Thirty-five years after three teenagers in Bangor, Maine, killed Portsmouth native Charlie Howard for being gay, the city of Portsmouth is planning to honor him with a remembrance bench. The permanent memorial comes after a recent exhibition on Howard’s murder and its effect on the LGBTQ community in Maine, and a Seacoast LGBT History Project-sponsored, nondenominational remembrance service, which raised awareness and funds for the marker for Portsmouth.
In July 1984, three teens threw 23-year-old Howard to his death off a bridge over the Kenduskeag Stream in Bangor. The city of Bangor holds an annual service for Howard, where flowers are strewn into the Kenduskeag.
“Not many people in Bangor know that Charlie was born and raised in Portsmouth, even though he moved to Bangor barely six months before he was killed,” Sarah Cornell, a member of Seacoast LGBT History Project steering committee, told Seacoast Online.
The traveling show, curated by the LGBTQ+ Collection at the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine and the University of Southern Maine Libraries went on display at Portsmouth’s South Church Unitarian Universalist and the Randall Gallery in the Portsmouth Athenaeum.
After the exhibitions and service, Portsmouth Mayor Jack Blalock and former Mayor Robert Lister, one of Howard’s high school teacher’s, made a formal request to their city council for the memorial bench in Howard’s hometown.
“He was well-known by many including former Mayor Eileen Foley, and because he has no family in the area, and because he himself is deceased since 1984, we, at the request of individuals in the community, make application to the City Council for a remembrance bench,” Lister and Blalock wrote in their request to the council.
“Charlie was a very caring person who was always concerned about others,” Lister told Seacoast. Though bullied, “Charlie always seemed to turn the other cheek,” Lister said. “He would always convey his feeling that he was his own individual. I am convinced that had he lived, he would have been a prominent advocate for the rights of individuals.”
According to Seacoast Online:
As the Bangor Daily News reported in a special 2014 series on Howard’s death, he and friend Roy Ogden were walking home from a Unitarian Church potluck that fateful night in 1984. Ogden later told police a car pulled up and three youths inside the vehicle demanded to know if they were gay.
The confrontation escalated and Ogden and Howard ran across State Street, pursued by the trio. They grabbed Howard at the bridge over the Kenduskeag, and threw him in. Ogden ran to pull a nearby fire alarm. But it was too late for Howard, who was found drowned some hours later.
Daniel Ness, 17, Shawn I. Mabry, 16, and James Francis Baines, 15, were originally charged with murder. But the charges were reduced to manslaughter after a judge decided they should be tried as juveniles. All were free by age 21.
The Bangor Daily News article begins with a quote from author Stephen King, who lives in Maine.
“I think the death of Charlie Howard shocked people in the Bangor area out of their complacency about matters of sexual preference and prejudice,” King said. “I know it did me.”
“It feels like an important time to reintroduce Portsmouth to Charlie,” Cornell told Seacoast. “We need to remember how joyful and brave he was. We also need to take responsibility for how he was treated here.”
Portsmouth officials are currently discussing the location for Howard’s memorial bench in their city.
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