More than 1,000 gay and lesbian activists, concerned residents and city officials marched through the North Side on Thursday night to honor a gay bartender slain 15 years ago and remember another critically injured Tuesday, both victims of violence against homosexuals.
The solemn, chanting marchers began their vigil for Frank Rodde III in front of Rodde`s former apartment building in the 3700 block of North Pine Grove Avenue and ended at the building named in his honor, the Rodde Center at 4753 N. Broadway. Retiring Police Chief LeRoy Martin and Mayor Richard Daley led the parade.
Martin received cheers when he told the crowd, ”Jumping a gay because he`s gay is like jumping me because I`m black. It`s hate, and I won`t tolerate it.”
Daley, though, received a chorus of boos, and his statement to the crowd was drowned out by chants of ”Shame. Shame.” Daley, who has been a target of gays` anger for allegedly lacking commitment in the fight against AIDS, was chastised by the crowd throughout the milelong march. He jumped into his car outside the Rodde Center and left without comment.
The march took on special significance because of the plight of Ron Cayot, 38, who was shot in an alley near 814 W. Cornelia Ave. early Tuesday morning as he was walking home from a gay bar. His companion suffered only facial bruises in the attack.
The shooting comes less than two weeks after a local gay social services agency released a report showing a 25 percent increase in gay-bashing from 1990 to 1991.
Bullets tore into Cayot`s trachea and abdomen. He has undergone 12 hours of surgery at Illinois Masonic Medical Center.
Doctors haven`t yet been able to improve Cayot`s chances of survival beyond 50-50. But the fact that he has an even chance at survival is heartening for the gay community, which for the past week has been reliving the unsolved Rodde killing as the Thursday vigil date approached.
Rodde, 29, a good-natured bartender known among his friends as ”the Clown,” was found stabbed to death in his bathtub on April 3, 1977, with slash marks to his head, neck and body. Police have never found his killer.
The killing sent shock waves through the gay community, said some of Rodde`s friends. Adding to the tension was the revelation that two other gay men had been killed in a similar manner just weeks before, said John Cottone, a Rodde friend.
”Frank just wasn`t the type of person to get caught in that situation. The boy was loved,” Cottone said. ”And nobody knew anything about the other deaths until Frank was killed. It was all very confusing.”
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As word of Rodde`s death spread, Cottone said, eyes started to open, and both closeted and open gays and lesbians began to work more closely. They really mobilized when Rodde`s parents announced that they wanted to memorialize their son in cooperation with the gay community.
Lucille and Frank Rodde Jr., along with local gay and lesbian activists, formed the Rodde Center.
”We supported him as far as we could in everything,” Lucille Rodde said Thursday afternoon. ”It was a hard thing to accept, and we didn`t ever want him to think he wasn`t part of the family. But we always told him to be careful, because we were certain that there were people that didn`t care for his kind of people and abused them.”
Meanwhile, doctors at Illinois Masonic say Cayot will be in excellent shape if he can only overcome the serious abdominal and back wounds he suffered in Tuesday`s attack. Cayot now has a 90 percent chance of regaining his speech thanks to a unique reconstructive surgery performed by Dr. Michael Friedman, chairman of the hospital`s ear, nose and throat department.
Friedman took lining from Cayot`s collarbone and used it to form a new trachea, a procedure Friedman has performed on only 30 patients over the past seven years. Cayot`s own trachea was blasted into a dozen pieces.
”Even in this city, I`ve only seen this severe of an injury two times in the past 20 years, where the entire lower part of the voicebox is destroyed,” Friedman said of Cayot. ”He`s very lucky to be alive.”
The Cayot shooting gave Thursday`s march an added significance, and many marchers said they wanted to express both anger-chanting ”Bash back!”-and solidarity.
”This is a way for us to show support and get together,” said Roger Heaton, 40. ”It`s an awful thing that happened, and it can`t be allowed.”
Jeanette Carrion, 33, echoed Heaton`s sentiments.
”If we stick together, we can send a message,” she said. ”We need to bring an awareness of this problem of gay and lesbian bashing.”