Like many couples, Kelly Glossip and Dennis Engelhard regularly attended church. They argued over making large purchases like whether to buy a new car or new furniture. They slept better at night together. They liked to just hold each other, standing in the kitchen of the house they shared for five years in rural Robertsville, Mo.
And like many couples, they had their own Christmas traditions.
But on Christmas Day in 2009, Kelly answered the phone, and a normal, shared life went to pieces.
His partner of nearly 15 years, Dennis Engelhard, was dead.
A Missouri State Highway Patrol corporal, Engelhard was helping a driver at the side of Interstate 44 north of Eureka, Mo., when another driver hit an icy patch, ran off the road and hit him. He was pronounced dead within the hour.
"We were one person, then half of me died," Kelly said.
I met Kelly a few months after this travesty. He was a wreck: his family had alienated him, Dennis’ family left him out of the obituary and Kelly didn’t receive pension benefits. Widows are normally given half of the spouse’s annual salary. But the Missouri Department of Transportation and Highway Patrol Employees' Retirement System limits benefits to married couples. Because of a 2004 Missouri constitutional amendment restricting marriage between one man and one woman, they couldn’t wed.
This project is an attempt to illustrate the effects of discrimination. I want to continue this project with video in an aim to show Kelly’s life and hardships while adding the layer of his voice to give deeper understanding for his story. Photographs don’t fully convey his arduous journey. The intense emotional pain has expanded to physical pain, forcing him to spend multiple visits in the ICU.
Kelly has also filed a lawsuit against the pension board for equal treatment. For him, it’s not about money. It’s about being treated as a human being, to feel that Dennis’ life mattered. He says he doesn’t “want anyone to go through what [he’s] gone through.”
I want audiences to see the normalcy in gay people like Kelly. I hope people will empathize what it’s like to lose your loved one and that his grief shouldn’t be tainted by hate.
