BY MICHAEL KEARNS

Fred Martinez: Keeping His Spirits Alive

In a world that awards the distortion of self—from face-lifted movie stars, to closeted clergy, to duplicitous politicians—Fred Martinez was considered a freak. Why? Only because he refused to camouflage who he was by exposing the intrinsic spectrum of his spirit in all its colorful manifestations; by allowing his masculine and feminine energies to emanate with pride: he was purely human—and brutally murdered because of it.

Two Spirits, a documentary-in-progress, poses the question: Why are people killed for being who they are? In the Navajo culture, Martinez's organic possession of masculine and feminine characteristics was looked upon as a gift: cause to celebrate, not denigrate. But living in the Americana of Cortez, Colorado, Martinez's limpid self-respect was another person's trigger to unleash sullied hate.

According to the Two Spirits website (www.twospirits.org), “Dressed as he usually did—with a touch of mascara, wearing a small bra stuffed with socks beneath his sweatshirt, and carrying his favorite purse—he spent several hours with friends, then he disappeared. His savagely beaten body was found five days later in a shallow canyon near his home. His murder attracted limited media attention, and the residents of the small off-reservation town in which he lived struggled to comprehend how someone so gentle—and so determined to experience a big and meaningful life—could have his life so senselessly destroyed.”

The perpetrator, 18 years old at the time, had a long and complex history of exposure to crystal methamphetamine.

Wesley Thomas, co-author and co-editor of Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality, is an anthropologist who studies cultural ideas about gender and Navajo culture and language. “We need to make it a practice to teach others to make sure this does not happen again: have people lose their lives due to someone's ignorance,” he says. “We, as human beings, need to take ownership of our social worlds to ensure that people live out their potentials and not deny them of such rights based on our own shortcomings.”

Filmmakers Lydia Nibley and Russell Martin are married—spiritually and artistically. Their film project, a co-production of Say Yes Quickly Productions, Toy Box Entertainment, and Just Media, will incorporate interviews and on-location re-enactments to depict the events surrounding Martinez's heartbreaking death with vivid language and imagery. When the couple speaks of Martinez, it is as if they are speaking of their own child.

“Like [Martinez],” Martin says, “I grew up in Cortez, Colorado, but our boyhoods differed in dramatic ways. I didn't know anything of the racism he encountered, nor did my own sexual awakening as a heterosexual man threaten my very survival, as did [Martinez's] determination to express his truest self in terms of his gender and sexuality.”

Nibley's commitment, she says, is “a fundamental human rights issue. But even though that larger interest is what drew me to the story it became more personal very early on.”

“When I talked to [Martinez's] mother, Paula, for the first time, she explained that while others in the family couldn't face seeing his body in the horrible state it was in after five days in the hot sun and the autopsy that followed, she felt compelled to witness what had happened to him [and] to touch him—to do what she could to restore his dignity. Her connection to his physical body was something I immediately understood.

“As a mother, I had never dared to imagine what it would be like to lose a child to a senseless and horrible death. But that day, as we sat together near [Martinez's] grave, I let myself feel what I had been so afraid of letting in.”

In the footage that I viewed, Martinez's mother recounts a dream in which Martinez returns to her in all his queer resplendence. Her narrative, delivered straightforwardly into the camera, would be impossible for a screenwriter to create or an actress to portray; she experiences the dream so intensely in-the-moment that we believe, along with her, that Martinez is alive.

And, thanks to Nibley and Martin, he is—on film.