Allen Schindler

[montyjeffrey]

Remembering Allen Schindler on what would have been his 55th birthday. Fair winds and following seas, RM3 Schindler.

[montyjeffrey]

[montyjeffrey]

How do you remember a friend like Allen whose life was taken so harshly when there's nothing left of him on this earth but memory, which is itself taken but more gently over time? I don't have any answers for that, but someone I admire does. Denise Levertov, the American poet, she offers us all this possibility in her poem "At David's Grave," which she wrote after the death of a friend's young child: Yes, he is here in this open field, in sunlight, among the few young trees set out to modify the bare facts— he's here, but only because we are here. When we go, he goes with us to be your hands that never do violence, your eyes that wonder, your lives that daily praise life by living it, by laughter. He is never alone here, never cold in the field of graves.

[montyjeffrey]

[lgbt-history-archive]

Dorothy Hajdys with a picture of her son, Radioman Allen R. Schindler Jr. (December 13, 1969 – October 27, 1992), National March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay & Bi Equal Rights & Liberation, Washington, D.C., Apr. 25, 1993. Photo © AP. [TW] Allen Schindler Jr., who was born forty-seven years ago today, was an openly gay member of the U.S. Navy who was brutally murdered by two shipmates in a hate crime that easily could have been avoided. Despite attempts by the Navy to keep details of the crime from coming to light, the tenacity of Schindler’s mother, Dorothy Hajdys, helped reveal the sometimes-murderous culture that faced LGBTQ servicepeople in the years before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and Matthew Shepard. In 1991, Schindler was transferred from the USS Midway to the Belleau Wood, a smaller ship with the reputation for being “the worst of all” when it came to anti-gay intimidation and violence. Eric Underwood, a friend Schindler met in his final days, remembered “that Allen said that people harassed him 24 hours a day.” And Schindler’s complaints to ship personnel went unanswered. Being around Underwood gave Schindler comfort; in his final journal entry, he wrote of meeting Underwood: “I guess that means we are everywhere.” On October 27, 1992, while on shore leave in Sasebo, Japan, Charles Vins and Terry Helvey, two of Schindler’s shipmates, followed him into a public bathroom; as Vins watched and occasionally joined in, Helvey beat Schindler to the ground and then stomped him to death. The pathologist who performed the autopsy said it was the most severe trauma he’d ever witnessed; Schindler’s family was only able to identify him by the tattoo on his arm. The murder, and the Navy’s obfuscation on key facts, radicalized Schindler’s mother, who became a force in the fight for LGBTQ equality. Despite participating in the murder, Charles Vins was allowed to plea bargain in exchange for implicating Helvey; Vins served a 78-day sentence and received a general discharge. In exchange for pleading guilty to murder, Terry Helvey avoided the death penalty; he currently is serving a life sentence. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #AllenSchindler

[montyjeffrey]

Who could have known that within a matter of months, the death of a young sailor halfway around the world would come to symbolize the struggle to end fifty years of discrimination against gay servicemen and servicewomen in the United States? Or that hundreds of thousands of protesters assembled on the mall in Washington, D.C., would take up the martyred sailor’s cause and, driven to their feet by the colloquial oratory of his mother, would tomahawk their fists at the Capitol and cry, “Justice! Justice! Justice!”

— Chip Brown, Esquire 1993.

[montyjeffrey]

Dorothy Hajdys-Clausen and the Chicago Chapter of the American Veterans for Equal Rights pay tribute to her son Allen Schindler on Veterans Day in Steger, Illinois, November 2007 and 2015. (Windy City Times).

[montyjeffrey]

[montyjeffrey]

Allen Schindler was brutally murdered by Terry Helvey and his accomplice, Charles Vins, who received a sweetheart deal from Navy prosecutors in exchange for his testimony against Helvey, who was sentenced to life in a military prison. In 1992, Schindler came to terms with being gay and in the armed forces when open homosexuals were barred from service, and he went public on his ship, the USS Belleau Wood, about his same-sex orientation. Helvey had a hatred for Schindler and harassed him on the ship and in the Sasebo, Japan, port where they were stationed. Schindler's pleas for help from the captain of the ship, Douglas J. Bradt, were ignored, and he was never held to account for failing to rein in Helvey's loathing and bullying of Schindler. That bullying eventually led Helvey to stomp Schindler to death in October 1992 in a public restroom in Sasebo. The Vins sweetheart deal and the case up to that point had been covered up by the Navy, and the story eventually became news when U.S. Stars and Stripes reporter Rick Rogers broke the story. I advocated for justice on behalf of Schindler, a young gay man who had his whole life ahead of him, and traveled to Japan twice thanks to the support and generosity of many friends and strangers. All of the folks who demanded justice, including Schindler's mother, Dorothy Hajdys, banded together to go up against the Department of Defense and made sure that Schindler would rest in peace. Sometimes, I think that had he not been senselessly murdered, Schindler would have received an honorable discharge from the U.S. Navy as he wanted and become an activist. The courage he showed in coming out in such a hostile military environment leads me to think of his potential to be an activist was cut short. Allen Schindler is remembered for being a hero and martyr, and good kid.

— Michael Petrelis

[montyjeffrey]

[montyjeffrey]

[montyjeffrey]

"I wish that when he was home that last time, had he said more to me, I would have never let him go back." — Dorothy Hajdys-Clausen

[montyjeffrey]

[montyjeffrey]

[montyjeffrey]

[montyjeffrey]

[montyjeffrey]

''My son wasn't a symbol of nothing the night he was murdered. He was just a sailor who was attacked by other sailors who got the idea somewhere that that was O.K. to do what they did to him. ''So tell me, in all of that, whether the Navy didn't make it pretty clear the value they put on my son's life and service. And tell me, too, between my son and Charles Vins, who you think served the United States Navy and his country with honor.''