In the early morning hours of July 3rd, 1990, 26 year old Julio Rivera, believing that he had made a new friend, was taken to an isolated alcove in a schoolyard and beaten to death. It was meant to send a message of fear to gay men and lesbians everywhere. At that time, initially nobody paid attention but a handful of people. Some things change. Some things don' t . . . .
—The Price We Pay, a manuscript by Kurt Wolfe and Andrew McMahon

Initially, the press and the police did their best to downplay or ghettoize this grisly hate-crime, a precursor of the tragic murder of Matthew Shepard and many other gay men in the 90s. Julio Rivera's killers attacked him repeatedly with a claw hammer, wrench, beer bottle and knife.

Newspaper articles vividly stereotyped Rivera as a Puerto Rican man with a cocaine addiction, who grew up in a South Bronx housing project. These articles used racist and heterosexist stereotypes to construct Rivera as a "hot, promiscuous addicted Latin," and therefore minimized his status as a gay man.

The police may have known or discovered that Rivera was gay, but decided to cover-up the fact that this was a gay bashing. The murder of Julio Rivera symbolizes the intersection of racism and homophobia, and is a vital pointer to the common ground between racial civil rights and gay and lesbian civil rights.

Kurt Wolfe just completed a manuscript featuring a fictionalized version of the Julio Rivera case (The Price We Pay, co-authored with Andrew McMahon). He worked as a gay TV and radio journalist, hosting Out in the 90s on Manhattan Cable ( local access), and as associate producer of Part Two in the four-part, award-winning PBS show The Question of Equality.

He went undercover in Oregon, posing as a straight journalist to cover the gay rights referendum in the early 90s. In this interview, Kurt shares some of his insights about the Oregon referendum, ACT UP, and Julio Rivera's case with readers of Gay Today.

Kurt Wolfe: I've been in gay broadcasting journalism for . . .maybe 15 years. I ended up going "undercover," if you want to call it that in the Christian Coalition's anti-gay movement in Oregon in the early 90s. You see, they would never have allowed an openly gay reporter to cover their movement.

I lived with these people, I traveled with them, stayed with them off and on for about 2 years. I interviewed different types of people in this anti-gay movement: from the leaders to the rank and file that lived in the woods. By posing as a fair, open-minded but heterosexual journalist, I was able to gain their trust. I didn't have to slant my journalism in any way to reveal the assholes that they were.

Raj Ayyar: You mean, you didn't have to editorialize or make any kind of moral judgment when writing about them. Kurt Wolfe: No, their own words showed them up for who they were. Raj Ayyar: Did they ever find out that you were gay? Kurt Wolfe: Well, eventually. This was all part of a documentary on PBS called The Question of Equality. Also, an HBO documentary called Ballot Measure 9, which won several awards, Sundance and so on. But, they (the organizers of the right-wing Christian movement) did not find out until a year or more later. So, there was no hate mail at the time and no fist shaking. Now, if they'd found out while I was there, it would have been different. We had an underground-railroad going.

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Raj Ayyar: Interesting. You mean, similar to the African-American slave Underground Railroad? You had a chain of safe houses throughout Oregon and neighboring states provided to whisk people out of their reach.

Kurt Wolfe: Yes, I mean, it was literally that dangerous. At the time we were there, there was a young gay man and a lesbian, who were roommates, and they were murdered. Burned to death. Their house was firebombed and when they tried to escape, Skinheads kicked them back into the burring house.

Raj Ayyar: And when did all this happen, Kurt?

Kurt Wolfe: From 1992-94. That's when the Oregon gay rights referendum was an issue.

Raj Ayyar: When you talk about White isolationists living in small towns, are you talking about hate groups and militia? They're well organized now, and it's scary.

Kurt Wolfe: Well, groups like Aryan Nation are on the extremist fringe. There are various 'lesser' groups, like the Skinheads I covered during the early 90s. What was particularly destructive about these folks in Oregon and elsewhere was that they would try to convince ordinary, decent people who weren't excessively homophobic, that gay rights could threaten their livelihood, corrupt their kids, ruin their living conditions.

Raj Ayyar: Similar things have been said about women, minorities, and new immigrants, 'legal' and 'illegal'.

