Popular media portrayals of the gay rights movement often focus on coastal cities, lending credit to the notion that the LGBTQ+ community is mostly grounded in places like San Francisco, New York City, and Key West. But did you know that one of the largest pro-LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations in the country is based right here in Michigan? Today, we’re learning about the founder of the Triangle Foundation, now known as Michigan Equality, Jeffrey Montgomery, a lifelong Michigander, and one of the most tireless advocates for LGBTQ+ rights in America.
Jeffrey was born on May 9th, 1953 in Detroit, graduated from Grosse Point South High School in 1971, and went on to Michigan State University (Go Spartans!) from which he graduated in 1976. He moved back to Detroit and worked in public relations.
In 1984, his partner, Michael, was murdered outside a gay bar in Detroit. When he found out after Michael’s funeral that the police weren’t taking the investigation seriously, dismissing it as “just another gay killing,” he began speaking out against apathy toward violent crime directed at the LGBTQ+ community. In 1991, he joined Henry D. Messner and John Monahan to form the Triangle Foundation to advocate for victims of anti-LGBTQ+ violence and harassment. While initially founded to work with prosecutors and law enforcement to improve legal remedies for victims of violence, the Triangle Foundation expanded its mission to include political advocacy and anti-discrimination advocacy.
This advocacy work was not without danger. Jeffrey experienced “death threats, vandalism, sabotage, [and] even being placed on the hit-list of the Aryan Nation.” (https://americayoukillme.com/about) In 1995, co-founder Henry D. Messner, a neurosurgeon and Korean War veteran was shot outside the Triangle Foundation’s office. Nonetheless, Jeffrey continued his advocacy work, serving not only in executive leadership at the Triangle Foundation, but also as a co-founder and spokesperson for the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, a member of the Steering Committee of the Michigan Alliance Against Hate Crimes, the Bias Crime Response Task Force of the Michigan Commission on Civil Rights, and a board member of the ACLU of Michigan. Throughout, he used his gift for communication and public relations to advocate for LGBTQ+ victims of violence, against discriminatory laws and policies, and in favor of the expansion of LGBTQ+ rights in America.
In 2000, Brown University began offering an annual lecture in honor of the late Matthew Shepard, a gay man whose torture and murder focused America on the brutality of anti-LGBTQ+ violence. Jeffrey gave the first of these lectures, wherein he spoke, in part:
Most of us who do this work are constantly in conflict about the use of victims and their stories. On one hand we don’t desire to exploit them and their trauma, but on the other hand, we need to tell their stories in order for the senseless episode that changed their life —often ended it— might be used to illustrate a truth.
That would be the truth of the risk and danger that defines the lives of all GLBT people every day.
And let’s not make any mistake, or gloss over that fact: Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are at risk every day of their lives. Not only are we the group most at risk of violence, we are most at risk of job discrimination, losing our families; homophobia retains its title as the last socially acceptable form of bigotry. Anti-glbt sentiment is a primary tool for organizing the far-right and it is stronger then ever as a means to split communities and reinforce constituencies.
So, we are faced with lives interrupted; lives destroyed; lives forever changed. And we believe that the stories of those people must be used and told and told again. We have to put a real human face, a real human event on the plague of hate violence.
Bias violence is not abstract or an academic problem…
We can not live as disposable people. The broader community, which has firmly established compulsory heterosexuality as the law of the universe, has to get over its problem with us.
Fortunately, our community has been able to build our own structure and network of advocacy and activism and has created a means for political and social response when we have been threatened and attacked, and in the face of the marginalization and invisibility imposed on us.
While it is all too true that there is no single monolithic voice or unified agreement about what it means to be glbt-identified, this “glbt community” has been able to unite behind some basic consensus of what we need to achieve in order to claim the right of full citizenship.
We want equality and the right to be left alone.
We want to be able to move freely and safely in our daily lives, free from the threat of random hate violence.
We want to be able to freely associate, without fear that our privacy, including the privacy of our intimate consensual relations, will be compromised by intrusive and abusive selective enforcement of laws or moral codes.
We want to be able to live with the person we choose in legally sanctioned arrangements or marriage, to be able to build and maintain families and raise children, with the full protections and benefits that attain to those relationships.
We want glbt youth to have access to safe and inclusive education experiences, in both public and private educational institutions, no longer dispirited by judgmental, prejudicial systems that contribute to low self-esteem and leave them at risk.
These are the basic rights and expectations yet to be achieved for GLBT people in this land of the free. GLBT people across this country only want equality and to be left alone, left to pursue our dreams and aspirations and our part of the American promise, which should be our birthright.
But the cards are stacked against us.
Scurrilous and abusive rhetoric is spewed by politicians and so-called religious leaders, who cloak themselves by turning the Constitution on its head and claim protection and permission to demonize and denigrate us.
Hiding behind the perversion of the concepts of religious freedom and political speech, those people have carved out a special right to impose their bigotry and hatred for us.
And that seems to be acceptable. Well, it isn’t.
They assault our democratic sensibilities and the foundations of fairness and equality that theoretically define us as a people. Those who drive official policy are operating under the influence of rhetoric and toxic thinking that can only lead to a fatal collision of our ideals as freedom-loving people and the restrictive, anti-family fractiousness of radical extremism.
Jeffrey died in 2016 after several years of declining health. Over the course of his lifetime, the LGBTQ+ community has made remarkable progress in gaining more cultural acceptance and legal protections. It’s no coincidence that Michigan, in particular, has some of the best legal protections in this part of the country for members of the LGBTQ+ community. Equality Michigan, the current iteration of the Triangle Foundation, continues to advocate for LGBTQ+ people, especially in Michigan. That said, those hard-won victories are far from iron-clad and have been subject to immense and ongoing push-back. In the 24 years since that Brown University lecture, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, especially transphobia, continues to be a key political strategy, from presidential campaigns to book bannings and school board races. Speakers often frame the LGBTQ+ community as being the result of social contagion from debauched coastal metropolitan areas, but LGBTQ+ folks are everywhere, and the success of Michigan Equality and other advocacy organizations in Michigan in creating the conditions for those of us in flyover country to flourish is a testament to the efforts of activists like our own Jeffrey Montgomery.
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