HA! I can only imagine what the people of Boing Boing would think of my habit of photographing entire graveyards. Umm... All history is dead folks. Paying respects and visiting/documenting the dead is in many ways no different than reading a history book or rereading a favorite book by a deceased but still beloved author. How creepy! Meh!
I've been combing the Oakhill Cemetery in Austin trying to find the graves of the victims of the Servant Girl Annihilator for a website I want to create (bad record-keeping and racial segregation in the old cemetery are making it very hard to find them, if their stones are still there). Oakhill is gated but I have never once seen any of the guards or groundskeepers, even though the cemetery was recently vandalized.
But there's a woman in a white car who is very suspicious of me. She drives around, watching me closely as I walk through and check gravestones. She's someone's grandmother and her car sports bumper stickers for all sorts of conspiracy theory sites and two that are pro-NRA. I fear she's going to shoot me.
But unthinking reactions of people with no interest in the dead aside, I am very glad your run-in with a homophobic rent-a-cop with a chip on his shoulder is getting lots of attention. Yours is not the first tale I have heard from people who were treated poorly or threatened for simply photographing his grave.
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Date: 2008-08-23 05:54 pm (UTC)I've been combing the Oakhill Cemetery in Austin trying to find the graves of the victims of the Servant Girl Annihilator for a website I want to create (bad record-keeping and racial segregation in the old cemetery are making it very hard to find them, if their stones are still there). Oakhill is gated but I have never once seen any of the guards or groundskeepers, even though the cemetery was recently vandalized.
But there's a woman in a white car who is very suspicious of me. She drives around, watching me closely as I walk through and check gravestones. She's someone's grandmother and her car sports bumper stickers for all sorts of conspiracy theory sites and two that are pro-NRA. I fear she's going to shoot me.
But unthinking reactions of people with no interest in the dead aside, I am very glad your run-in with a homophobic rent-a-cop with a chip on his shoulder is getting lots of attention. Yours is not the first tale I have heard from people who were treated poorly or threatened for simply photographing his grave.