Matt Helms

Detroit Free Press

Jeffrey Montgomery, who turned his anger over inaction in the wake of his partner’s killing in an anti-gay hate crime into the Triangle Foundation, an influential group fighting for LGBT rights in Michigan and beyond, died Monday at Harper Hospital in Detroit.

The Detroit resident was 63. A cause of death wasn’t immediately known, but friends said his health had been declining in recent years.

Montgomery’s legacy will be the “amazing impact that he had on our state,” said Stephanie White, executive director of Equality Michigan, a statewide LGBT-rights organization created in 2010 with the merger of the Triangle Foundation and Lansing-based Michigan Equality. “It’s a little bit hard to overstate the legacy. At a time when a lot of us were afraid to come out of the closet, he was very public and very unapologetic. He inspired a generation of activists. He was a little rock with a big ripple.”

After his lover, Michael, was shot to death outside a Detroit gay bar in the mid-1980s, Montgomery said he learned through a Wayne County prosecutor that Detroit police weren’t spending many resources on solving the murder, saying it was “just another gay killing,” and that other anti-gay crimes similarly went without investigation. Michael’s killing was never solved.

Montgomery in 1991 helped found Triangle, formed initially to assist victims of anti-gay crimes and work with police and prosecutors to change the culture of how anti-LGBT crimes were treated. Soon the foundation, for which Montgomery was the first executive director, was taking on other forms of discrimination against LGBT people, including in housing and employment, and branching into lobbying in Lansing and Washington on legislation affecting the gay community.

Montgomery was quoted widely in the news on gay issues and high-profile crimes, including the so-called Jenny Jones killing in 1995, in which Scott Amedure of Orion Township was killed by Jonathan Schmitz days after Amedure confessed to having a secret crush on Schmitz during a taping of the Jenny Jones show.

National gay rights groups also paid to have Montgomery attend the trial of the killers of Matthew Shepard, the 21-year-old Wyoming college student who was brutally attacked, tied to a fence outside Laramie and left to die in 1998, said Sean Kosofsky, who worked with Montgomery at the Triangle Foundation for more than a decade.

Kosofsky, now executive director of the New York-based anti-bullying group Tyler Clementi Foundation, said Montgomery became a leading expert on anti-LGBT murders and worked to debunk the so-called gay-panic defense, the controversial defense tactic that blames assault or murder of LGBT people on temporary insanity brought on by sexual or romantic advances by gays.

“He was somewhat of a radical but he made our rights seem so basic,” Kosofsky said. “And Jeff’s uncompromising call for equality is what his legacy will be.”

Jan Stevenson, co-publisher of the Michigan LGBT newspaper Between the Lines, had known Montgomery since 1989. The Triangle Foundation was founded within a year of Stevenson founding Affirmations, the Detroit-area's LGBT community center, now based in Ferndale.

“I think he’s going to be mostly remembered for his work on hate crimes," Stevenson said. "He was very vocal with the Scott Amedure murder, and he also took a prominent national role with the Matthew Shepard murder. He went out to Wyoming and attended the trial and was an adviser to the Shepard family when they were going through that. I think it was his greatest accomplishment: promoting hate-crime legislation and the need for it.”

Montgomery, a Grosse Pointe native, was student body president at Grosse Pointe South High School, according to a 1997 Free Press profile. He received a bachelor’s degree in social science from Michigan State University.

Before working with the Triangle Foundation, Montgomery was public relations director for Detroit’s Thanksgiving Day parade and worked for about 13 years on the restoration of Detroit’s Orchestra Hall in the 1970s and 80s.

Former Triangle board chairman Jim Lessenberry recalled Montgomery as a man with a rich sense of humor to go along with a commitment to basic fairness.

“He was truly one of the most selfless people I’ve ever met, and he was consumed with the notion of fairness and equality for all people,” Lessenberry said. “He was a pioneer in understanding that the issues of any oppressed community is the issue of all oppressed communities.”

He also was a founding member of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, a Washington, D.C., group that advocates for sexual freedom as a fundamental human right.

"For all the ferocity of his refusal to let others suffer harm, Jeff was a gentle soul," said Woodhull's president and CEO, Ricci Levy. "He cared deeply for those he served for so long, speaking out for human rights for almost three decades through his advocacy against violence, homelessness, HIV, and the recognition of the diversity of family, sex and sexuality."

A public memorial likely will be held later. The family requests that donations be made in his memory to support "America You Kill Me," a documentary film being made about Montgomery's life, at www.jeffreymontgomery.org.

Survivors include his brothers, John and James Montgomery, and two nieces.

Contact Matt Helms: 313-222-1450 or mhelms@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @matthelms.