Last Sunday, a candlelight vigil was held in Dupont Circle to honor the late Dr. Gaurav Gopalan, a gay man and prominent member of Washington, D.C.’s LGBT community He was found dead in women’s clothing on an 11th Street sidewalk two weeks ago, a victim of gender violence.
Over 200 people attended the vigil. They gathered to commemorate him by telling anecdotes about his life and reading passages from his favorite Shakespeare plays. One of his friends said that Gopalan would have responded to being mistaken by the police as a transgender Latina or Middle-Eastern woman with his characteristic “mariachi cackle of a laugh.”
D.C. Councilmember Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) was also in attendance, and called police and other city authorities to action.
“We need to find this killer because, having done this once, there is every reason to believe they will do it again,” he said.
Though Gopalan was found in women’s clothing, he was not transgender. However, his murder was potentially a part of a string of murders and violence in D.C. against transgender women. The last reported murder was that of Lashay Mclean, a young transgender woman, on July 20.
Craig Dylanwyatt, a gay D.C. resident who attended the vigil, agreed with other LGBT activists that these victims have “not received the same priority attention” as other, non-gender deviant cases.
It took a week for the authorities to rule Gopalan’s case a homicide, and it has not yet been ruled a hate crime.
“These murders show that there is a need for people in authority positions, like the government, the police department, and other public services to get the word out,” Dylanwyatt said.
Many LGBT activists hope that the crime against Gopalan, an aerospace engineer and a beloved member of the D.C. theater community, will bring more police attention to crimes of gender violence.
“Normally, [these kinds of things happen] to a commercial sex worker. Now, this is the murder of someone who was prominent. Now it sparks,” Earline Budd, who works for Transgender Health Empowerment and who was at the vigil, said.
Budd said that the presence of Councilmember Graham at the vigil and the sentiments expressed in a letter written by D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton that was read out at the vigil were “thundering call[s] for action” and indicated that more pressure will be put on the authorities to close this case.
“We need a solved crime,” Budd said. “There are too many unsolved cases like this one.”
Sivagami Subbaraman, director of Georgetown’s LGBTQ Resource Center and a friend of Gopalan’s, emphasizes that Gopalan’s murder also affects students at Georgetown.
“We are also citizens in a larger community because we are an open campus and students step out,” Subbaraman said. While the LGBTQ Resource Center holds many educational programs to increase knowledge about LGBT issues and develop campus-wide tolerance, Subbaraman stressed that “just because there is a Center doesn’t mean [violence] won’t happen here.”
“I think all students should care [about promoting tolerance and stopping gender violence] regardless of sexual orientation,” Subbaraman said. “If you don’t care about everybody’s safety then you, yourself, can’t be safe.”
Subbaraman believes that tolerance is an issue pertinent not just to Georgetown students, LGBT and straight, but to people from everywhere on the sexual spectrum in the D.C. area and beyond.
“That’s why the vigil was so powerful—it highlighted the fact that [Gopalan] was a part of a lot of communities,” she said.
