Queermonton Vue Weekly Week of October 31, 2007, Issue #628

1998 was a tumultuous time to be gay on the flat plains of North America’s prairies. Big skies and land as far as the eye could see provided no protection from the unruly human winds that in this so-called modern time often deliver crueler storms of torture than Mother Nature ever could.
Vriend vs Alberta

On Apr 2, 1998 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the Vriend vs Alberta case that provincial governments could not exclude LGBT individuals from human rights legislation.

The Supreme Court’s ruling was the result of a six-year battle that began when Delwin Vriend was fired from his job as a lab coordinator at King’s University College in Edmonton due to his sexual orientation.

When Vriend attempted to file a discrimination complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission his request was refused on the grounds that sexual orientation was not protected by Alberta’s code of human rights. This meant that Vriend could not sue the College directly for discrimination because, in the eye of Alberta’s laws, being a sexual minority was a seemingly justifiable reason to be fired. With that decision, Vriend sued the Government of Alberta and its Human Rights Commission for not protecting him. The issue was not that the college fired him because he was gay, but that the college could fire him because he was gay.

In 1992, Vriend’s case against the Province resulted in an Alberta court ruling stating sexual orientation must be written in as a new protected class under the human rights legislation. However, the provincial government appealed the decision through the Alberta Court of Appeals and had the decision overturned. This meant that Vriend and all other sexual minorities were in the same boat as when he was first fired, a precariously unsafe one that could easily be led by a homophobic captain throwing queers overboard, leaving them with no lifejacket.

This final ruling at the provincial level led Vriend and his team to take the case to the Supreme Court of Canada where within a year the hearing was over and the Vriend camp emerged victorious. In the end all provinces read the Supreme Court’s ruling into their human rights legislation—all except Alberta, which to this day has yet to read it in.

Matthew in Wyoming

I find it hard to write about Matthew Shepard. I don’t know where to start and I need to believe that you already know what happened starting Oct 6, 1998. I don’t know how much detail to go into nor how much of him to bring into it and how much of what happened to share.

With Vriend it’s different. As simple as it is to see that there would be no Vriend vs Alberta without Delwin, the story quickly finds it’s own narrative. Vriend becomes the symbol for the small army of people including Delwin that fought hard and won the case.

With Matthew it is about one young man who could have been and has been countless young people among us. The difference is that most of us escape with a cautionary tale that makes us shake our heads with disbelief later in life. Matthew paid with his life, his head shaking and flinching from the impacts of fists and the butt of a gun. He was tied to a fence on the outskirts of a city that wasn’t even his own, beaten by two strangers who lured him out of the neon danky glow of a bar by pretending to be gay with the somewhat-innocent intent to just rob him. But everything came loose; things got out of hand.

Matthew suffered a fracture that went from the back of his head to his right ear—an earthquake inside the flesh of his head, damaging his brain stem and affecting his body’s ability to control its own heat or make the heart beat.

They left him for dead, without a wallet and shoeless, begging while they went to rob his house, only to be distracted from the task by more violence and subsequently apprehended. A mountain biker found Matthew the next morning, a near-lifeless lump clumped up against the cold autumn earth. He was unconscious and died in a hospital within six days.

If it were not for hearing Matthew’s mother Judy courageously tell the story in the hopes of “making even a small difference,” I am not sure I could even attempt to write about Matthew. But who am I to cower at an opportunity when even his own mother can say the words: Matthew was killed because he was gay. Matthew was a victim of a hate crime even if, at the time, the state of Wyoming was not equipped with the laws to say so.

Find out more. But don’t google him, because hateful websites come up. Instead, search out The Laramie Project at the library, video store or local playhouse. In fact, Victoria School of Performing and Visual Arts is putting on a production this November.

Six months, life and a border separate Vriend’s victory from Matthew’s murder. When viewed together the stories show two men unwittingly illustrating the similarities between the terrain of Alberta and Wyoming and the vastness between rights and realities, intentions and actions. The world did not become a better place when Vriend was passed and it did not stop when Matthew’s heart did. Ten years later, we who still live on the Prairies carry on and so does the world around us.

