The Case of the Missing Butch: Amy Bradley's Queerness and Why It Matters
Written by Daphne Bryant
TW: Homophobia, Sexual Assault, Suicide
I can’t stop thinking about it…27 years ago Amy Bradley disappeared on a cruise ship, and nothing about her vanishing sits right with me. It was and still is a mystery: did she jump into the water and kill herself? Was there some sort of accident? Or is foul play involved; was she trafficked, murdered or worse? The thought that any of these possibilities could be a reality deeply disturbs and devastates me, as it would anyone, and I was surprised I hadn’t heard of the case before. Last night was my first time seeing or reading anything about Amy, who she is, and what happened to her. I remember watching the Netflix documentary, looking at pictures of her in youth, in high school, in college and post-grad, and thinking to myself:“ Hm. She looks pretty gay.”
Before the big reveal I took a break from the documentary to go to Stud Country (AKA queer ass line dancing) with my friend, and when I returned home I knew I had to finish learning about Amy. It was just gnawing at me. My gaydar isn’t perfect, but I felt a strange sense of satisfaction when halfway through Episode 2 it was revealed that Amy is, in fact, gay. The timing was almost serendipitous. All alone in my living room I paused the TV, pointed at the screen and shouted:“ I KNEW IT! I KNEW THAT WAS A MASC!”
Amy is, in every sense of the word, a textbook butch. Prior to this documentary, the primary photo shown of her was a formal photograph taken the night she went missing: in it she’s wearing a black dress and shiny jewelry, but that’s probably the most fem she’s ever been. This year more casual photos of her (some taken by ex-girlfriends, some taken by family, some school photos, etc.,) were released, and in all of them she is visibly gender-nonconforming. It seems that in her everyday life, and especially at college, Amy preferred masculine clothing, extremely short hairstyles, and backwards baseball caps. As Gabe Dunn puts it in his Autostraddle article,“ I’m not sure how to explain the ‘90s lesbian je ne sais quoi but whatever it is, Amy has it.” You know what they say: gay see gay, and Amy’s queerness is not up for debate.
Backing her identity are multiple childhood and college friends, as well as two ex-girlfriends: Kat Lovelace and Mollie McClure. Kat’s relationship with Amy was an interesting one. They met at Longwood University in 1994 and began dating soon after, but Amy insisted that it be kept a secret. She’d explained to Kat that her parents would not accept them, and that even her coaching staff (for basketball) had steered her away from dating. Apparently Amy was so worried people would find out about her gay life that she acquired a beard boyfriend, and encouraged Kat to find one too.
Beards are nothing new. For centuries gay men have dated women and lesbians have dated men as social disguises for their sexuality. Before either girl had come out, Kat spent a summer with Amy, where they kept the true nature of their relationship hidden. There were close calls, and a lot of fear and anxiety about being caught, but it wasn’t until later that anyone in Amy’s immediate family found out. When Amy finally did summon the courage to come out to her family, they were not thrilled. Their reaction is not at all surprising, considering they’re from the south, have always been conservative and now identify with MAGA, Donald Trump’s goon squad.
Being gay, and being out, in the 90s wasn’t nearly as“ accepted” as it is now. Still, I think people might be undermining just how much her family’s views on her sexuality might have affected Amy. Her father, Ron Bradley, was incredibly disappointed, so much so that he sent Kat a damning letter expressing his disapproval of their relationship, and even implying that it was her fault Amy liked kissing girls. Funnily enough, Ron played down the intensity of the letter, even though it was three pages long and extremely scathing. My thoughts? I echo the views of many Reddit users. Any adult that writes a letter that long to their child’s teenage partner is a control freak with little to no boundaries. I feel so bad for Kat, and even worse for Amy.
Thankfully my parents never sent my girlfriends any letters, but it was hard coming out, and for so long certain family members, like the Bradleys, blamed my sexuality on the most heinous things: my Emerson College education, my detachment from Christianity, even my trauma with men, and the fact that I’d been SA’d on multiple occasions. Every excuse other than the truth: that despite all these things, I was and am queer. It’s not a phase, it’s who I am, and it’s a big part of who I am.
What’s interesting about this case is that Amy’s sexuality, which seemed to be a pretty concrete part of her life and identity too, was concealed from the public for almost three decades. Casual followers of the case and long-time Amy Bradley experts alike were shocked by the Neftlix reveal. We now know that Amy had come out as a lesbian a few years before the cruise: this is a fact confirmed by everyone including her own family. We also know, factually, that it didn’t go well. As a girl born and raised in Georgia, I can read through the southern bullshit and niceties: the family definitely reacted poorly, and to this day vehemently deny that she was a self-identified dyke. Amy had many sapphic relationships, like the one with her most recent ex Mollie McClure, who also appeared in the documentary.