Kurt Wolfe: That's right. And the threat to employment argument is gibberish. But, when they tried to tap into those fears with that kind of rhetoric, it worked. You know, Raj, I needed the leaders of this movement to be monsters. And they were not, at least not without reminding us of the little monster in all of us.

Raj Ayyar: I have always maintained that there is a little Adolph Hitler in all of us.

When he got up to take communion, he crumbled the Host and then he dropped it to the floor. Well, right behind him in the camera was the late Cardinal O'Connor, who looked like he was weeping. Then a group of priests grabbed the boy and took him away. The cops arrested him. From what I understand, Roman Catholics view this as a horrible sin.

We were the only people to have that footage. When the other TV networks found out that we had it, everybody wanted that footage. We got calls from all over the country, asking for that footage. We were offered as much as $5,000 for that footage. No amount of money would have induced us to part with that footage, because we knew that if CNN or ABC or whoever got it, the only thing that would ever be seen on national TV would be that young man crumbling the Host.

The 5,000 activists, who were there, legitimately protesting the hatred and bigotry of Cardinal O'Connor would never have had their story told. Now, we did run that footage, but within the context of the whole story.

Raj Ayyar: Within the context of that story, the young man crumbling that Host makes a lot of sense, because you could see that in that gesture he was equating the broken Host/Body of Christ with the broken, dismembered body of the AIDS community, oppressed and mutilated by the government since Reagan, the church, by institutional homophobia, and HIV-phobia everywhere. Within that context, I do not see the young man's act as sacrilege at all.

Kurt Wolfe: Whenever there was a major ACT UP demonstration, someone would call us up. Now, we were pretty sure that our phones were bugged. So, probably, were the phones of people in Queer Nation and ACT UP. So, they sent messages to us at the TV station in highly coded language. The success of many of the actions of ACT UP and Queer Nation can be directly correlated with the high visibility they were getting on Out in the 90s.

The Julio Rivera murder reflects the three different modes of oppression: hate crimes against gays, racism, and classism. The third mode is important, because had Julio Rivera been middle class, the police and press may have taken a different view of the matter. Kurt could not get this brutal crime out of his system. He had too much knowledge of what was going on behind the scenes. He and Andy McMahon co-authored a manuscript, The Price We Pay, which is a tight fictionalized courtroom drama, featuring the murder and the trials.--Raj

Raj Ayyar: Is it an autobiographical work?

Kurt Wolfe: Oh, no. It started off as a non-fictional account of the brutal murder of Julio Rivera. But, then, we came to the conclusion that it would make a wonderful vehicle for a story to be a fiction based on reality.

Raj Ayyar: Tell us a little about the story.

Kurt Wolfe: The story is about a young attorney, by the name of Alex Henderson who is a closeted gay lawyer.

Raj Ayyar: Was that true of the 'real life' public defender?

Kurt Wolfe: Oh, no. He was not gay. The attorney in our novel happens to be in court when one of the alleged murderers, a young gay man, is being arraigned. The young man couldn't afford an attorney, so Alex agrees to take him on. The fictional attorney is loosely based on some aspects of my life. The attorney finds out that the young man was not one of the gang members that killed Julio.

Raj Ayyar: Are you saying that Julio was having sex with one of his alleged murderers when —?

Kurt Wolfe: Yes. And this guy, named Eric Brown, was Julio's lover, and was attacked by the real murderers, but not killed, because Eric's brother was one of the gang responsible for Julio's murder. The gang was called the Doc Marten skinheads.

Okay, let me tell you the non-fictional story. One night, I got a call from Eric Brown's attorney called me to say that Eric was a victim and was having sex with Julio that night. I asked him if he'd talked to Eric about it. I did not want to violate client-attorney privilege. He said that if Queer Nation knew about this, they'd let up on his client. I replied, "Why doesn't your client get up on the stand and testify about this? Come out of the closet?"

The attorney stated that because there was no weapon associated with Eric, all the evidence against him is circumstantial, and there were no witnesses. Eric decided to take a chance. Because, if he came out of the closet, his family would disown him, and he'd probably be killed by the gang that murdered Rivera. I don't believe that's exaggerated, and so he pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to 25 years—life in a maximum security prison, where he still is.

Raj Ayyar: Interesting. I mean, his taking life in prison over coming out of the closet.

Kurt Wolfe: That's right. Hence the title of my book, The Price We Pay.