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A little after noon on Palm Sunday, Chris Richardson had time to kill. Durham County stores couldn’t sell alcohol before 1 p.m. on Sundays back in 1981, and 20-year-old Richardson, his wife Wendy, and their friends Chuck Osbahr and Kathy Reddish planned to spend the afternoon drinking by the river.
It had been Richardson’s idea. The night before, when the two couples gathered at Osbahr’s apartment, Richardson said he knew a place they could go swimming out in the woods. The rest of the group had been noncommittal, but now with the sunny April afternoon stretched before them, they agreed. A day on the water sounded nice.
First, though, they needed beer.
While they waited for the hour to pass, Richardson drove the foursome around north Durham in his 1974 blue Gremlin, the left rear window smashed out and a gash down the side from an accident the week before. A Doberman pinscher named Harley guarded an empty Styrofoam cooler in the back. They passed West Point on the Eno, a popular park on the Eno River that seemed like the perfect place to swim. But the spot Richardson had in mind lay another six miles north along a tributary known as Little River. They could let loose further out in the woods.
As the clock neared 1 p.m., the crew finally stopped to buy a case of beer before heading into the country.
What happened over the next three hours would become a defining moment in Durham’s history and in the LGBTQ movement in North Carolina. Richardson and his friends—all between 17 and 22 years old—were on a collision course with several others enjoying the river that day, including a man named Sonny Antonevitch. By the time Richardson and Osbahr emerged from the woods around 4 p.m., Antonevitch would be near death, another man would be bloodied, and the gay rights movement in North Carolina would embark on a political trajectory that still reverberates 45 years later.
The incident at Little River has been remembered as an act of homophobic violence after which gays and lesbians stepped into the public square demanding to be seen. The story of the crime that changed queer activism in North Carolina, however, has never been fully and accurately told. As the recent surge in legislative, rhetorical, and physical attacks on LGBTQ people continues, a full accounting shows us what was truly at stake in those woods—and what it means to refuse to live in fear.
In 2021, my husband Joe and I moved into a house on the Little River. “It’s like Eden,” Joe said the first day we wandered along the river, overwhelmed by the wildness of the place after the long cloistering of the pandemic. As we unpacked, I searched online for any information I could find about the history of the river we had quickly come to love.
I soon learned that not far from our house was a swimming hole where in 1981—the year I was born—four men had been attacked in an antigay hate crime. The scant sources I found said little about the victims but noted the incident had inspired the first public protest for gay rights in North Carolina. It seemed we were building our life on the very history that enabled it.
The story of the crime that changed queer activism in North Carolina has never been fully and accurately told.
As Joe and I settled into our rhythm of walks along the river, I wondered about those men, what violence they had endured, and how that had galvanized a movement which, over the course of my lifetime, changed the politics of our state. Pulling that thread, I began to unspool the story.
Over four years of research, I consulted hundreds of primary sources, including court transcripts, letters, diaries, case files, news reports, organizational records, property deeds, and hours of interviews with people close to this story, as well as more than a dozen oral histories conducted by my research associate, Hooper Schultz. I corresponded with people who could provide firsthand accounts; several spoke on the record, but some declined to do so.
Since at least the early 1970s, Little River had been known among local gay men and lesbians as a secluded, safe, and strikingly beautiful gathering place. The owners of the large, wooded lots along the water used to let people swim and socialize around two clusters of rocks just east of a bridge on Johnson Mill Road. No one quite remembers when or how it became a gay spot, but by 1981 it was one of those queer spaces that now seem rare: known yet hidden, sociable yet easygoing, untouched by commerce, technology, or fear.
In an era when antigay hostility was widespread in this part of North Carolina, and consensual sex between members of the same sex was illegal, the river provided refuge and community. As longtime Durham resident Michael Penny recalled in a 2022 oral history: “Some people would enjoy the atmosphere, some would just chatter on, and some would just get in their little corner and read, or whatever. But it was lovely. My favorite thing about living here.”
