
GAYS ARE MARTYRS – Marlene Daley
GAYS ARE MARTYRS Somewhere around 13/14 years old my mind took a mental picture of a man being stoned as he ran down the incline of the road toward my home in my little community. He was wearing an ankle length bridal dress, a lopsided tiara with an attached veil blowing in the wind, and heels that at a guess I would say were three inches high. Despite this, in flight he wobbled some sort of gymnastics that kept my eyes peeled to his feet for every safe landing. My entire little neighborhood had come out to watch this debacle. Where bodies were not in full view, heads could be seen furiously bobbing atop craning necks shouting pronouncements of “gay” or some other unpreferred banter, over their concrete fence. I had never before seen or heard of homosexuals. My head swirled with thoughts of the whereabouts of his groom, the pastor and his bridal party. I wondered if this bit of exhibition was meant to be a statement in advocacy of rights and liberty, but certainly I knew that he had to be straight up gay because one could tell in the moment, that no one in their right mind would dare to run such a joke in Jamaica in the 1960’s. In 1978 while going about my business in The Village in New York, bundled in sweaters that came up a tad bit short of staving off the 50 degree temperature, that felt more like 0 Fahrenheit to a