A Valencia mob storms the cathedral to burn a man the church had just spared, Melbourne police strip-search four hundred and sixty-three people in a gay nightclub and find nothing, and Tyra Hunter is left to die in the road by the men sent to save her.
1519
The Avalot de la Seu
Valencia blames the plague on sodomy, and a mob takes a man out of the cathedral to burn him
Plague reached Valencia in 1519 and the people who governed the city left. The nobles went to their estates, most of the officials went with them, and the clergy who stayed preached that the disease was a punishment sent for the sins of the city, sodomy among them.
Ferrando Sanchis was a baker. He had been condemned to death for sodomy, and then the church intervened and the sentence was lifted.
That was what set it off. On August 7, 1519 a crowd went into the cathedral after him, dragged him out and burned him. The riot is remembered in Valencia as the avalot de la Seu, the uprising at the cathedral.
The city was already close to the edge. The guilds had been armed on the king’s own orders to defend the coast against raiders, and with the ruling class gone they were the only organised power left inside the walls. Within months that armed brotherhood - the Germania - was running Valencia and fighting a war against the nobility that lasted until 1522.
The plague did what plagues do to people who are already hated. Alongside the men suspected of sodomy, the city’s Muslims were attacked, on the same reasoning, by the same crowds.
Melbourne police raid the Tasty nightclub, and the people they searched take them to court
At ten past two in the morning on August 7, 1994, about forty Victoria Police officers walked into the Tasty nightclub in Melbourne looking for drugs. They held everybody inside for seven hours. All four hundred and sixty-three people in the club were strip-searched, most of them gay, lesbian or trans.
What the police found, across seven hours and four hundred and sixty-three people, was a bottle of amyl, two empty bags and an asthma inhaler. Nobody was charged with anything.
The people who had been searched did not let it go. Around two hundred and fifty of them brought a class action for false imprisonment and assault, and it cost the state of Victoria about six million dollars. In 2014 the acting chief commissioner of police apologised to the community for the whole thing.
In Melbourne the raid is talked about the way New York talks about Stonewall.
Tyra Hunter dies in Washington, and her mother takes the city to court and wins
Tyra Hunter was a hairdresser in Washington DC. On August 7, 1995 she was hit by a car. Firefighters and paramedics reached her and began treating her in the road, and when they cut away her trouser leg and saw that she had male genitals they stopped. Witnesses said they stepped back, laughed, and made remarks about her while she lay there. She was taken to hospital eventually and died the same day. She was twenty-four.
Her mother, Margie Hunter, sued the District of Columbia, a firefighter and a doctor at DC General.
The trial ran five weeks. On December 11, 1998 the jury found that the fire department had broken the District’s own human rights law and that Tyra Hunter’s death was caused by medical malpractice, and awarded her mother about $2.9 million. The city appealed and the case was settled in 2000 for $1.75 million.
The case is one of the reasons emergency services in the United States now train their staff on treating trans patients at all. It took a mother going to court for three years to establish that her daughter should have been picked up off the road.