In 1981, queer folks were not the only visitors; the first rock cluster to the east of the road creates a swimming hole that attracted straight couples and groups like Osbahr, Reddish, and the Richardsons.
But a few hundred yards downriver, past a sharp bend shouldered by a cliff, the second swimming hole was a more decidedly queer space. Accounts at the time describe the spot as “a place frequented by homosexuals,” mostly gay men and some lesbians, both Black and white. Though occasionally men would cruise for sex in the woods, people who remember it say the primary activities were swimming and sunbathing—albeit sometimes in the nude.
Between the two swimming holes, weekends on the river could get crowded. On April 12, 1981, as many as 50 people had staked out spots on the rocks. Tensions flared a few times over the years, but mostly the two sections—straight and gay—left each other alone. According to Penny, “It was spectacular … like a big, festive club.”
Ronald “Sonny” Antonevitch had ridden his motorcycle to Little River sometime before 1 p.m. He arrived alone, made his way down to the second swimming hole, and settled on a low rock just steps from the bank, where he could lie back and read in the sun. He wore glasses and a Speedo. He had a large scar from recent heart surgery across his bare chest. In his youth he had been a good swimmer, but at 45 with a chronic heart condition, he had to settle for sunbathing.
Like Chris Richardson, who regularly biked down to the river when he worked for a nearby tobacco farm, Antonevitch had been to the river before. Witnesses recalled him as “that guy who always sits by himself and watches.” He mostly kept to himself, though some later claimed to have seen him at gay bars in Durham and Chapel Hill. He was a known quantity whom no one seemed to know.
The Richardsons, Osbahr, and Reddish parked on the side of Johnson Mill Road at about 1:15 p.m. and walked down to the river. As they searched for an empty rock, they passed the first swimming hole and went around the river’s bend. Here accounts diverge, but when they reached the second swimming hole, Wendy and Kathy said they saw a group of three men and a woman gathered on top of a boulder. The men were nude, and the woman wore only swim shorts.
The two couples returned to the first swimming hole.
For the next 45 minutes, they let Harley splash in the water and chatted with other sunbathers upriver. At some point, Richardson and Osbahr wandered back to the path and began breaking limbs off trees and smashing them into club-length sections. They complained about the nudity and about the “queers” at the second swimming hole. Then they noticed Penny walking down from the bridge to the water, a blanket and radio in his hands. According to Penny, Richardson turned to him and said: “I am going to kill your motherfucking queer ass.”
As Penny quickly retreated to his car, he was hit in the back with a tree limb.
Turning around to face his assailants, Penny asked them not to hit him again. Richardson then struck Penny across the face with the branch. Penny later testified: “I fell to the ground, and all my teeth moved in my head.” Blood poured out of his mouth.
Richardson and Osbahr allowed him to stand up and walk away. Richardson jeered: “You forgot your radio!”
Penny drove to the nearest gas station to call 911. According to him, the dispatcher who answered responded: “Well, you shouldn’t have been down there anyway.” The police did not come.
While Penny drove himself to the emergency room at Durham County General Hospital—several teeth falling out en route—Richardson and Osbahr returned to the water. They told another group of picnickers that they had had some trouble up on the trail. For the next hour they drank and talked to others about the nudity. Richardson, according to one witness, expressed his outrage at “the faggots fooling around with each other” around the bend, although no one other than Richardson recalled seeing anyone engaged in sexual acts. By 3 p.m., the two men were worked up.
Richardson rallied his friends, as well as four other men they met at the river, to confront the gay sunbathers. On the path, they encountered Mark DeMarais and Darryl Jones, a couple who had spent the day playing Scrabble at the second swimming hole. According to DeMarais, upon seeing them, Richardson yelled homophobic threats and swung his tree-branch club at the couple, hitting DeMarais on the arm and Jones on the back.
DeMarais threw his knapsack at the assailants, and the two ran back to warn a dozen or so other gay men before escaping through the woods to call the police.
Richardson then led his gang to the edge of the second swimming hole, where he set his eyes on Antonevitch.
“Do you want to die?” Richardson asked, stepping out onto the rock.
