Source: http://cronkitezine.asu.edu/archives/stories/lostsouls03.html
By Joe Watson, Reprinted from The State Press, April 4, 2002

To Bernadine Soos, Raymond was much more than a flamboyantly gay man who drew stares and whispers.

She was deaf to the effeminate intonation in his voice. The plucked eyebrows, caked-on foundation and women's clothing in which he dressed himself for a night out in downtown Phoenix were nothing more than his outer shell.

That Raymond's sexual preference was for men, that he lived his life as the opposite gender and called himself "Amy" once the sun set on the horizon of the Salt River Pima Indian Reservation, was of no consequence to the remaining members of the Soos family, who now mourn the death of their baby brother.

"We accepted him for who he was," says "Bernie," showing no emotion through her facial expressions but revealing her agony and despair in her deep brown eyes. "He was so afraid when he first told me he was gay that I would be ashamed of him and stuff. But I told him that I would never be ashamed of him. He was my brother.

"I never tried to change him because if you try to change someone, and they don't want to be changed, you're just going to drive them away. I didn't want that."

Bernie never condemned her brother, Raymond Soos Jr., the youngest of eight siblings whose parents both passed away in the late 90s. She never ridiculed his choice of lifestyle, the alcoholic binges he went on almost nightly or the carelessness with which he sashayed through seedy bars and along dark corners of Van Buren Street.

Raymond's daily routine was ritualistic: He would wait until 10 or 11 at night before leaving home for the clubs. If a friend couldn't pick up Raymond from his home about 1,000 feet from Casino Arizona off of the 101 Loop and McKellips Road, then Bernie would gladly drive him into the city. At least then she would know Raymond wasn't hitching rides, as he was prone to do against her many warnings.

Bernie knew she could expect him back home around 3 in the morning where he would stay for about an hour before venturing out again to a nearby friend's house. At about 7 a.m., Raymond would visit the liquor store to buy beer before beginning his work shift at the social service office on the reservation.

And at some point, presumably, he slept.

It was 4 a.m. on Feb. 16, and Bernie knew something was amiss. Raymond hadn't come home to the reservation, where he had lived his entire life of 34 years, and he hadn't called to ask any of his older sisters to pick him up from Phoenix after another beating. Raymond had been attacked several times over the past couple of years, "once almost every three or four months," Bernie says, and, again, just a week before the night she saw her brother for the last time.

The police cruiser pulled into Bernie's driveway the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 19, to inform the family of Raymond's fate: He was dead, his naked body left bruised and bloodied on an empty stretch of road in far-northeast Phoenix.

"I believe it was his lifestyle that led to his death," says Bernie, resentfully and without apology, not toward the memory of Raymond, but to the hostility which her transgendered brother faced daily.

Raymond was victimized not only in a mysterious murder, but also by the dual societies of the white man's world and that of his native brethren, who, say his family, friends and some anthropologists, have forgotten their own history and teachings in a place where isolation, poverty and alcoholism reign.

As far as receiving support and camaraderie from the local gay and lesbian community, transgendered Native Americans seemingly find few resources for assistance and even fewer allies who find their lifestyle socially acceptable.

And as more Southwestern Native Americans come out of the closet in an almost trend-like fashion (for reasons unknown) and HIV/AIDS cases are rising steadily among Navajos in Arizona (the largest tribe in the country), the tribal councils are just now beginning to foster dialogue concerning the realities that exist.

Legends Lost

The history of gay and lesbian people in Native American culture derives from many myths and tribes, whose interpretations are as varied as the people themselves.

But anthropologists such as Wesley Thomas, Ph. D., a Navajo and assistant professor at Indiana University at Bloomington, agree that nearly all indigenous tribes in North America welcomed and revered those who were "two-spirited."

A native term derived in the 1980s that was originally used for all gays and lesbians, "two-spirit" has now evolved in Western culture to mean those who are transgendered because of their ability to see life through the eyes of both a man and a woman.

"[Transgenderism] was very common among all tribes," says Thomas, the co-editor of Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (1997). "Those who were two-spirited were very much a part of the Native community. People who were different...there was always a place for them."

In Navajo folklore, many believe that homosexuality began at the River of Separation, a place where First Man and First Woman were forced to live apart because of their differences with one another. Both, along with the other males and females in the tribe, learned to live without the other sex and became self-sufficient within their own gender.

According to some, this included sexual gratification, as the women turned ears of corn into sexual instruments to pleasure themselves and the men turned to one another.

Others cite Dilbaa, a masculine spirit who had intended to be female, as the first transgender or "Nadleeh" (pronounced nod-lay), which literally means an entity that is in a constant state of change.

Today, however, Navajo and other tribes across the country are rewriting their past, according to Thomas. As natives became increasingly exposed to a massive onset of Western Christianity in the 1930s, two-spirit people began disappearing. And the discrimination and prejudices that exist in the white man's world began to spill onto the reservations.

