Speakers inspire hope from hate at Los
Prietos
Following the presentation of the colors and the Pledge of
Allegiance on March 9, about 60 boys in blue and khaki uniforms marched into
the recreational room at the camp to listen to the story of Tim Zaal, a former neo-Nazi and punk-rocker, and Matthew Boger, a gay man who was forced to live on the streets at
the age of 13 and has been targeted because of his sexuality.
An unlikely pair, Zaal and Boger now use their past experiences to educate visitors to
the Simon Wiesenthal Center at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, where Zaal is a speaker and Boger the
museum director.
Their story is not the usual tragic tale of victim and
perpetrator. In a twist of fate, the two joined forces as activists against
violence, bigotry and hate crimes, after realizing that Zaal
was one of the men who brutally attacked Boger
26-years earlier.
“When we met, we very quickly realized who each other
were,” Boger said. “I shut down, went numb and just
got up from the table and walked away.”
Now close friends, Zaal and Boger travel nationally telling their story of forgiveness
and reconciliation.
Opening the discussion, Zaal
recounted his commonplace upbringing in a Los Angeles suburb in the late ’60s
and early ’70s, a lifestyle he said his parents and other community members saw
threatened by the introduction of Latinos to the area.
Zaal
said his racism and bigotry toward people different than he was springboarded by racist undertones and ideas he was taught
by his family, as well as his community.
“I remember my father would come home from work and he
would say things like the property value was going down and the neighborhood
was not like it used to be in the old days,” Zaal
said.
He described how his sisters seemed to live in constant
fear of being accosted by “cholas,” and recalled how
people of other ethnicities were abstract beings in his mind.
“To me the scariest thing was a ‘chola,’”
he said. “I compared Sinbad’s Medusa to a ‘chola’…”
Though Zaal explained that his
racism was not shaped by a single incident, he recalled one particular
experience that stood apart from the rest and help shape his hatred toward
everyone who was not white, heterosexual and punk rock: his older brother was
shot in the heart by a black man in a suspected drug deal gone bad.
“From that day forward, whenever I thought of an African
American, I thought of that gunman,” he said. “Whenever I thought of an African
American I got angry…They tried to kill my brother.
“My mother didn’t set me aside and tell me that all
African Americans don’t try to kill white people, so that’s what I thought.”
Of the many violent brawls and beatings Zaal was involved in, he zeroed in on a night in which he
and his buddies stopped three or four times to beat up someone on their way to
their usual hangout.
“We were violent,” Zaal said.
“If you had hair past your ears, we would beat you up… Violence for me back in
those days was something I did on a regular basis; punk allowed me to do this
and still be socially accepted.”
Of the many “slap downs,” that night, Zaal
recalled kicking a guy in the head with his razorblade-spiked boots and leaving
him for dead.
Unknown to Zaal, the man he left for dead was Boger,
who was beaten unconscious by Zaal and his group of
punk-rock rebels.
Zaal
only remembers “snippets” of the violent encounter. On the other hand, Boger provided emotional details about the same night from
a victim’s perspective.
“That night all I heard was ‘tonight all fags die,’” he
said. “Then it seemed like 100 guys were rushing me all at one time. I was
beaten and kicked until I was unconscious.”
Boger
said he woke up in the alley and, despite the amount of blood gushing from his face, he refused to go to the hospital or contact his
mother, who had thrown him out of the house when he was 13 and refused to
acknowledge his existence because of his sexual orientation.
“I couldn’t deal with hearing my mother say she did not
love her son again,” he said.
Being rejected by his family wasn’t new for Boger, whose mother was an ardent Catholic and whose father
was a Hell’s Angel motorcycle gang member.
“We grew up pretty confused,” Boger
said. “From a very early age I knew I was a strange kid…at the age of 12 I knew
I was gay…I realized I couldn’t tell my mom or dad.”
But a year later, tell he did, and he hasn’t seen his
mother or father since.
Boger
lived in various metropolitan areas and did the best he could to survive.
Though Boger said he has learned
to forgive by turning much of his resentment into a positive story of change
and survival, growing up on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles has
left its mark.
“My life has totally been lived in fear; even at the age
of 42, I still live in fear,” he said.
A fear for which Zaal is trying to atone.
“For me it was just another punch-up, another flash in the
night, another kick in the head,” he said. “But this guy could not go out of a
four-square-mile area for years [because] of something I did.”
But the road to forgiveness has not come easy, neither for
Zaal, who now must learn to forgive himself, nor for Boger, who continues to practice forgiveness simply in the
interest of self preservation.
“I didn’t forgive Tim so we could be friends and hang
together,” Boger said. “I forgave him so I could be
stronger.”
Zaal
is grateful to Boger for seeing him as a human being,
a right he didn’t always give to others.
“I think it takes a very big man to forgive someone like
me,” he said.
Zaal’s
and Boger’s message to the boys at Los Preitos: try and think of everyone as human beings and
think before you act or react — words of advice that did not fall on deaf ears.
“It had meaning to me, because it made me realize that
everyone has problems,” said Zack Swanson, who is serving time at the boys camp for assault with a deadly weapon.
Jorge Hernandez, another boy at the camp, who has been in
and out of juvenile hall and has clashed with rival black gang members, said he
listened more to what Zaal had to say.
“I realize that there’s not really a point to it all,” he
said. “There’s just no solid point.”
James Adames, a senior juvenile
institute officer at Los Preitos, said he hoped the Boger and Zaal story would sink
into the boy’s hearts.
“Some of these kids are intolerant of anybody,” he said.
“I’m hoping it will get their eyes open.
“It’s a great story, from hate to hope. In that story there’s hope for all
these boys.”