If you've read the news this week, you know what I'm talking about. Last weekend, in Laramie, Wyoming, a 22-year-old gay man name Matt Shepard was attacked, tied down, burned, beaten, and left to die by two men who are now in custody. Matt was discovered and removed to a hospital, where he eventually expired at around 1 a.m. this morning. According to the murderer's girlfriend, the attack was "provoked" when Matt flirted with one of the murderers, who naturally chose to express his disinterest not by saying, "No thanks, I'm taken," but by bashing Matt's skull in. The men are being charged with first-degree murder; their girlfriends are being charged as accessories, although it sounds like they're providing enough information to assure themselves of plea bargains.
Wyoming does not, of course, have a hate crimes law or anti-discrimination statute that covers homosexuality. This is not Wyoming's fault; practically nowhere in this country does. And why? Because any time someone tries to put through that kind of legislation, the conservative right gets up and whines about how homosexuals are unreasonably demanding "special consideration" and "special legislation" to get "special rights" to which they're not entitled and which they don't even need. Well, we wouldn't need this "special" legislation if it weren't for the fact that to most of America, we are special people. We're very special indeed. We're so special in North Carolina that we can be arrested and hauled into court for having consensual sex with another adult. We're so special that the Supreme Court has given Georgia and every other state in the union permission to pass laws that will make it illegal for us to have sex--and then go into peoples' houses to enforce them. We're so special that in every state I've ever lived in, people have been granted the right to deny us housing, refuse to hire us, and fire us at will just because they don't like our kind. We're so special that lawyers can argue, and courts will believe, that a straight man will naturally be so terrified at the mere thought that one of us might be hitting on him that he will invariably fly into a murderous rage during which he cannot be held responsible for his actions.
So we need laws that will protect our "special" rights. Like the right to housing. The right to employment. The right to raise children. The right to have sex. The right not to be beaten to death. What one might even call the right to life. Because we are, after all, a special case. Not because we wanted to be, but because the rest of you made us that way.
But Plaidder, I hear you saying. Surely anti-discrimination and/or hate crime legislation would not have prevented this crime. After all, murder is in fact illegal, even if you're murdering someone against whom it is legal to discriminate. Murderous rage is murderous rage, right? Will the knowledge that this is a special form of crime with special penalties really deter a man deeply in the throes of homosexual panic?
BULLSHIT! say I. I admit that when a murderer is lofting the crowbar or axe or whatever the weapon is, he has pretty much passed the point of considering whether the action is worth the possible consequences. But if you look at the history of violence in this country, you will notice that not everyone's "panic" translates into murder. Women who panic when hooted at by strange men in dark alleys don't then whip out the Uzi and take out the entire construction crew. Gay men who panic when confronted with a clutch of screaming Bible-beaters shouting that they hope God's scourge wipes out them and their kind don't break off table legs and start clubbing them like baby seals. Back when the Klan was regularly lynching African-Americans, there was a startling dearth of incidents in which African-Americans "panicked" and set fire to the houses of white Americans. It's not because all of these people are congenitally weaker than straight white men, or because we're somehow more moral and forgiving. It's because we know that we're not allowed. We know we're not entitled to take our rage, pain and frustration out on straight white men, because our country only sanctions one kind of violence--the kind that moves from the top downward. We all know where we stand in the hierarchy. And we all know that you can hit down, but you can't hit up. A straight man knows that if someone should happen to give him a nasty scare, society will allow him to attack, just as surely as a gay man knows that his only two options are flight and death.
The only way to change this is to change the shape of the pyramid. And the only way to do that is by forcing our government and all its allied institutions to recognize, and declare, that we are no longer safe targets. Legislation, by itself, will not stop things from this from happening. But without that legislation, we can't get out of this mess. Because until we have some kind of clear and unambiguous legal protection, it will continue to be open season on us.
It's too late for Matt--just as it's too late for his murderers, who will be prosecuted and convicted by the same society that tacitly encouraged them to commit this crime, the same society that bred into them the "panic" that ended their lives as free citizens. America will wash its hands of them as it washed its hands of the Jonesboro child murderers. But convicting these two people--even if they get the death penalty--will not stop the next murder from happening. And until our government, our churches and our politicians admit their responsibility for these outrages and take steps to rectify them, they will all continue to stink of our blood.
Seems like I end up saying this every time I teach this novel, because every semester America gives me a new reason to do it. Forget Kurtz, forget the Congo. I got your heart of darkness right here, pal.
You're soaking in it,
The Plaid Adder
Wanna see last week's critique? Go here.
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