In her case study, "One Man's Story of Being Gay and Diné (Navajo)," ASU associate professor Margaret Waller, Ph. D., who grew up in an adoptive Pueblo family in Taos, N.M., spoke to a 28-year-old graduate student about growing up in a Native American family, and found that the lessons he was taught about homosexuality were anything but romanticized by his "traditional" parents.

"Teles [whose name was changed so that he could "come out"] had this idea that there was a time that a non-straight identity was valued among the tribe," says Waller, who is also a lesbian. "At the same time, he grew up hearing stories that were really very disturbing.

"Like the story of the young man whose family tricked him into getting married [to a woman]. He didn't know that he was going to get married until that day, and it was a great source of [humor] within the family. You know, 'Well, we set him straight.'"

There is a stark contrast, says Thomas, between the Western concept of homosexuality and the existence of the Nadleeh. Until the 1950s, he says, sexual gender had nothing to do with sexual preference among the Navajos. What Raymond and gay Native Americans who have moved from the reservations into the cities are practicing today is not the traditional sense of two-spiritedness.

Thus, their search for gender identity does not resonate with the majority of the members of the tribe, even those familiar with its past.

Because of the "constant denial of transgender by the Pimas," says Thomas, Bernie knew nothing about two-spirit people. She's learning now, and she may learn more about her brother, whom she insists told her "everything about his life," than she ever wanted to know or expected.

Masked Motives

At. 7 a.m. on Feb. 16, hot-air balloonists spotted Raymond's body in a roadway near Cave Creek and Jomax roads. According to Phoenix Police spokesman Sgt. Randy Force, investigators believe a car struck him while he was lying in the road, and multiple blunt force trauma was listed as the cause of death by Maricopa County medical examiners.

Raymond, says Force, was last seen alive being dropped off by a friend in the 1300 block of East Van Buren, an area where the prevalence of both drugs and prostitution exists. He also was believed to be in possession of a large sum of cash, having picked up his paycheck and his tribal per capita earnings earlier in the day, totaling as much as $1,600, prompting police to suspect robbery as a motive.

Bernie, however, says there is no way Raymond would have gone out that night with that much cash on him.

"He knew better than that," she says. "He would take a bit of money, you know. But he knew how much he would spend at the bar," places like Cruisin' Central, a downtown gay club, and Club Zerape, a Latin-music club he would head to for after hours.

Instead, Bernie believes Raymond's unsolved murder was a result of who he was to the world outside of the Soos home: A gay, feminine man who was never afraid to go into a "straight" establishment, refer to himself as "Amy" and flaunt his sexuality.

Bernie believes in her heart that his death was a hate crime.

"So many times when he would come home, he was either beaten or nearly dead. He ended up in the hospital twice, and other times the police would bring him home," Bernie says. "Someone would pick him up and tell him they were going to be nice to him and treat him well. And then they found out he was a man, and he would get beaten up.

"I think that's what happened this time. That's a hate crime to me."

To Phoenix Police, a hate crime is one "committed against persons or property which is motivated by an individual's dislike of a race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sexual orientation or gender."

Thus far in the investigation, according to Force, there is no evidence that suggests Raymond's murder had anything to do with hate, but rather, a senseless crime of passion.

"We all have two lives -- the one we share with our family and friends, and the one we keep to ourselves," Force says, hinting at the strong possibility that, most likely attributed to the ill-reputed bars he patronized, Raymond was involved in prostitution. "His family has the luxury of their beliefs. We don't have that. We have to do our jobs based on fact.

"And the facts so far say that this wasn't a hate crime."

Two Tragedies, Torn Community

Then on March 4, a second murder was discovered, this time, of a transgendered native of the Hopi tribe in northeastern Arizona. The body of 25-year-old Alejandro Lucero was found near 18th Street and Thomas Road in Phoenix, clad in a blue woman's tank top, "low-rider" jeans, a strapless padded bra and blue thong panties.

{mosimage}Lucero's murder was just as violent a death as Raymond's -- death by strangulation and blunt force trauma to the neck, according to police reports. Lucero was known to frequent similar bars as Raymond and, according to his sister, Angelica, was also known to make money giving massages, but she was uncertain on whether he worked as a prostitute.

Soon, thereafter, a local gay and lesbian organization, the Arizona Human Rights Fund, reportedly sent out a mass e-mail to its membership asking for assistance in solving the murders and calling for community awareness.

Events such as these tend to unite a community, especially when it is as embattled as the gay community. But the two tragedies have done little to ease the tension between transgendered Native Americans and the "mainstream" gay and lesbian population, says a popular local female impersonator.

"We all communicate inside the bar, but once we walk outside, it ends," says Fernando Trinidad, 31, a Hispanic gay drag queen (not a transgender) who goes by the stage name "Phaedra." "There are a few people in the community who support [the transgendered], but most of us just don't agree with what they're doing, living their lives as women.

"I think it's something that most in the gay community just don't get and choose not to learn any more about the subject."

In Waller's case study, Teles expresses the frustration of relocating from the isolated reservation and attempting to fit into an urban gay community where most of its population feels "disengaged" from their families of origin, and instead have adopted other gays as their family of choice.

