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July 24, 2000

Watershed of Mourning At the Border of Gender

By NINA SIEGAL

	Amanda Milan, born Damon Lee Dyer, in a family photograph.

amily members knew the victim as Damon Lee Dyer, an ebullient aspiring fashion designer, who, as long as anyone could remember, walked a tightrope of sexual identity.

Friends knew her as Amanda Milan, a fiery prostitute who dreamed she might some day afford surgery to become a woman. The police who found her in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown last month identified her as Damien Dier, a 25-year-old man, wearing a dress, and fatally stabbed once in the neck.

Amanda Milan, as Damon Lee Dyer preferred to be known, might have been just another anonymous victim. But yesterday, about 300 people gathered at the Metropolitan Community Church, an interdenominational Christian church on West 36th Street in Manhattan, to call attention to the killing, which they said was similar to many such attacks on those who cannot be easily defined by simple pronouns.

Ms. Milan died on June 20 after a confrontation altercation with two men in front of the Port Authority terminal, the police said. Witnesses said she and a group of friends were heading home after a night out dancing and were walking toward a taxi stand at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue.

One of the men, whom the police have identified as Duayne McCuller, 20, began to make lewd remarks to the group.

According to her friends, Ms. Milan told the man that she, too, was a man and asked him whether he wanted to fight. Witnesses said he declined, and she walked away. Then, a second man, who the police have identified as Eugene Celestine, 26, handed Mr. McCuller a knife, which prosecutors said he plunged into Ms. Milan's throat.

Mr. Celestine and Mr. McCuller have been charged with murder, said Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney's office.

A third man, whom she did not identify, has been charged with helping Mr. McCuller evade arrest.

The police have classified Ms. Milan's death as a homicide. But Ms. Milan's friends and family say they want it to be considered a bias crime and prosecuted with the stiffer penalties that accompany such charges.

"I think it was a hate crime, and anyone who is trying to call it anything else is simply wrong," said Diane Dyer McKee, who often took care of Ms. Milan as a child. "This guy cowardly came up behind him and slit my nephew's throat. I don't know why he did that. It was just hate."

Detective John Giammarino, a police spokesman, said, "It was from a dispute, not a bias crime." He said he could not comment further on the case.

Clarence Patton, director of community organizing for the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, which monitors attacks on homosexuals, said arrests were rarely made when transsexuals are killed. Since 1992, he said, there have been seven unsolved murders of transsexuals in New York.

Earlier this month, Gov. George E. Pataki signed a bill that imposes sterner sentences on criminals who go after their victims on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation or age. But Mr. Patton said that because the wording is vague, the law may not apply to transsexuals or people who call themselves "transgender," an umbrella term for someone who does not identify exclusively with either sex.

 

"We hope to motivate people to push for an amendment to the Pataki hate crimes law, because it doesn't currently protect transgenders," said the Rev. Pat Bumgardner, the pastor at Metropolitan Community Church, who led the memorial service.

Members of her church's transgender spiritual group, Gender People, helped organize the memorial with members of about twenty other gay, lesbian and transgender groups. The ceremony was followed by a march to the site of Ms. Milan's death, about 10 blocks away, where mourners created a small shrine of flowers in her honor.

To many of those who attended, the event was a watershed moment for transsexual advocacy in New York.

"In her death, Amanda has unified the trans community," said Chelsea E. Goodwin, a chairwoman for the Metropolitan Gender Network, one of the city's oldest transgender organizations.

Ms. Milan's cousin, Tammika L. Clark, 25, reached at home in Chicago, said her family was very grateful for the support that she has received in New York. "It's a lot of comfort for us to know that this is not going unnoticed," she said.