Harlan's Race

Activists—Vince Matti among them — had demonstrated throughout the trial. Today, people’s emotions were out of hand. One placard said in English, BILLY DIED FOR FREEDOM, right next to several in French Canadian. Other signs read GIVE MECH ANOTHER MEDAL and DEATH TO SODOMISTS.
    Loving hands of gay and lesbian demonstrators reached out to touch me. Numbly, I squeezed hands back.
    Vince stood right behind me, his handsome face dark with anguish. Always a pacifist, he had marched against the Vietnam War when he was 15. But Billy’s death had shaken him with change, deep as an earthquake. Lately he’d growled about a tooth for a tooth — the death penalty for Mech. I had disagreed, feeling that a lifetime in prison was worse than death, for a country boy.
    But the law was clear. The Canadian government had refused to extradite Mech, and the death penalty was outlawed in Canada. Police had made no further arrests in the case — the man glimpsed by the cameras seemed a ghost. The defense seduced the jury with Mech’s clean country look and war record.
    “Yes, I acted alone,” Mech had insisted. Deep moral outrage at Billy and me had driven him wild, he said. He had not lived through hell in Vietnam, he said, so that deviates could enjoy freedom too. He wept in the dock. Canadian conservatives were no different than the American variety — they might harden their hearts to the tears of a black child or a battered wife, but they came unglued at the tears of a war veteran. For the most public murder of a homosexual in the history of North America, Mech got ten years.
    Our little party paused for the expected statement on the courthouse steps. Several dozen microphones aimed at us.
    “All right,” I said in my locker-room voice. “Listen up.”
    The media people quieted. Though the Canadian court had tried a news blackout on the trial, a changing U.S. had followed any news avidly on TV. American religious zealotry was finally drawing its sword on the new sexual freedom of gays and straights. Florida politician Anita Bryant had had her own things to say to the media, against the brightness and beauty of gay life.
    Now a spring breeze played with my tie, and fanned my feverish head through my crew cut. On a day like this, Billy and I had made love for the first time, two years ago. In my worst nightmares, I couldn’t have seen myself standing here — or Billy’s ashes scattered in the woods near my home.
    I cleared my throat.
    “People ask me about justice,” I began hoarsely.
    From that seething sea of heads, thousands of eyes met mine. Some eyes were crying. Some looked away, or looked down. Some eyes blazed with incredible hostility.
    “There are those who say that Billy deserved to die,” I went on. “I was raised in the kind of home that these people come from. That Mech came from. I served in the same uniform he did. Their cruel and cold-blooded America is not the country that I stand for. It all starts with words of hate. Words turn to bullets. Maybe a courtroom can’t bring to justice all the people who murder with words. But history will.”
    I turned away from the mikes.
    ‘Vince!” “Mr. Matti!” ‘Vince!”
    Vince was the picture of defiant leftist — rock ’n’ roll mane and tattered bell-bottom jeans. His peace medal was conspicuously missing. He leaned to the mikes and shouted: “I have nothing to say to a corrupt society that killed my best friend.”
    As he made a Panther fist in the air, cheers went up from the nearest gay radicals in the crowd who could hear him.
    Then, between our bodyguards, John, Vince and I pushed along the narrow aisle of barricades, towards the curb, where our limousine waited. It was an old black Cadillac limousine with bulletproof windows, that John had hired. Corky had the engine running, with Jemal riding shotgun. From both sides the crowd leaned on us, cursing us and blowing us kisses, past Royal Canadian Mounties towering on their horses.
    “No further comments,” John Sive was yelling at the media.
    “Shame!” a woman shouted at John. “Faggot fathers are the worst scum of all!”
    A chant started. ‘Free Richard Mech! Free Richard Mech!” “J’aime Beelee,” cried a young French Canadian man in my ear.
    Out of the corner of my eye, as Chino pushed me into the limo, I saw riot police dragging some young passive resisters towards a police van. One woman was still clutching a sign — I caught the word LOVE.
    In another minute, we were