“No.”
“Motherfucker, can you swim?”
“No. I’m handicapped.”
“Motherfucker, you can walk. If you want to get out of here, you are going to have to walk across this river.”
“What have I done to you?” Antonevitch asked.
As Antonevitch stood, he slipped into the water. Richardson swung his tree branch into Antonevitch’s torso. Antonevitch managed to stand, and Richardson swung the branch again, this time hitting him between the eyes, breaking his glasses.
Osbahr joined the assault with his fists, and the two men held Antonevitch’s head underwater as they beat him. A witness later testified that as he looked away from the violence, he could hear the impact of the branch on Antonevitch’s body.
After several minutes, Richardson and Osbahr backed off. They hurried the women back up to the car, stopping to steal $17 from DeMarais’ knapsack and pick up Penny’s radio before speeding back to Durham.
Antonevitch stood and began stumbling up the trail, carrying half of his broken glasses and his book. Two of the men who had joined the gang seemed to have second thoughts and now helped him wash his wounds and bandage his head with a towel. They then carried him to the backseat of their car.
On the way to the hospital, he had one request: “Don’t contact my family. I don’t want them to worry.”
When the police finally arrived at Little River that evening, they found the other half of Antonevitch’s glasses and a broken branch in the shallow water, next to a rock covered in blood. Antonevitch remained conscious long enough to give police a statement describing the attack, pausing several times to shout, “Oh God, I’m dying! Somebody, please help me!”
In a wrenching coincidence, Penny, who was being treated in a neighboring room for his injuries, could hear the screams. Antonevitch slipped into a coma that night and never regained consciousness. He was transferred to North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill for surgery to relieve swelling, but he died three days later due to the bleeding in his brain.
News of the attack spread quickly. On Monday, the Durham Morning Herald, the Raleigh News & Observer, and the local ABC affiliate all ran stories about the search for the assailants. Initial reports noted that Little River had a reputation for being a gay hangout and referenced the possibility that the attackers had “an antihomosexual motive.”
“Don’t contact my family. I don’t want them to worry.”
Sonny Antonevitch
By Saturday, the day of Antonevitch’s funeral, Richardson and Osbahr had been arrested on murder charges and given court-appointed lawyers. Their victim, the News & Observer noted, was “a heart patient dependent on disability checks to support his wife and son.”
In the days following Antonevitch’s death, his wife, Patricia, shared her anger and confusion with the press. “I have vengeful feelings toward those men,” she told the Herald. “There was no need for them to kill my husband. … He never hurt anyone.”
The Daily Times-News in Burlington asked her about reports that the assailants targeted homosexuals. “They got anything but,” she said. “All they got was a handicapped fellow who couldn’t fight back.”
Though the initial reports hedged on whether homophobia had motivated the assault, Durham’s queer organizers knew intuitively what had happened.
“It seemed very visceral and immediate because it was here on the Little River,” recalled author and lesbian activist Mab Segrest. “It was very personal.” The entire community felt attacked.
Several of Durham’s queer organizers lived in communal housing arrangements, like Carl Wittman and Allan Troxler’s adjacent houses, which they shared with Segrest, her then-partner Barb, and others. After processing their grief privately around kitchen tables across the city, they decided to channel their anger into action.
North Carolina had already seen a spate of “queer-bashing” incidents along with routine police harassment aimed at enforcing the state’s “crimes against nature” law, which made consensual sex between members of the same sex a felony. The KKK and American Nazi Party, whose leaders called for gay people to be executed, had increased their activity in North Carolina since the Greensboro Massacre in 1979, during which they killed five people associated with the Communist Workers Party. Only six months earlier, an all-white jury had acquitted them.
“That opened the floodgates of [white supremacist] violence,” Segrest said. A tide of unrestrained hate seemed to be rising.
Wittman had moved to Durham from the West Coast, where he had been active in the gay liberation movement. Along with Troxler, he sought to make Antonevitch’s death a rallying point for the local lesbian and gay community. The community faced pervasive discrimination in employment, housing, health care, and child custody–all of which, in Wittman’s view, licensed attacks like Little River.