Queermonton Vue Weekly Week of October 17, 2007, Issue #626

What is it to be gay? Can our gayness be measured by how others perceive us? Are we gay if we never have same-sex nudie relations? Are we gay because we say we are, or are we gay because someone else says we are? For asylum seeker Alvaro Orozco and Canadian Immigration Minister Diane Finley, these questions have never been more poignant or important to consider.

Since his Oct 4, 2007 deportation date, Orozco, a 22-year-old gay man born in Nicaragua, has been in hiding in the Toronto area. The deportation order is so far the last word from Immigration Canada on his three-year-long journey to achieve refugee status based on sexual orientation, a journey that began at the age of the 13 when Orozco fled his family to escape abuse and fled his country in pursuit of freedom.

Currently, Orozco’s only hope of staying in Canada and avoiding the persecution and violence that would greet him upon returning to Nicaragua is for Minister Finley to grant him a Minister’s Permit to stay in Canada based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

As a boy Orozco says that he was different from his brothers. His father, who called him “marica” (derogatory term for gay), knew it as well and physically and emotionally punished him for it. As he entered his teens he began to feel that the macho Nicaraguan society would not be much more accepting of him. Orozco was right.

The same year Orozco turned seven, the government of Nicaragua added an amendment to the penal code that criminalized same-sex marriage, as well as sodomy. Six years later, in 1998, Orozco began his epic journey from Managua, the place of his birth, to Toronto, his adopted hometown. In between, he travelled through South America, sleeping in churches and landing in jails, he swam the Rio Grande to get to America, where he was taken in by members of the 7th Day Adventist Church, and eventually, inspired from his internet research, made his way via Buffalo to Canada, a place he felt was a beacon of hope and resources for gay immigrants.

As soon as he arrived in Canada he sought refugee status based on the domestic violence he had experienced. Coming out to officials and befrienders was not something Orozco felt comfortable doing, however. It wasn’t until he witnessed the "outness" of gay men in Toronto that he felt comfortable enough to include sexual orientation into his claim. While living in Nicaragua and throughout his journey, Orozco maintained and practiced the survival skill of concealing his sexual orientation. “I deliberately tried to act as ‘straight’ as possible” he says, “I was terrified of being perceived as gay.” This is where the irony gets thick and tragic.
On Oct 6, 2005, Orozco appeared via teleconference before Deborah Lamont, a member of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board. He was in Toronto; she was in Calgary. After what he describes as a grueling process that tested his mere six years of formal education, his claim was rejected. Ms Lamont did not believe that Orozco was gay.

In her ruling, she stated that Orozco was fabricating the sexual orientation portion of his claim in order to support “a non-existent claim for protection in Canada.” She found his “many explanations unsatisfactory for why he chose not to pursue same-sex relationships in the US.” She also cited the fact that at age 13, Orozco did not inform Nicaraguan officials that he was escaping the country because he was gay.

Implicit in this ruling, says Orozco’s lawyer El-Farouk Khaki, is the notion that Orozco isn’t “gay enough,” or does not “appear” to be gay. “The decision” he says, “shows a lack of understanding of issues facing queer kids from homophobic cultures.”

It also raises important questions: does the Canadian justice system run on the assumption that everyone is straight unless proved otherwise? Does that make Canada’s judicial culture homophobic? What does a sexual minority “look” like in the eyes of the law? How do we prove we are gay? Should we have to?
A few days before his Feb 2007 deportation date, Orozco received a two-month deferral by the justice department that gave his lawyer time to fill a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment application. The PRRA, like his initial claim, was rejected and resulted in the now eclipsed Oct 4 deportation date.

Sadly, it seems that due to his inability to appear camp-on-command, have sex before he was ready or exercise a suicidal need to tell the people he was fleeing from why he was doing so, Immigration Canada has forced Orozco to hide—the very thing he was attempting to escape from. V

Visit orangehabitat.com/alvaro for updates or more information on Orozco’s case.