Common Ground

One day a man came in to the Back Street Cafe, a gay bar, and opened fire, shooting multiple people at random. The shooter killed one person and wounded six others. A drifter from out of town, he told police he had been teased all his life because of his name, Ronald Gay. Inadvertently, perhaps, Ronald Gay forced the community of Roanoke to come face to face with certain parts of itself it might previously have ignored. It could easily have turned into an indictment of Roanoke as a breeding ground for hate crimes. But local gays and lesbians said, 'No, that wouldn't be fair.' That's not the way the city is. The mayor, a devout Southern Baptist, who personally regards homosexuality as a sin, debated whether he should appear at the vigil, and then concluded that as the mayor of all the citizens of Roanoke, he should, and he did. The local paper, The Roanoke Times, had been working on a major series about homosexuality before the shooting. They'd been having a hard time getting gays and lesbians to talk. The Roanoke Times published a series that ran over four days, front page, inside page, cover of the feature section, on and on and on. For a community that had largely kept its opinions on homosexuality to itself, a community that was reeling from the shock of the Back Street shootings, the series was like lancing a boil. The subject of gays and lesbians in Roanoke, though, was all but unavoidable. It certainly couldn't be tucked back into the closet again.This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.