When I was preparing to move to the Four Corners town of
Cortez, Colo., to take a job as a newspaper reporter, I did some background
research to learn more about my future home. Iām well connected with the gay
and lesbian community, so one of the first stories I heard was the tragic tale
of Fred Martinez. Martinez had the double curse of being both a Navajo (racism
still runs strong in many border rez towns) and a transgender individual. In
June 2001, when he was just 16 years old, he was beaten to death by 18-year-old
Shaun Murphy.
It was a horrifying, sad story to hear, and made me wary of
the place I was moving. When I arrived
in Cortez, though, I met several outstanding gay couples (one was a
town councilman) and encountered a community working towards addressing some of
the tensions illustrated by such an awful act. (Martinezā story was made into a documentary film called āTwo Spirits.ā)
While most LGBT youth donāt suffer fates like that of
Martinez, many of them are subject to bullying, teasing, and other social
interactions that can harm self esteem and lead to depression or even suicide.
The āIt Gets
Betterā project aims to support LGBT young people by providing
testimony from older members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender
community, or celebrities (hereās one by
Steven Colbert), who have made it to the other side of what can be many
hate-filled years.
And, to my surprise, I was recently passed along a
testimonial video for the project from the U.S. Department of the Interior. In
the video, you can see gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender public servants
from the Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and United States Geologic
Service and others, followed by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, all
sharing their experiences of bullying and shame, but then all telling youth or
whoever is watching the video how happy they are now, after high school, with
jobs they love and co-workers and partners who respect and love them.
Itās normal for people to fear what they donāt know. And in
rural communities such as the one I live in now, gay people, same-sex couples and transgender or bisexual individuals arenāt a regular presence in the lives of
youth. This often makes it easier for kids to demonize or stigmatize
those of different orientations. The many āIt Gets Betterā messages do their part to raise
awareness across the country, but videos like this one, from Interior,
can play a special role by pointing out that there are gay people in rural areas like much of the West ā and that some of these people have gotten great jobs working as caretakers of our natural resources.
Seeing a ranger in Yellowstone affirming
that heās gay and happy, and a motorcycle-riding Interior department employee doing
the same, sends a powerful message. If rural kids (and their parents) could see more gay cowboys ā or
hunters, or bikers, or BLM employees ā maybe weād all see less hate.
Stephanie Paige Ogburn is the online editor at High Country News.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
