Unfinished Lives

Synopsis:
Over 13,000 Americans have been murdered in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries because of their sexual orientation and gender presentation. In Unfinished Lives: Reviving the Memory of LGBTQ Hate Crimes Victims, Stephen Sprinkle puts a human face on the outrage and loss suffered when people die from anti-gay hatred. Beginning with new developments in the story of Matthew Shepard's murder in Laramie, Wyoming, Sprinkle tells the stories of fourteen representative LGBTQ victims whose lives were savagely cut short due to homophobia and transphobia. These are stories about people who could be your neighbor, classmate, co-worker, or friend - real, everyday people whose love was foreclosed, relationships brutally terminated, and future contributions stolen from us by outrageous, irrational hatred.

Told lovingly yet unflinchingly, Unfinished Lives lifts the stories of these LGBTQ victims from undeserved obscurity, allowing their memory to live again. Relying on personal interviews and visits to the locations where these people lived, loved, and died, Sprinkle records the raw emotions, powerful movements for social change, and unexpectedly hopeful communities that arise from the ruins of those people whose only "offense" was to live as they were born to be.

Part portraiture, part crime narrative, and part ethnography, Unfinished Lives is poised to change the conversation on hate crimes in the United States.

Endorsements:
"Unfinished Lives cries out to be read . . . It speaks to the systematic denigration of LGBTQ people in the United States . . . and it offers hope that the cycles of abuse and hatred and violence can be broken-one person, one family, one community at a time."
-from the Foreword by Harry Knox
Director of the Religion and Faith Program
Human Rights Campaign, Washington, DC

"In telling these 'stories that trouble the soul' about the hateful murders of fourteen LBGTQ people who were selected for execution simply because of their non-conforming sexual orientation and gender presentation, Stephen Sprinkle has courageously refused to bury the victims in silence or go along with the cultural amnesia that tries to suggest 'it was all a mistake' and 'they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.' No, anti-gay violence is an intentionally employed weapon of mass terror, and religion is often its accomplice. With a fierce determination to honor our dead by telling the truth out loud and proud, Sprinkle calls the community to take up the queer theological tasks of, yes, remembering and mourning, but also of community resistance and organizing to end the violence against us, against all peoples."
-Marvin M. Ellison
Bangor Theological Seminary
editor of Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection

"Stephen Sprinkle takes on one of the most profound questions of our time: When fear and hate and judgment result in violence and murder of non-gender conforming people, what is the right response of ci...