“When the Antonevitch murder happened,” Segrest told me, “Carl politicized it, coming from a very different political climate with gay men in San Francisco and Oregon. He and Allan made an issue of it.”
They worried that Antonevitch’s assailants would get off just like the Greensboro killers. They planned a unified public protest outside the Durham County Courthouse—a new tactic for Durham’s queer activists, whose organizing had thus far treated issues facing gay men and lesbians as separate and distinct.
The community was ready for a more assertive strategy after the brutality at Little River. As Debbie Swanner, one of Durham’s lesbian activists, wrote at the time: “Only a unified, radical, and most importantly, organized lesbian/gay liberation movement can successfully combat the forces against us.”
At noon on Good Friday, around 70 people gathered for a vigil. Many wore pink triangles to connect Little River to the Nazis’ murder of homosexuals 40 years earlier. “Germany started this way!!” read one handwritten sign. Others invoked the Greensboro Massacre and the unsolved killings of Black boys in Atlanta.
At the vigil, organizers handed out a broadside written by Segrest which argued the violence at Little River was not an isolated incident but rather a symptom of the homophobia, racism, antisemitism, and militarism surging in North Carolina and throughout American society. “We don’t want to die,” the flyer declared. “We lament the climate of violence which encourages such acts. … It is not acceptable to kill people because they are gay. It is not acceptable to kill people at all.”
As prosecutors prepared for Richardson and Osbahr’s trial, Swanner and Duke student David Ransom began planning an even larger demonstration. On June 27, 1981—12 years after the Stonewall Uprising in New York City and only weeks after the first reports of a strange new illness affecting gay men—they held North Carolina’s first march for lesbian and gay rights. Known as “Our Day Out,” the march drew a crowd of 300, putting Durham at the heart of a new public phase of the gay rights movement in North Carolina.
“It is not acceptable to kill people because they are gay. It is not acceptable to kill people at all.”
Mab Segrest
“I felt that the hatred of gay people needed to be met with active resistance,” wrote librarian and activist Nancy Blood, “and the vigil and the march seemed like productive ways of working toward that visibility.”
But that visibility came with risks. Some protesters wore disguises for fear of losing their jobs. Concern that the KKK might try to disrupt the march led Durham police to position armed officers on roofs throughout downtown. But even that wasn’t reassuring, Swanner recalled: “We always felt like the police weren’t really there to protect us.”
Nevertheless, they knew a public action was necessary. “We were making a very emphatic statement as queer people against the violence and conditions of our lives,” Segrest said in a 2021 interview with the News & Observer. “It was a breakthrough.”
Curiously, though, little was said of Antonevitch himself. Everyone agreed that his cruel death inspired them to come together–and come out–as a community, but no one memorialized him as someone they knew personally. Photos of the vigil show only one sign referencing Antonevitch, and not by name: “He was just enjoying the river,” as if to emphasize that he could have been anyone.
When asked about Antonevitch in 2024, one of the organizers said, “I don’t remember anything about him.”
Richardson went on trial for second-degree murder in September 1981. A few weeks before the trial, Osbahr became a witness for the state and entered a plea bargain for involuntary manslaughter; he claimed Richardson had threatened to kill him if he testified.
Near the end of Richardson’s weeklong trial, prosecutors revealed that he had previously been charged with assaulting his wife and attempting to run over a public safety officer.
Troxler and Wittman attended every day of the trial. They had urged the district attorney to reduce the charge to second-degree murder to take the death penalty off the table; they believed capital punishment was just another version of the very brutality they opposed. Still, they didn’t want Richardson to walk free.
“It is strange to be rooting for the State,” Wittman wrote in his account of the trial for the Gay Community News. “The State, which outlaws homosexuality. The State, which has arrested dozens of gay men recently on the streets of the state capital, entrapping them to ‘unnatural acts.’ The State, which finds that lesbians are not fit to mother their children. But we are with the State on this one.”
