As we remember Angie, let's not forget Fred

 

Angie Zapata wasn't the first transgendered teenager to be murdered in Colorado, but hopefully she'll be the last.

As we celebrate justice for Angie today in the form of a guilty verdict for Allen Ray Andrade let's take a moment to remember Fred Martinez, a young two-spirit who was murdered in Cortez, Colorado in 2001.

The murder of Fred Martinez is the focus of a new documentary that was recently accepted in the International LGBT Film Festival to take place June 18-28 in San Francisco. Titled “Two Spirits: Sexuality, Gender, and the Murder of Fred Martinez,” the film interweaves the story of the short life and brutal death of a Navajo teenager with a penetrating examination of the two?spirit tradition among American Indians. 

The film reconstructs what happened on a night in June 2001 when one boy bludgeoned another with rocks, then bragged to friends that he had “bug-smashed a fag.”