Pedro Julio Serrano, the LGBT activist and the spokesman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, confronts the crowd at the very popular Krash nightclub in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Serrano heard negative comments about transgender people while serving as a guest judge during a contest. "One of the few times in the club's history in which everyone was silent and listened," adds Christopher Pagan, the Puerto Rican gay activist who shot the video and translated.
Watch the video WHEN YOU JUMP.
Serrano has been the lead activist demanding justice in the brutal slaying of gay teen Jorge Steven López Mercado. On Wednesday, thousands marched through the streets of San Juan for a vigil in memory of the 19-year-old. That same day, the Puerto Rico Department of Justice agreed to investigate the murder as an anti-gay hate crime, the first in the island's history.
Serrano questions one of the key statements by the confessed murderer, who claims López was dressed as a woman. Serrano tells Doug Ireland at Gay City News: "None of Jorge Steven’s friends, and I’ve spoken to many of them, knew anything about his ever having engaged in sex work, not his family, and not the police. Nor was he known as a cross-dresser. He identified and lived as a very proud gay man, he was very genuine and authentic. He was just very fashion-oriented and what you could call a gender-bender, but not in a transgendered way. We do not know if the murderer’s claim that Jorge Steven was wearing a dress is true or not, because the body had been so dismembered, its legs and arms and torso strewn in different locations, and it had also been burned along with the clothes he was wearing."
Serrano's powerful testimony WHEN YOU JUMP.
That was wonderful. I know so many gay guys who are afraid of trans girls. The lesbians, some really don't like trans women either. I don't really get it. Even in gay life being male, trans or otherwise, still gets props more than being a woman.
Posted by: Diva1961 | 30 November 2009 at 14:40