For more than thirty years, people have gathered on July 7 in memory of Charlie Howard in Bangor, Maine. On that date in 1984, Charlie drowned in the Kenduskeag Stream after being thrown off the State Street Bridge. As a young gay man, he sometimes liked to wear lipstick and carry a purse. His style was a bold statement that no one else in town dared to make. At the time of his murder, I had recently moved from Boston to Bangor to live with my girlfriend Diana, who was teaching at the nearby University of Maine. Charlie’s death was shocking, and more shocking was the method and motive. Before Charlie died, Bangor had seemed like one of the safest cities in the country. In a typical year, there were no murders at all.

On that Saturday in July, after leaving an evening event at the Unitarian Church, Charlie was walking arm in arm with his friend Roy. A car stopped on the State Street Bridge. That was the extent of information shared in the first news accounts that I read. Later, we all learned that inside the car were two girls along with three boys, the two youngest were only 15. The boys spotted Charlie with Roy, didn’t like what they saw, and got out and chased the two men. While Roy made it to a fire alarm box down the street and pulled the switch, asthma slowed Charlie, and when he fell, the boys kicked and beat him. They lifted him over the railing, and he hung onto the rail, begged for his life, and yelled “I can’t swim!” But they tossed him into the Kenduskeag anyway, in Roy’s line of vision, while he waited anxiously for the fire crew to arrive. It was too late. Charlie was dead at twenty-three years old.

It took several hours before they found his body downstream. Through town, the river had concrete side walls – there was no climbing out once you were in it until after you passed under the Washington Street Bridge, half a mile away, on your way to the Penobscot River.

Reading the newspaper the morning after Charlie’s murder, I was both outraged and depressed that Charlie had been killed. And I was scared. Who would be next? Us? Anonymous strangers suddenly seemed threatening. Our neighbors in the building seemed to accept us, but what about people down the street? Diana had been out on campus in nearby Orono since her arrival, and I’d met all of the faculty and staff in her department. But they hadn’t known she was a lesbian when they hired her. Did any of them have a problem with us? At work I had mentioned her as the friend I lived with but nothing more.

The Monday after the murder, Diana and I dressed in our darkest clothes for the memorial service. While I told Diana I was willing to participate, I was filled with trepidation. Would there be violence? Would we be harassed?

Before the evening service, a few hundred of us gathered for a candlelight vigil in front of the Police Department. Afterwards, the walk to the church was a procession, not a march. It was the first time Diana or I had gone inside the building even though it was just down the street from our apartment. By the time the service started, the place was filled with students, professors, community people, some of whom were lesbians and gay men. It was standing room only.

After the service, we marched with the crowd to the stream. I held the bridge rail tightly, then leaned over and thought that the fall alone could take a life. Despite the hundreds of supportive people all around me, Bangor now seemed like a sinister place.

A few days after Charlie’s death, we organized. Well, other people organized, and I went. First, there was a big meeting at the Unitarian church where Charlie had attended rainbow support group meetings. There was some comfort in seeing a large group of people who were like us, or who supported us. At our gathering, the group took the name Bangor Area Gay Lesbian Straight Coalition (BAGLSC). Most of our friends attended. One was Diana’s colleague, a professor who had stayed deep in the closet, afraid to be fired if the department chair found out. The Chair wouldn’t have come straight out with “We’re firing you because you’re a lesbian.” He would have made some other excuse. Back then, many men were still uncomfortable working with women, not to mention lesbians. But because of Charlie’s murder, this colleague was moved to attend the meeting, let a crowd see her face, to show them she was with them and one of them.

I had been in a queer support group as a graduate student in New York, but there were fewer than twenty of us, and it was more about socializing, not about political activism. I’d been to the Pride March, carried a sign demanding “civil rights now.” Still, I didn’t see myself as an activist then; activists were other people, and their cries now included health care concerns. A mysterious illness was spreading, gay men were dying. Some Americans seemed to prefer this death sentence over finding a cure for AIDS.

Charlie was killed on Saturday, and I was scheduled to fly to San Francisco the following Friday for the Democratic National Convention. Even though I was a newcomer to the state, I had campaigned and won a place as an alternate Mondale delegate on the Maine Delegation. Why Walter Mondale? It wasn’t that his ideas distinguished him from the other two candidates, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson. All three supported “homosexual” and abortion rights. AIDS funding too. I just thought he was most likely to win. I still had trouble believing that we had an actor, Ronald Reagan, as President, now running for reelection. I thought Mondale had the best probability of beating him.  

I wavered about leaving town. I worried about Diana staying alone in Bangor. She said she wasn’t worried. She’d been “out” as a professor on campus in Orono for a few years at that point, and not one person had said anything negative or called her names. But I knew that Orono, a college town filled with faculty and staff from around the world, had a different population than Bangor. I didn’t take much comfort in what she said; I thought it was false bravado.

