The Plaid Adder's CRITIQUE OF THE WEEK

[I wrote a critique of the week about Columbine a while back, which you can find here. A few days later, I spotted a tabloid headline and wrote this rather long postscript to it.]

Well, the *National Enquirer* thinks it knows what caused all this mess. Columbine is splashed all over the cover, naturally, including a little blurb trumpeting the "Gay Secret" that drove them to mass-murder.

I don't normally read the NE, but as I stood there in the checkout line I couldn't pass that one up. I thought, fantastic. They're going to make out that these guys are like the two lovers in *Swoon* or the two guys in *Rope,* male lovers who kill other people to get each other off. That'll really help matters. After all, as my students will tell you, in many American minds the moral distinction between homosexuality and murder is already fuzzy. People need something to blame; why not us? We're already being blamed for, among other things, natural disasters in Florida.

But when you finally locate the piece to which that blurb refers (no easy task; the NE has dispensed with editorial niceties like the table of contents), it turns out to be something different. Apparently, according to the Enquirer's sources, the two murderers spent so much time together and dressed and acted so similar that the other students started making fun of them for being "faggots," taunting them about when they were going to get married, and so forth. According to these same sources, the two future mass-murderers got very agitated and angry and began making threats. The Enquirer is now apparently representing this as what "pushed them over the edge."

Of course, this is the National Enquirer we're talking about. So it's hard to say whether there's any truth to this. And frankly, I'm not sure whether I hope it's true or whether I want it to be a lie.

If it's a lie, it's just another annoying demonstration of the tabloids' eagerness to use homophobia to sell papers, which is certainly in evidence any day you walk by the checkout counter. If I've seen one "who's gay on TV" cover I've seen a thousand. It bugs me to think that homosexuality is being lumped in with alien babies and Nostradamus's predictions about the apocalypse, but there we are.

If it's true...well, that's a different story.

Because what that means is that what stood in that school cafeteria with them and their automatic weapons was homophobia. Not homosexual desire, but the blind unreasoning hatred and hostility with which Great Straight America greets it. What stood with them in the cafeteria was the same evil thing that killed Matt Shepard on a deserted road in Wyoming. Because that's the same thing that made the word "faggot" available to those high school students as a term of humiliation and abuse; it's the same thing that told Eric Harris and Dylan Kleebold that the only way to wipe out the terrible shame of being called gay was to kill the people who had uttered the slur.

The Enquirer says that this taunting episode took place in the library, which is where they shot several of their victims. So if it's true, it's a neat enough correspondence: going back to the scene of the insult and wiping out in blood the memory of having been called a fag. Because after all faggots don't kill people, do they? That's what *real* men do. In our culture, it's a lot better to be a murderer than to be a fag. At least you get some respect.

And if you follow it down further it just gets even more tragic and twisted. Two adolescent boys, having been humiliated for being insufficiently masculine, follow the crazy logic of American masculinity and decide that the way to prove everyone wrong is to pick up that surrogate phallus and force everyone to eat their lead--especially the athletes whose claim to masculinity is as secure and unchallenged as theirs is tenuous and unconvincing. And so they end up taking out a dozen of their classmates and then turning the guns on themselves--dying together in a grotesque parody of the traditional lovers' pact.

So is it true? Who knows. Even if it is, it can't have been the *only* thing that turned these two kids into murderers; even according to the Enquirer they were already wearing the trenchcoats and keeping the diary before all of this happened. And it wouldn't explain why they targeted minorities; for that rationale we have to go to the previous critique. But I have to say, that based how I see things working out in this country, the Enquirer is starting to get this massacre to make that sick kind of sense that the Jonesboro massacre made. And that's the thing. Whether this story is true or not, it's being offered as a way to make this make sense. This kind of logic is something the Enquirer knows its readers have internalized.

So this is how rumors get started. But I don't think this particular explanation will catch on. Because it might force Great Straight America to realize that their old friend "homosexual panic" is killing *them* now. Matt Shepard's murderers acted on their "panic" in the appropriately sanctioned way--by beating to death the gay man who supposedly evoked it. Eric and Dylan took theirs out on the straight classmates who had instilled it in them. And as far as Great Straight America is concerned, that's a much bigger problem. We can't start feeding this monster *straight* people. Who knows what could happen.

But America needs homophobia. Just ask the Reverend Cameron, a right-wing psychologist who went on record saying that America had to be vigiliant and make sure that homosexuality is ever and always stigmatized, because otherwise the appeal of the homosexual lifestyle would become "too powerful to resist." It seems that if all you're looking for is "sheer sexual pleasure," then "studies show" that homosexuality is the best way to get that, since "marital sex tends toward the boring." I have to say that this is what I had always suspected was at the bottom of American homophobia, but I never dreamed the Christian right would *admit* it. But ridiculous as Cameron made himself and his cronies sound by waxing eloquent on the power of homosexual desire, the man does have a point--which is that if homosexuality *weren't* stigmatized, heterosexuality would be in many ways a less attractive option for a lot of people. Women and men have to do a lot of work to get along in our culture; and I've always maintained that in a free market with real competition, straight men would really have to revamp their product or else lose serious market share. So if we didn't have homophobia, where would we be? Rutting shamelessly in the streets, living from orgasm to orgasm with no thought for the nuclear family. We don't want that, do we? Of course not. So we need homophobia.

And that means that nobody is going to see the thing standing in the cafeteria with Harris and Kleebold. It would cost us too much to admit that the same force that is preserving the patriarchy from the onslaught of the irresistible homosexual lifestyle is also the same thing that shot up a high school in Colorado. Too much by one set of standards, anyway. Some of us might think that another shot-up high school would be the highest price we could pay--higher than whatever retribution we would bring down on ourselves by killing off this terrifying but very useful monster. But we're not the ones with the TV stations, the radio call-in shows, the House and Senate seats.

So in the end, I have to hope the story *isn't* true. Because if that's what really stood in the cafeteria, then it will inevitably kill again. Because I know America doesn't have the strength, the courage, or even maybe the intelligence to kill it.

I got your Heart of Darkness right here,

The Plaid Adder 

Wanna see last week's critique? Go here.