and the sect has been steadily
growing in membership ever since, although actual
Identity strength has been impossible to determine.
The Shelby trial was the first time Identity was a
factor in a N.C. hate-group case.
Helms Leading Hate Crimes Opposition
Organizers for Pride ’89 see obvious parallels
between the Shelby verdict and the importance of
federal legislation designed to monitor hate crimes
against all racial, religious and ethnic groups, Pride
organizer Carter said. The legislation’s most
powerful opponent is Helms, who is expected to
introduce an amendment to the Hate Crimes bill
deleting anti-gay violence as a type of crime to be
monitored, Carter said.
A North Carolina bill designed to study hate
activity, HB 588, is currently languishing in the
House Law Enforcement and Public Safety
Subcommittee and is not expected to pass either
house this session. The degree of committee
support for the bill is still unknown. Like every
other gay and AIDS-related bill during this
General Assembly session, opposition to monitor
ing gay hate crime is based on the idea that all gay
people are felons under the Crime Against Nature
laws and thus undeserving of such protection.
It is currently impossible to track accurately
anti-gay violence in the state or the nation because
the FBI’s crime statistics do not include a
breakdown for gay-related crime. Most local law
enforcement agencies — metropolitan police
departments and rural sheriffs offices — follow the
FBI guidelines. Anti-gay violence is lumped in
with other murder, assault and related crime
categories.
NCARRV v observers and other civil rights
groups have compared the Shelby verdict to the
famous acquittal of Nazis and Klansmen who were
photographed murdering several members of the
Communist Workers Party in Greensboro in
November, 1979. Segrest and others pointed out,
however, that the Shelby case relied on far less
physical evidence than the Greensboro trials.
Hate-crime monitoring legislation at both the
federal and state levels is seen by NCARRV and
other civil rights activists as essential to
determining a more exact level of anti-gay hate
continued on page 3
Greensboro Groups Support
Discrimination Hearings
“You made a happy 20,000 people today,” was
Mamie Thompson’s reassurance to the Greens
boro Human Relations Commission after the
group voted unanimously to join with the
Greensboro Council on the Status of Women and
call on the City Council to hold public hearings on
anti-gay violence, harassment and discrimination.
But the HRC went a step further at the request of
Thompson, spokesperson for the Guilford Alliance
for Gay and Lesbian Equality, and recommended
that the City consider amending city ordinances to
provide specific protection from discrimination.
They also decided to tell the City once again that
they support changing Greensboro’s personnel
policy to protect gay men and lesbians from
harassment in city jobs, despite notification from
the city manager’s office that the proposal had been
rejected by the city administration.
The HRC had proposed the personnel policy
change, along with nine other recommendations,
last December after over nine months of work on
gay and lesbian issues. The city manager, Bill
Carstophen, turned down the three most critical
recommendations, Alliance members said, includ
ing one that would direct the city to give special
training to police officers about dealing with gay
people.
“Are you going to let your own recommenda
tions lie on the cutting-room floor?”, Thompson
said she asked the HRC. When one commission
member suggested a further study of the issue,
HRC member and outgoing chair Mike Diamond
said that they had already looked at it, discussed it,
and stated their support. “Let’s say we believe in
it,” Diamond said.
The Council on the Status of Women voted to
call for public hearings on anti-gay violence in their
March 21 meeting. ’’Although this is not
specifically a women’s issue, women are involved,”
said Linda Jones, a CSW member who will take
the recommendation to the city council. “We felt
there would be no harm and hopefully a lot of good
to come out of a public hearing.”
Jones said that her personal belief was that gay
men and lesbians are facing the same struggle that
women fought for equal protection. The same
argument women confronted that they are
“already included because everyone is included” is
continued on page 10
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