After four hours of deliberation, the jury found Richardson guilty of second-degree murder, assault with a deadly weapon causing serious injury, and—for stealing DeMarais’ $17—robbery with a dangerous weapon. The judge sentenced him to 25 years to life, which he is still serving today.
Photos of the vigil show only one sign referencing Antonevitch, and not by name: “He was just enjoying the river,” as if to emphasize that he could have been anyone.
Though Richardson’s attorney insinuated the victims had brought the brutality on themselves, the prosecution and witnesses avoided discussing homosexuality outright. They also barely mentioned Antonevitch’s family, only once reminding the jury that the victim had a wife and son.
In his closing statement during the sentencing hearing, the DA repeated the words from the sign at the vigil: “He was simply out enjoying the river.”
Sonny Antonevitch’s life seemed “surely not worth inquiring about,” Wittman noted acerbically in his account of the trial, lest the jury object to the details.
While Troxler raised money from Durham’s gay community to support Antonevitch’s wife, the victim himself had become a ghost. The more his death gained political significance, the more his actual life faded. Without funds for a headstone, he was buried in an unmarked grave. What remained was the silhouette Patricia had offered the papers that spring: a “handicapped fellow” with a wife and a baby.
Antonevitch’s home life, however, was more complicated than his widow let on. He and Patricia Connor had met at Wayne Community College in 1977 and married after what she recalled as “a whirlwind courtship.” Their son, VJ, was born that September, and the family lived together in a mobile home on Yarborough Road in Mebane, about 30 minutes from the swimming hole.
VJ was born with Coffin-Lowry syndrome, a rare genetic condition that causes severe intellectual and physical disability. As an infant, he also had hydrocephalus, which prevented him from holding his head up and further impaired his cognitive development.
Antonevitch had worked as an electronics repairman and then as a truck driver, but his heart condition had kept him mostly out of a job and reliant on disability benefits since 1973. Patricia’s family stepped in to help the struggling newlyweds.
Patricia and VJ were not the only important people in Sonny’s life. In 1969, Antonevitch purchased the property on Yarborough Road with a man named Robert. (I am not including his last name because, after a year of interviews and searching public records, I was unable to locate him.) The two lived together there, even after he married Patricia. When Patricia arrived at the hospital to find her husband in a coma, Robert was with her.
I first learned of Robert’s existence from Patricia’s siblings, who remember him answering the phone when they called; he often seemed annoyed when they asked to visit their sister. Antonevitch told them Robert was his older brother. In her self-published memoir, written in 2019 from the perspective of her nonverbal son, Patricia calls “Uncle Robert” her husband’s stepbrother.
Troxler’s records include a list of contacts he got from Patricia with a large asterisk next to Robert’s name and the words “close friend.” The day after Antonevitch’s death, Patricia and Robert gave a joint interview to the News & Observer in which they identified him as “a longtime friend.” Responding to the reporter’s suggestion that Antonevitch had been “a homosexual,” Robert insisted that the attackers “didn’t get one when they got Sonny.”
Regardless of the exact nature of the men’s relationship, the four formed, for a time, a family–if not always a happy one. Patricia’s brief mentions in her memoir suggest that the three adults argued over VJ’s care, and her siblings had concerns about Robert’s role in the couple’s lives. Before he died last year, Patricia’s brother told me he suspected the two men were involved, but no one knew for sure. Robert seems to have vanished after Antonevitch’s death.
Does it matter if Antonevitch was anything other than the straight, married family man the news reports portrayed after his death? In one sense, of course it doesn’t. “The point is not whether those people that were attacked were homosexuals,” Wittman told the News & Observer. “The point is that Richardson thought they were homosexuals.”
The much larger issue was a cresting tide of violence that could affect anyone–even a straight person in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“The point is not whether those people that were attacked were homosexuals. The point is that Richardson thought they were homosexuals.”
Carl Wittman
“The incident here, [the protesters] believe, is another in a growing list of violence against certain types of people,” WTVD correspondent Don Ross observed in his evening report on the April vigil, “the latest example of blind prejudice and hatred for strangers.”
