Hauntings from the Past

This photograph popped into my email the other day. It is my business card from probably 1991 or early 1992. This card was, according to filmmaker Brian Alexander, in the wallet of Sue Pittmann when she was murdered by her neighbor over a dispute about a fence. Very early in our Saginaw exile, I wrote about the murders of Pittmann and Puckett and how painfully resonant it was for me when we were harassed when we first purchased our home and then last year after we adopted Tibe. In the earlier post, I wrote:

Always haunting me during this neighborhood conflict was what happened to Sue Pittmann and Christine Puckett in the suburbs of Detroit on May 5, 1992. It feels like an eon ago when they were shot and killed by their neighbor, someone with whom they had on going conflict. When he was arrested he just said, I had to do it. Initial reports in the newspaper were that it was a conflict between neighbors over a fence. In fact, these two open lesbians were shot and killed in cold blood and with no remorse by their next store neighbor. Bigotry and homophobia kill lesbians.

Seeing this business card from my twenty-one- or twenty-two-year-old self reminds me of how little I understood about bigotry and homophobia then but how committed I was to ending it. The image, remembering the card in my hand, the quality of the paper on which it was printed, what it meant then to have a card with the word Lesbian on it, reminds me of my earlier self. She haunts me. I want to retreat and never speak to people again; she demands something different. She demands a commitment to creating a new world free from homophobia and bigotry. She dwells within me. She haunts me.

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