"For American Indians and others of color," Waller writes, "...the social support commonly associated with the word 'family' in the dominant gay community is often not available.

"...Rather than finding an oasis in the urban gay subculture, [Teles] finds another context of marginalization...[and] he looks to his Navajo family as his most important source of social support."

Trinidad admits that immature bickering on the part of both groups has much to do with the divisiveness between them. There is a feeling that transgendered Native Americans resent gay female impersonators for not living the life of a woman 24/7 and that the two-spirit culture is one of brevity and strength above the mockery of performing. Whereas those who are transgendered walk the walk, drag queens merely talk the talk.

Trinidad sounds as if he resents two-spirit people for not being as pretty as he is, saying that what got Raymond "into trouble" was his femininity without looking very much like a woman.

"If I project myself as being very feminine with the way that I dress, someone would probably think that I'm a woman," says Trinidad, who doesn't try to hide the baritone in his voice. "If it's someone else who doesn't go through all of the work, with the make-up and trying to take care of their body, well, they don't look like a woman . . . I'm sorry. They look like a man who wants to be a woman.

"And I think that's where the straight community may not understand, or even the gay community may not understand, that if you're going to go through all that work to live your life like a woman, then why not go all the way?"

Costly Acceptance

"Jennie" wouldn't mind going all the way, making the transition from a male-to-female transgender to a full-fledged, post-op transsexual. But as a Navajo who, like Raymond, knew since she was in elementary school that she wasn't a straight male, Jennie says paying $20,000 for the operation to physically change her sex is not a priority.

"You know, honestly, if I had the money I would," says Jennie, 37, who lives in Phoenix with her partner of two years, Daniel. Jennie prefers to be referred to as a woman and, therefore, not gay.

She continues, "I grew up in poverty on the reservation. I'm used to not having money. Now, I make a little bit of money here and there, and I live a comfortable life. I enjoy the fruits of my labor."

According to the 1990 Census, about 56 percent of the Navajo people lived below the poverty line at the time, with the average per capita income of a Navajo person being around $4,100. Unemployment ranged from 36 percent to more than 50 percent seasonally. And, as has been the case for several decades, alcohol abuse and depression remain major problems on the Navajo reservation, with more than 160,000 of its 250,000 members currently living on the nation in northeast Arizona and northwest New Mexico.

Jennie says her father was an alcoholic and her mother was physically abusive, taking out her frustrations on Jennie and her siblings. Jennie saw the effects of living in such a family on the Navajo reservation in many of her friends that she attended high school with, but somehow, she had the inner strength not to fall into the traps of a dysfunctional family.

"I knew that as soon as I graduated from high school that I was going to get out of there. The city has allowed me to express so much more of myself and be comfortable with who I am, things I never could do on the reservation," Jennie says, moving her hands, displaying the facial expressions and posture of someone who has lived as a woman for more than 15 years, as she has. "But not everyone who is gay and leaves the reservation has to have this tragic ending like Raymond and Alejandro.

"You know, I'm sorry to say this, but both of them ended up getting what they asked for in many ways. I didn't fall into this state of depression. I'm not an alcoholic, and I don't have HIV. I'm tired of people who are transgendered or two-spirit being made out to be pathetic freaks."

Mixed Messages, Minimal Support

The Navajo Area Indian Health Services center reported earlier this year that it received 16 new HIV patients in 2001, 15 of those being male and half without having contracted AIDS, as of yet.

Of greatest concern to the Navajo AIDS Network, an organization based in Chinle, Ariz., whose primary focus is on bringing HIV/AIDS education and awareness to the Navajo people living on the reservation, was that two of the new patients last year became acutely infected with HIV while living on the Navajo Nation, something NAN had never had evidence of in its first 136 cases since 1987.

But educating Navajos on the dangers of unprotected sex is just now being accepted among the tribal council and the majority of members on the Nation.

"Talking about AIDS has been so taboo for such a long time," says Thomas, who is in the process of re-editing parts of Two-Spirit People and will make a presentation at the "Healing Our Spirits Worldwide" Native American conference in Albuquerque in September. "It was thought of as a white man's curse, a white man's disease. But now, it's finally becoming part of the conversation. The tribal council's heads were buried for so long, and now the denial and naivete seem to be fading."

Two-Spirit Shields Project is the only support group for gay and transgendered Native Americans in the Valley. Its primary mission is to provide education and prevention of HIV/AIDS to the local two-spirit population, says Pam Harrison, the group's advisor.

But moreso, she says, the group of nearly 60 people, which included her friend Raymond Soos, becomes a place for transgendered Natives to feel accepted, one place where they fit in with society.

"They have no social network," says Harrison, 30, who has been with the group for the past year of its five-year existence. "They lack any type of trusting relationship with family and friends, so we end up addressing a lot of self-esteem issues.

"Some say that being two-spirit is a blessing. Other elders [within the tribes] say that being transgendered is the wrong way, that you're not supposed to be like that. They hear so many conflicting stories about themselves, about whether they can be comfortable with who they are, that they don't know what to believe about themselves."