Like the branch that ended Antonevitch’s life, blind prejudice and hatred are blunt instruments; they do not care about the messy details of strangers’ lives.
And yet, a central thesis of the LGBTQ movement is that our lives are the point. Every queer person knows what it means to fear violence. Though Wittman told the press it did not matter if the men at the river were gay, he also wrote: “There has never been any doubt about the central theme of the case: queer-bashing, clear and simple.”
Wittman gave voice to a core belief of many in the movement, that it is important to name when people are attacked because of their sexuality: Each of the victims, he wrote, “was there because he was gay, and he was assaulted because he was gay.”
If we care to look closely at Antonevitch’s life, a portrait emerges of a family—the people he hadn’t wanted to worry on his way to the hospital—living against the constraints of circumstance and social structure. What little we know suggests he struggled to maintain a household and a life that wasn’t fully legible to the outside world.
Why was Sonny Antonevitch killed? Perhaps he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe he was trying to figure out how to live, however imperfectly, as a working-class, rural, and disabled queer person. That life led him to a sun-soaked rock at a gay swimming hole deep in the woods on a Sunday afternoon—a rock from which he could not rise and run when hatred loomed over him with a tree branch in its hand.
Surely his life is worth inquiring about.
This year’s drought has lowered the Little River down to an ankle-deep stream. One ruthlessly hot morning in June, Joe and I decide to walk down the middle of the riverbed from our house to the spot where Chris Richardson attacked Sonny Antonevitch 45 years ago.
The place that was once the Little River swimming hole bakes in austere silence.
I climb to the top of the largest boulder and pause in awe. No wonder they sought refuge here.
Allan Troxler also returned to this place in 1988, two years after his partner Carl Wittman died of AIDS. He recounted the visit in testimony on antigay violence and discrimination before the Durham Human Relations Commission. “I want to speak for two men who aren’t here to speak for themselves tonight,” he began. “Who are as responsible, perhaps, as anyone for this gathering: Chris Richardson and Ron Antonevitch.”
Even as Troxler noted all that had changed since the attack, there would always be work to do: “The water has washed the blood away, and again we can be one with nature there on the Little River,” he told the commission. “But the stories you’ll hear this evening will attest that we are still unnatural to many.”
The contemporary LGBTQ movement, grounded in shared identity and political recognition, took root in North Carolina in summer 1981. For all its gaps and shadows, Antonevitch’s murder gave a previously fractured community something to rally around, a means to denounce violence against not only gay people but also people of color, Jews, political dissidents, and immigrants. The network of activists and their allies who planned Our Day Out laid the foundation for decades of organizing that have brought about enormous changes.
To build this movement, they needed to make Antonevitch a stand-in for all potential victims. That is the messy, imperfect nature of activism. But doing so made him a casualty twice. It also obscured the most crucial lesson of Little River: History often hinges on people trying their best to live their specific, complicated lives. Recovering those lives defies the hatred that seeks to erase them.
My husband calls to me from the riverbank. The heat has become unbearable. We head back to our kitchen, make sandwiches and iced tea, and spend the afternoon reading in the air conditioning. As we walk, I think about Sonny Antonevitch, about the home and people he would have returned to that Sunday afternoon. I think of the violence that still courses through our society, of book bans and Don’t Say Gay bills, of the attacks on trans folks and challenges to civil rights that doubly punish queers of color. It is not okay to kill gay people, Mab Segrest wrote. It is not okay to kill people at all.
I wonder if, like river rocks in a drought, the hardened landscape isn’t so much changed as exposed for what it has always been.
Then I give thanks for the simple pleasure of a walk in the woods, for the courage of the activists who gathered in the April rain, for all the parts of my own life on this river that are possible because of their response to what happened here in 1981.
Amid the horrors of this moment, when so much of what we have taken for granted seems to be drying up, gratefulness for what remains and what we remember is itself an act of resistance. It is the opposite of fear.
A historical marker commemorating Our Day Out and the Little River attack will be unveiled in downtown Durham on Saturday, October 3.
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