Then I thought of Charlie, who’d dealt with taunts, teasing, and stares on a daily basis. People told a story of him leaving the supermarket and responding to a heckler by turning to face the source and bursting into song: “I am what I am, I don't want praise, I don't want pity, I bang my own drum, some think it's noise, I think it's pretty.” He was reciting “I Am What I Am,”  Gloria Gayner’s dance club hit of the year, a gay anthem and a remake of a tune from the film La Cage aux Folles released six years earlier. In the end, I let Diana convince me she’d be fine without my protection - my skills as a bodyguard were limited anyway, as I didn’t carry a weapon or know how to use one.

After arriving on the West Coast, I stayed in Oakland with a friend for a few days. When the morning fog burned off, I floated on a raft in her swimming pool and thought about murder. I’d been on a swim team in my youth, but I wasn’t certain that I would have been conscious or able to escape from the raging Penobscot.  I thought about the terror of the victim and the callousness of the perpetrators. I thought those teenagers might have just destroyed their futures with their cruelty. How would they live with themselves knowing their actions had led to a young man’s death?

Since I was a late-comer to the Maine delegation, the others had already made their hotel reservations. As I was desperate, a friend offered me a sleeping spot on the floor of the hotel room she shared with her sister and another female delegate who’d claimed the roll-away bed. It was all the more generous as none of them supported my candidate. My friend and I had first met at a meeting of the Bangor Chapter of the National Organization for Women. Sometimes Diana would take a break from her class preparations and stop by after the meeting when a few of us would go out for drinks. I was glad my roommates knew about my relationship with Diana and had no problem with it. As for the rest of the delegation, no one knew at that point.

In our hotel room, bedtime was like a slumber party. The sisters formed a voting block and determined which TV station we watched or which song on the radio we listened to – fortunately I shared their taste in music, or they would have seen my grumpy side.  If the first to fall asleep let out a snore, they were awakened by the unsuccessfully suppressed giggles of the rest of us. I slept half in, half out of the closet, which reflected my identity at the Convention. I wasn’t about to become a spokesperson or talk to the press. I was concerned about Diana’s safety back home, and mine too, after my return.

In the Maine delegation, there was one other lesbian I knew about, but the two of us hadn’t previously met, as she lived in a different part of the state, down south, closer to Portland. She was a Jesse Jackson supporter, and she loved to talk to the press about anything – Jesse, his Rainbow Coalition, queers, Charlie’s murder. I left her to it.

Then someone introduced me to the head of California’s Mondale delegation. A San Francisco lesbian, she was a big deal both in the state and local political circles. She was wearing a large button that said Lesbian & Gay Caucus so I asked her about it and she told me to join.  I was ready to proclaim myself by wearing a button around strangers. There wasn’t any membership application or anything like that; I just showed up at a meeting, was welcomed, and handed my own button. Given Charlie’s bravery, wearing a button was the least I could do. I made it part of my outfit each morning, and to my surprise, no one from the delegation commented on it. Out on the street, I braced myself for comments which didn’t materialize. It was San Francisco after all, and I usually had a companion or two or three with me when heading to or from Moscone Center.

While wearing my new button, I met two young men with HIV. I’d read about HIV/AIDS, there had been four cases reported in Maine, but it was the first time I’d met anyone who shared their diagnosis. These gay men were at the convention to humanize those with the virus and to make sure that HIV/AIDS funding was part of the party platform.  

All three candidates had expressed their support for prohibiting discrimination against “homosexuals” in addition to AIDS funding. But during the convention, Jesse Jackson, in his speech, specifically reminded everyone that “lesbians” were part of the American quilt. I cried. He was the first presidential candidate in history to mention us. And he hadn’t just used the word “homosexual” which was such an odd word. It had never seemed to have anything to do with me. All the prohibitive legislation I’d heard of was directed toward men’s behavior, as if lesbians were invisible. For the first time, I’d been named.

One night the women from the lesbian and gay caucus organized an outing to Amelia’s, a women’s bar on Valencia Street in the Mission. As we sipped our beers, they shared with us out-of-towners that it was famous locally, as Dykes on Bikes, the women who lead the annual SF Pride Parade, held their meetings there. Besides, it was one of the few lesbian bars.

Before it was time to head home, I called Diana and told her we just had to move to San Francisco and she said OK.

I returned to Maine with my button securely stored away in my suitcase; I was travelling alone and felt vulnerable. Diana picked me up at the airport, completely unharmed, and we embraced each other for a long time.

The Monday after my return, there was a BAGLSC general meeting. A friend called and asked if I would speak about my experience at the convention. I said yes, even though, like a lot of other people, speaking before a crowd was not something I felt comfortable with. I felt I owed it to the people, who may have voted for me, to share the highlights, especially about Jesse’s speech.

When I finished, a young woman in the crowd said loudly, “Who asked her to speak?” I felt my face turning bright red. As I soon learned, in my absence, it had been determined, or not protested loudly enough, that everything be done by consensus, and my friend and I had not followed the rules on getting consensus for me to speak.

I had been in groups that made decisions by consensus before, but those had been small women’s consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s. Consensus did not work well in a large group like BAGLSC. The meetings were never-ending. Whoever was willing to stay the longest, had the least pressing commitments the next day, made the decisions.

