morgan_dhu | In Memoriam (Reply)

chlaal wrote:

Seven years ago today, Matthew Shepard died. He was brutally, horribly murdered for the "crime" of liking boys. Let's never forget that in America in the 1990s and 2000s, there are (were) so many people who think (thought) that beating a 21-year-old kid to death for being gay was okay. If you don't think that is okay, today would be a good day to speak up and say so.

12 years ago this fall, Gregor Jodrey died. He would have been 48 this past Sunday. He was the best of friends, wise and witty, and so very, very kind and gentle and compassionate. He used to get impossible crushes on straight boys, and we'd sit in our living room and console each other, because I used to get impossible crushes on straight girls from time to time myself. Our friendship was so strong, it actually survived not only sharing an apartment, but sharing a lover. He was a writer, a photographer, a scholar, a dreamer, a mystic. He read omnivorously and thought deeply and loved fiercely and laughed loudly and danced like the sidhe themselves in the moonlight. Sometimes we'd get drunk on Jamieson's and high on weed and dance our heads off to Marley and Janis and the Lizard King until dawn found us collapsed and giggling like maniacs outside on the lawn in the morning dew. He loved life so goddamn much.

The last time I saw him was about two years before he died. I'd been living in Toronto for about eight years then, and he'd come up from Nova Scotia to visit a couple of times before. He came in and we sat in my kitchen, which is what you do when you're visiting in Nova Scotia, and we drank a bit and smoked up a bit and talked for hours and it was as if no time or distance could ever come between us. I loved him so damned much.

He was beaten to death and left like a piece of trash by the railroad tracks, because he was a gay man living in this world. His killer was sentenced to four fucking years less time served for destroying this loving and gentle and beautiful man.

Wherever he is, I know he's dancing.