Joshua Puckett – A letter for the first fundraiser in 2006
In order to raise the money for this documentary, I had three major fundraisers. This is the letter that Joshua Puckett wrote to me and that I read at the first Fundraiser on May 20, 2006 at Renaissance Unity in Warren, Michigan with singer Susan Herrick performing…
–Brian Alexander
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I would like to thank you all for coming out to this evening’s fundraiser being held in the memory of my two loving mothers. I am sorry I could not be there tonight, but this was impossible due to the unfortunate fact of my incarceration in the Michigan Department of Corrections. That, however, is another story for another time and place.
I take full responsibility for my actions and the choices that put me here, but I will tell you that if my parents had been alive I would never have ended up here.
I was born to a wonderful woman, Christine Puckett, who at a very early age knew she was a lesbian. She embraced and accepted that in a time when society did not, and looked down on her for being different. She decided she wanted a child and thus I was born. Things were not easy and we struggled a lot. She searched for love in many places and thought she found it a few times, but it was not meant to be. Finally she found what she was looking for, or, as some would say, she found someone who would put up with her. But no matter how you look at it, it was true love that bonded Sue and Chris, so true that, even as a jealous only-child, I came to accept and love Sue as a mother too.
I went to live with my father in Seattle a short time after my mother’s wedding. My father (Joe) was a wonderful man, so I was thrice blessed with good teachers. My father was dying of AIDS and my mother thought it was best that I spend some time with him before he passed. We had a great time and I found a friend as well as a father. When he died, his friends in the gay community in Seattle helped me deal with it and took care of me until I could return to my mothers in Michigan.
When I returned, the relationship shared between my mother and Sue was as strong as ever. The business they ran together was taking off. They were working in the gay community to help Affirmations, and most of all they were happy. That made me strong. I was ready to finish school, take on the world, and use my experiences to help people and to be a benefit to society.
Then came the fateful day, the day when I was greeted at school not by my mother but by distraught grandparents, driven to our home and greeted not by my beautiful mothers but by news cameras, chalk outlines, and blood stains on the concrete. My mothers had been killed because they did not love in the way that mainstream society said was appropriate. Because of that, some angry old man felt “he had to do it.” He had to kill them because they were different.
How many of you here could this have happened to? The only way we can fight hate and ignorance is through vigilant education and by never forgetting where we came from and the people that had to die to get us here. The damage did not stop with them. I remind you I would not be here if that angry old man hadn’t felt “he had to do it”. I was a good kid on my way to doing good things when my two mothers were taken from me.
I would like to thank Triangle and Affirmations for all the support they have given Brian on this project. I would also like to ask you all to be generous and ask your friends to be generous. Through your generosity, the memory of my mothers and the lesson of what hate can do, will live on and not be lightly forgotten.
Thank you for your time,
Joshua Puckett
G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility (JCF)
3500 N. Elm Road
Jackson, MI
49201
