We can never talk enough about bullying and hate crimes. Until we can end the violence, we must remember the past and work to see that it’s not forever repeated. With that it mind, I would like to talk about the January 2011 Resource Publications book release, Unfinished Lives: Reviving the Memories of LGBTQ Hate Crimes Victims
Dr. Sprinkle is an Associate Professor of Practical Theology at the Brite Divinity School which is located at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. He’s the first openly gay member of the faculty. His previous publications where theological in nature. Unfinished Lives was a work near to his heart. It was a research labor that took him all over the United States to seek records and to speak to the families and friends of victims and to hear their stories.
The Amazon.com published synopsis of the book:
Over 13,000 Americans have been murdered in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries because of their sexual orientation and gender presentation. In Unfinished Lives: Reviving the Memory of LGBTQ Hate Crimes Victims, Stephen Sprinkle puts a human face on the outrage and loss suffered when people die from anti-gay hatred. Beginning with new developments in the story of Matthew Shepard’s murder in Laramie, Wyoming, Sprinkle tells the stories of fourteen representative LGBTQ victims whose lives were savagely cut short due to homophobia and transphobia. These are stories about people who could be your neighbor, classmate, co-worker, or friend – real, everyday people whose love was foreclosed, relationships brutally terminated, and future contributions stolen from us by outrageous, irrational hatred. Told lovingly yet unflinchingly, Unfinished Lives lifts the stories of these LGBTQ victims from undeserved obscurity, allowing their memory to live again. Relying on personal interviews and visits to the locations where these people lived, loved, and died, Sprinkle records the raw emotions, powerful movements for social change, and unexpectedly hopeful communities that arise from the ruins of those people whose only “offense” was to live as they were born to be. Part portraiture, part crime narrative, and part ethnography, Unfinished Lives is poised to change the conversation on hate crimes in the United States. Endorsements: “Unfinished Lives cries out to be read . . . It speaks to the systematic denigration of LGBTQ people in the United States . . . and it offers hope that the cycles of abuse and hatred and violence can be broken-one person, one family, one community at a time.” -from the Foreword by Harry Knox Director of the Religion and Faith Program Human Rights Campaign, Washington, DC “
Be warned, this is not a “feel good” accounting. Many of these murders were brutal. Those stories are told, with no holds barred. The aim of the author is for us to bear witness to these acts, to grieve for the victims and to become angry at their tormentors and, through that anger, to push for social change. This book is part memorial but, perhaps more so, a call to action and to activism.
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