My
prior post on gay marriage led me to read up on three martyrs in the gay rights movement:
Lawrence King,
Matthew Shepard, and
Harvey Milk. Prior to reading into these stories I had thought that the murders were motivated solely by homophobia. What I found made the stories much more complex.
Larry KingLawrence "Larry" King, 15, was murdered by Brandon McInerney, 14, last year at a school in California. According to
a Newsweek article written just after the murder, Larry liked to flaunt his femininity and tease others with it. He'd wear makeup and high heels to school and tell boys "I know you want me." When a teacher asked him why he'd do this, Larry replied, "It's fun to watch them squirm."
According to the same
Newsweek article, Brandon McInerney grew up in a raging household. His father and mother had a history of brutal fights, one involving his father shooting his mother in the arm with a pistol. Brandon was born shortly after that shooting, but the fighting continued and Brandon was constantly in the middle of custody battles, which consisted, it seems, of arguing over whether his meth-addict mom could raise him properly.
It turns out the angry, drug-infested upbringing affected Brandon. He killed Larry in retaliation for a public taunt Larry had made in front of classmates, a taunt that consisted of Larry asking Brandon to "be his Valentine" on Valentine's Day. Though he was only fourteen years old, Brandon will be charged as an adult and will likely face additional penalties because he committed a hate crime; he'll perhaps spend over half a century in prison.
This is not to say that I think Brandon doesn't deserve a harsh punishment, or that he was innocent. It's just to say that the story might have more to do with meth and junior-high teasing and gun control than it had to do with homophobia, especially since Brandon's anger was likely stirred mostly by being teased by classmates rather than by an irrational personal aversion to homosexuality.
In other words, the story isn't exactly what it might appear to be to the many people who see Larry as a poster child for the gay rights movement (and, considering that last year's
day of silence was dedicated to Larry, there were many who bought into the surface of the story).
Matthew ShepardMatthew Shepard's story also had much more to do with meth than I had known. In 2004 ABC News
revisited the story, interviewing the two murderers and others surrounding the case. What they found was that Aaron McKinney, the 21-year-old who led the attack, had just come off a week-long meth binge and had set out to rob a meth dealer of $10,000 worth of meth the night he killed Shepard. When the robbery failed he went to a bar where Shepard, who had for two years been in some of the same drug scene as McKinney had, was getting drunk.
Shepard was so drunk that he asked McKinney and his friend Russell Henderson for a ride home, and they obliged. According to McKinney, and who knows if what he says here is true (there were witnesses only to the drug-related events that occurred before this), during the ride Shepard touched McKinney on the leg and then McKinney began to pistol whip him. McKinney demanded that Shepard give up his wallet, which he did, and when McKinney found only 30 bucks inside he went berserk, beating Shepard with the gun until Shepard passed out. Then McKinney and Henderson dragged Shepard's body to a fence and left him there.
When asked if she thought the crime was motivated primarily by drugs, Shepard's mother said, "I'm just not buying into that. There were a lot of things going on that night, and hate was one of them, and they murdered my son ultimately. Anything else we find out just doesn't, just doesn't change that fact."
In other words, she didn't deny that drugs played a part.
Knowing the bit I do about
meth, a drug that induces intense paranoia and rampant anger, I have to believe that had the drug been completely absent from the scene, Shepard's death would have been unlikely.
In 1998 the murderers told the jury that they were motivated by their hatred of gays to try to win the jury over to their side. Their plot didn't work, but their words have changed the national landscape, since Obama passed the Matthew Shepard Act two weeks ago, and
The Laramie Project, an anti-homophobic play based on these events, has been performed hundreds of times across the nation and even turned into an HBO movie.
It seems the main culprit, meth, got off without a sentence.
Harvey Milk Another big move for the entertainment industry was last year's Oscar-winning movie,
Milk, based on the life of Harvey Milk, America's first gay senator. Since it took place in San Francisco, a city that has had a strong gay presence ever since the gold-mining days when the ratios of men to women in the city were very heavily skewed in favor of men,
Milk was a sure-fire hit for critics during the post-Proposition 8 debate.
Dan White, the man who murdered Milk, is frequently perceived as being motivated by a hatred of gays. In this scene from the movie, for instance, White is portrayed as one of those wily supporters of the family:
Dan White: Society can't exist without the family.
Harvey Milk: We're not against that.
Dan White: Can two men reproduce?
Harvey Milk: No, but God knows we keep trying.
(quote lifted from imdb)
It's clever, partisan dialogue. But Ray Sloan, a gay man who worked closely with Dan White during the seventies in various government positions, tells a different story. The author of
this article on Sloan's take on
Milk claims that "White's character in
Milk seems to be a metaphor for a larger cultural and institutional bias against homosexuality that was prevalent in the 1970s."
In opposition to the movie's portrayal of White, Sloan claims that White was accepting of gays, himself included.
According to Sloan, it wasn't until White was pinched for money and Milk voted in favor of a local Catholic church changing a zone ordinance, something White opposed, that White got angry. He resigned from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but just a few days later, strained for money, he requested his job back. The mayor considered it, but appointed someone else. White fell into a searing anger and one day soon thereafter he shot the mayor and Harvey Milk.
While the trial results were completely inane and most likely motivated by homophobia (White was only given a seven-year sentence for a double murder), it's hard to read the central motive for Milk's death as homophobia, especially since the mayor, the man White killed before he killed Milk, wasn't homosexual.
Parsing HomophobiaUntil I read into these stories, I assumed that all three of these murders were motivated solely by homophobia. I simply believed the sound bites I'd heard and pieced together the rest.
In writing this, I'm not turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed against homosexuals
throughout history. Nor am I denying that there is still plenty of real pain and struggle surrounding these issues today, or, again, that these murderers were innocent in any way. But I am worried about a non-discerning public transferring their fear of murderers like McInerney, McKinney, and White onto all people who claim that homosexuality is wrong.
I don't think people who are educated about these stories and issues will take this misstep, but, unfortunately, the portion of the population that thinks in simple either/or terms is so large that I worry that the nation will continue to perceive these three people as martyrs for the gay rights movement, despite the evidence that homophobia was only a part of the problem, if it was a part of the problem at all.
I'm hoping that the term "homophobia" can be parsed more carefully. I hope that a non-discerning public doesn't pit members of traditional churches in the same boat as these murderers. I hope that they can discern the difference between someone asserting that homosexuality is a sin and someone ridiculing or physically harming a gay person.
I say this because many people on the fringe of the Proposition 8 debate, the people I'm speaking of when I say "non-discerning public," seem to feel
justified in rudeness, rudeness that could only surface once they perceive the "enemy" as irrationally lowly and hate-filled. I'm hoping that people will be able to parse the term "homophobic" more carefully and use it less-readily. If the term isn't parsed more carefully, a non-discerning public is likely to hear only what they want to hear, which may lead them to possibly conflate all traditional church members with the misunderstood McInerney, McKinney, and White.