Nex, Charlie, & Matthew

I keep thinking about Charlie Howard this week with the news of the death of Nex Benedict. 

Charlie was a young gay person who was killed because of that when he was thrown over a bridge in Downtown Bangor, the next town over from where I grew up, by some other young people the same year I was born, 1984. I remember learning about him, his life and his death, while in high school. I remember stealing glimpses over the bridge where he died into the churning waters below while on visits downtown. Wondering if I would survive the fall or if I could make the swim away from the channelized part of the river into more open waters if a group of someones ever decided they wanted to push me over the side because of my queerness.

Just a few years after I learned about Charlie, I started driving cross country often (sometimes alone, sometimes with family of origin, sometimes with queer family) between Maine and Washington State. While Route 80 was the most direct and fastest, it also went through Laramie, Wyoming. My first trip across Route 80 was less than four years after Matthew Shepard had been beaten to death there and I remember feeling a familiar palpable unease even as I just flew by on the highway.

Forty years after the end of Charlie’s life, twenty six years after the end of Matthew’s life, is this week, the end of Nex Benedict’s life. Charlie and Matthew aren’t the only people between 1984 and now that have died in these ways of course, and yet the similarities in what I know about both of their experiences and deaths keep ringing loudly in my mind this week with what has been shared about Nex’s death.

If you’re an LGBTQ+ person of any age who is out there and wondering, like I once did, if you’d survive the fall, or like many others of us if you’ll survive your school day, if anyone would come and help you if you were being hurt, you’re not alone. You’re not alone in wondering about that and you’re not alone in this world because there are many of us in communities of all sizes across this continent who are part of this fight and movement for an existence where none of us have to wonder about things like that or to experience what Charlie, Matthew, and Nex have experienced. Where none of us feel uneasy, where none of us have the hair stand up on the back of our necks at a rest stop or a public bathroom, or moving down the street, or laying in a field, where none of us have to feel anything other than joy and curiosity about ourselves and our experiences of gender and sexuality.

Rest in peace and power, Nex, and know that we’ll never stop until we’ve remade the world so it works for all of us.

HB