Episode 170 : To Catch A Killer With Doug Greco

This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with author and  political organizer Doug Greco. Greco has organized for over 15 years in Austin and San Antonio with the Industrial Areas Foundation, the nation’s largest and longest-standing network of faith and community-based organizations. Before that, he served as Director of Programs with Equality California, the nation’s largest statewide LGBTQ organization. His book, To Find a Killer: The Homophobic Murders of Norma and Maria Hurtado and the LGBT Rights Movement, is the focus of this episode. Despite monumental gains in legal equality over the past decade, the LGBTQ community still faces harsh disparities in physical and mental health, economic status, racial stratification, and hate crimes victimization. These factors compound for LGBTQ persons of color, low income individuals, immigrants, and members of the transgender community. In To Find a Killer — a finalist in the Writers' League of Texas 2021 Manuscript Contest for Nonfiction — Doug Greco explores the next phase of the LGBTQ rights movement and how issues of race, class, sexuality, gender identity, and economic status often intersect producing negative outcomes for members of the LGBTQ community. Beginning with a gripping, firsthand account of the 2011 anti-gay murder of twenty-four year-old Norma Hurtado, a student the Greco taught in an Austin high school ten years earlier, To Find a Killer employs a mix of narrative nonfiction and political analysis to uncover the intersectional nature of the disparities impacting the LGBTQ community. Drawing from his fifteen-years' experience as a grassroots organizer in Texas and California, Greco argues for the types of political organizations and public policies necessary to address these challenges. To Find a Killer charts a robust but pragmatic course for the LGBTQ movement today: investing in grassroots leadership development, rooting organizations in local civic and religious institutions, and focusing not just on legal equality, but a wider set of socio-economic issues.

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