Meeting attendees had numbered near a hundred, but in just two months, it seemed half of the people stopped attending meetings while others just showed up once in a while. In frustration, a group of gay men started a separate group because they felt ignored by “The Feminists.” But I didn’t feel like I was being listened to by either.

Despite the frustrations, Diana and I continued to attend BAGLSC meetings. No other organization was trying to affect change for us. There was nowhere else to go.

The Bangor School Committee took Charlie’s murder as a call to action and drafted a Diversity Directive for the school curriculum. Diana and I decided to attend the public meeting where they were going to take a vote, and I took a seat on one of the grey metal folding chairs. Across the aisle sat a row of men, Bibles in hand, with clenched jaws, their voices filled with hostility, speaking loudly to be overheard. There was a significant group of people in Maine who belonged to the Christian Civic League, whose mission was to make civil law reflect what they believed to be a single Biblical perspective, and I thought they might be members. I shuddered when I saw the Pastor from a local Baptist church among them. He had a huge congregation, 3000 strong, with the reputation for being the largest Fundamentalist congregation in New England. They even had their own radio station. Since Charlie’s murder, the Pastor’s favorite topic was the evils of homosexuality, and he’d been on TV and in the papers more than usual, expounding on his bigoted views.

In addition to the scary-looking men, there were a few students from the local seminary which was known to be liberal, supportive of social justice. The seminarians held their Bibles and wore large crosses. I was soon listening to a seminarian or two sharing a viewpoint different than the League’s. Other seats held professors, students and other citizens. Most were strangers to me. I didn’t know who they were there to support, and I worried some in the audience might even have raised the boys who threw Charlie into the Kenduskeag. Once the meeting commenced, it seemed like things could turn violent at any moment – against the committee members and their supporters that is. I sat frozen in my seat. I looked at Diana, and she looked at me, and not a word passed between us. My breathing became shallow. I was thinking this mob could beat or kill us if they knew we were a couple. We had attended with the intention of speaking up to defend the Directive, to support the committee members for proposing it, but I’m ashamed to say, we were intimidated into silence. Bible quotes were thrown back and forth, voices raised, people spoke up for the Directive and others argued against it. I sighed with relief when the Directive passed without any comments from me.

After the vote, some men stormed up to the front of the room and screamed at the committee members.

“You’ll burn in hell for this!” one shouted.

I looked around anxiously, hoping to see the police or security, but there was none. Even if nothing more happened this night, I worried about what would happen outside or the next night.

In the weeks that followed, everyone seemed safe. No one from the committee was battered or bruised, no homes were burned or vandalized.

An attorney came to speak at a BAGLSC meeting about the status of Charlie’s murder case – what was admissible, the difference between murder and manslaughter charges, conviction and appeals. We were getting an education we never thought we’d need. Nothing was final at this point. We had to wait and see how the process evolved.

Mid-September, Diana and I drove down to Augusta, the state capital, to become founding members of a new, state-wide group, the Maine Lesbian Gay Political Alliance (MLGPA). The group committed to working on gay rights issues at the local and national level, to lobby legislators and work to get the media to partner with us to educate people. I was hoping it would fare better than BAGLSC.

In early October, the murder charges were reduced to manslaughter. The Attorney General’s request to try the three as adults was rejected by a judge, so they were tried as juveniles, and the boys pleaded guilty. They were sentenced to an indeterminate period, not to exceed four years, of incarceration at the Maine Youth Center. No one I knew was pleased with the outcome. Some BAGLSC members had opinion pieces published in the local newspaper, a few were interviewed on the nightly news.

And the girls? They got in the car thinking they were in search of someone to buy the group beer. When the car stopped at the bridge, they remained in the car. They weren’t charged with anything, but I’m sure they were haunted by what happened while they parked on the State Street Bridge that night.

Despite the verdicts, despite the election results and the start of Reagan’s second term, despite the eventual demise of BAGLSC, many positive things emerged from our broken hearts and all of the conflicts of trying to work together, and I’m glad to see that today the MLGPA survives as the renamed EqualityMaine.

Some of the earliest BAGLSC organizers still reside in the Bangor area. There are others, like me, who, as soon as an opportunity presented itself, moved to a place where fear didn’t join us as we went out the door each morning. After I accepted a new job and moved to Portland, each weekend, Diana drove several hours to see me- except for the summer when she moved in for three months. That arrangement took its toll, and the next year, we broke up. It took several more years for Diana to obtain a professor position in another state, but she did, and moved away too.

As for those who stayed, kudos to them. They are the ones who have created a different Bangor. And every year, the church holds a memorial service followed by a march to the State Street Bridge where people drop flowers in Charlie’s memory. I still think of him. I think he would be proud of his legacy. The queer community stood up and spoke up. People have changed, laws have changed, and hopefully, the momentum for equality will continue.

Back then, I didn’t know anyone who was talking about the possibility of domestic partnerships let alone same sex marriage. People could be fired for being queer. It had been barely ten years since the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder.

I know some pessimists say two steps forward, one step back, “Just look at what’s going on in this country.”

I hope they are wrong.