Mollie and Amy first met when they were 14, at a sports tryout (classic, I know). The two became close friends, and Mollie would sleep over at Amy’s house, where romantic feelings started to blossom.“ I was falling in love,” Mollie said in the doc, reflecting sweetly on her young feelings. The two went to separate colleges and came out, respectively, but didn’t know about the other until their post-grad reunion. The way Mollie described it was almost cinematic: the two hit up a gay bar, danced all night, and kissed for the first time in Mollie’s driveway. Listening to their story made me smile, and then it just made me sad. Amy was/is queer. She lived as a gay person and was out to her friends. She loved women, and not in an“ alternating preference” way, as her brother Brad Bradley claims.
After confessing their attraction to each other, Amy and Mollie pursued a long distance relationship that took a tumble when Amy cheated on her and drunkenly made out with someone else. As an apology, Amy gave Mollie a handwritten love letter in a bottle, although it was really more like a plea. She asked repeatedly for forgiveness, and wrote things such as“ I feel like there is an ocean between us, like I'm on a desert island waiting for you to rescue me. A message in a bottle, my only hope. I miss you, Mollie” and ended the message with“ Save me, please. Stranded, Amy.” In the doc Mollie seemed hesitant to share the contents of the letter, probably because the foreshadowing and implications are so in your face. Amy was in distress, and feeling guilty, and perhaps there was more to it than just that. The letter was dated February 24th, exactly one month before Amy disappeared. Suddenly suicide, which her family vehemently denies, or the possibility of her family knowing more about Amy and her life than they’re letting on (even the possibility that her family did not truly know her at all), becomes much more likely.
So, about her case. On Monday, March 23, 1998, Rhapsody of the Seas departed Aruba and was traveling in international waters to its next island port of Curacao, Netherlands Antilles. During the early morning hours of Tuesday, March 24, 1998, Amy Bradley, who was a passenger, went missing.
Amy was known to drink, but most people on cruises do. She partied with Brad, had a lot of beers, and was even videographed dancing with a male crew member nicknamed Yellow. Due to this fact, and eyewitness testimony, Yellow, a self-proclaimed flirt known to hit on the women who came aboard,was a prime suspect in the case. Apparently Yellow wasn’t the only person on the cruise that took a liking to Amy: her family asserted over and over again that waitstaff were flirting with her, strange men were watching her, and fellow passengers were chatting her up. Not that this is an experience unique to Amy; unwanted male attention is directed towards women on cruises everywhere, but her family has pretty much stuck with the narrative that Yellow, or people Yellow is affiliated with, kidnapped Amy and sold her into sex slavery. Yeah…that’s their angle.
There are some interesting possibilities that could maybe support their story, like the supposed photos of her that were found on a prostitution site in the islands. At the time the FBI said there were similarities in facial structure and that the woman pictured could have been Amy, seven years later, although that theory has supposedly been debunked. The family also theorizes that Amy is alive and frequenting the website amybradleyismissing.com, hoping to catch glimpses of her family. This is based on the fact that IP addresses in Bridgetown, Barbados (where a witness claimed to have seen Amy in the bathroom) travel to the website, look at family photos, and linger on those photos for extended amounts of time, mostly doing so on holidays and birthdays. For the most part though, this narrative lacks real evidence and feels rooted in racist and misogynistic rhetoric. Out of all the women on the ship that night, was Amy really targeted and made to be a sex slave, captured by black men and forced to stay with them against her will? Has she really been spotted in the Caribbean by all these white tourists with rescuer complexes? I just don’t know. No one appears to.
Amy’s sexuality was deliberately kept out of the picture for years, and I’m not sure if that’s because her family is so anti-gay that they’d rather her be remembered as an innocent guy magnet than a tough butch, or if it’s because her lesbianism had something to do with her disappearance. Either way, their continued manipulation and denial of core facts strikes me as odd. She wasn’t always the perpetually happy person the Bradleys and others paint her as having been, and her queer relationships point to a potential darkness, or rather sadness, that stirred within her, even just a month before she went missing.
Amy Bradley’s story is a tragedy. Something happened to her, but I think all of the conspiracy theorists have worked themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out just what that something is. I personally am more interested in who Amy was when she was here, and not just a missing person. The stories about her queerness add color to the case and her life.
