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Queering Your Politics, Politicking Your Queers

In California last week, the jury in the Larry King trial deadlocked on whether Brandon McInerney was guilty of manslaughter or murder when he shot his classmate for being too gay in 2008. Meanwhile, opponents of the recent legislative move to mandate the teaching of gay history started collecting signatures to get a repeal on the ballot, and Proposition 8 supporters won the right to continue the fight in court.

These things are not happening in a vacuum. They are deeply intertwined and they illustrate the one step forward, one step back state of queer politics in California, a state maligned by the right for its ‘San Francisco values’ that has some problems of its own. California is still one of the safest states to live in and be openly queer or gender variant; it is a place where you are more likely to be welcomed and treated with respect, less likely to be killed because of who you are and how you choose to express it.

But, as these things remind us, all is not golden in the Golden State. We are not a uniformly liberal state, as any election returns can show you. California has a streak of conservatism and a large conservative voting base. Ronald Reagan was our governor once, remember? So was Arnold Schwarzenegger, for that matter. California is in some senses an unpredictable place and queer politics aren’t exempt from that by any stretch of the imagination.

In 2008, an openly gay 15 year old student was shot by a classmate, dying several days later. Almost immediately, the media started covering the case from the gay panic angle, and that accelerated during the trial, in which the defense attempted to argue that King was threatening because he came on to his classmate. Wore heels and pearls.

They also called to the stand teachers who testified that campus administrators turned a blind eye to the tensions King was creating on campus with his flamboyant dress and behavior. In the months before the shooting, King began wearing makeup and women’s spike-heeled boots and seemed to relish making boys squirm with comments such as “I know you want me,” teachers said.

Almost  every report has stressed that King ‘wore women’s shoes’ and makeup, along with other trappings of femininity. How far have we come from the Twinkie defense, which, may I remind you, also involved a case that took place in California? The reminder in the media was clear; King was asking for it. Boys who wear women’s clothes deserve to die. Oh, the media might not have come out and said it, but it was implied. A tangled morass of both gay and trans panic surrounds King, who sounds like he was just starting to explore his gender and sexual identity when one of his classmates shot him point blank in the head.

King’s jury deadlocked in favor of manslaughter. Again, I am not an attorney, but this is a conviction that suggests someone is not fully culpable for murder; there were extenuating circumstances and complexities that make it hard to say a murder took place. No deliberation, malice, or premeditation. Because students totally just carry guns to school all the time and shoot each other in the head without malicious intent. Five courageous jurors refused to bend to pressure, and the result was a mistrial. There’s a potential for a retrial, but not very much optimism.

Defenses often revolve around the idea that the defendant was young, saturated in abusive rhetoric, and upset by the flirtations of his classmate. Honestly, I suspect the jury may also have felt conflicted about the idea of sentencing a young man to a very long time in prison. Thanks to the retributive nature of our justice system, a sentence of murder with a hate crime charge as well would have resulted in a hefty sentence. Jurors may have wondered what good that would do, and what chance of rehabilitation would have been available for McInerney under those circumstances. The message they sent, though, was that people can’t agree on whether shooting a young man in the head for wearing high heels is manslaughter or murder.

Under Senate Bill 48, California teachers will be required to cover the:

…contributions of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, European Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans, and other ethnic and cultural groups, to the development of California and the United States.

To teach, in other words, a more complete history of California that includes all its participants. This reads like ye ole PC nightmare gone wilde to opponents, who are mustering some of the same arguments that came up in 2008 with the Proposition 8 campaign. Apparently, teaching queer and trans history would ‘…inappropriately expose young children to sex, infringe on parental rights and silence religion-based criticisms of homosexuality.’ Because, you know, queer and trans people, all we do is go around having sex everywhere. I guess all that sex and violence in, say, the colonisation of California isn’t as much of a concern.

These arguments sound like a rehash because they effectively are. In 2008, voters were told that gay marriage would undermine the fabric of society as we know it. Those arguments are coming back for another spin around the block as supporters of the failed initiative once again attempt to have this fight, arguing that they deserve to be able to go to court to appeal the smackdown issued when the court declared Proposition 8 unconstitutional.

These things, I say, do not occur in a vacuum. At the same time the jury was being told that the defendant was not guilty because his classmate was too gay, which created extenuating circumstances, they were able to read news reports about all of the horrible things The Gays are doing to California. Demanding that their history be taught! Wanting to be married! And, likewise, proponents of anti-gay legislation in California took note of this trial verdict, that 12 people couldn’t seem to decide on an issue that seems relatively straightforward to some of us. They noted that even in the Golden State, supposedly a place that is welcoming to the queer community, that welcome is not extended across the board.

We are about to enter what looks to be an intense election cycle in the United States. Already the media is getting ready, the rhetoric is ramping up, and foes of the queer and trans communities are getting ready to do their worst. In one week alone, we saw some of the best (jurors believing that Larry King was murdered, the state affirming that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional) and the worst (jurors not believing that Larry King was murdered, haters using the same old tired arguments in an attempt to write inequality right into our lawbooks and our very constitution). This is only the tip of what may be a very ugly iceberg in the coming months, and part of a larger discussion, as well.

There’s been a lot of conversation in the queer and trans community about politics and goals; some of us, for example, are not as concerned about marriage equality as we are about skyrocketing homelessness and suicide rates for queer and trans youth. As we discuss our own goals and priorities, cases like this illustrate the huge obstacles we have to fight against. Whether you think parents shouldn’t kick queer kids out of their homes, want to see hormones and reconstructive surgery fully covered by insurance, or believe that marriage equality and military service are the number one priorities for the movement, I think we can all agree that it’s an uphill battle to get society to admit we are human beings, let alone to extend us equal rights in any field.

23 Comments

  1. Brooke wrote:

    I think it goes without saying that nobody deserves to be shot on account of their sexuality, manner of dress, or reaction to gender roles/identity in our society. I support full marriage equality and human rights for queer and transgendered people.

    However, I think the treatment of the King case here is a little off. If there’s any truth to the accusation that the victim enjoyed harassing others with public statements like “I know you want me,” then there is a problem with his behavior. If a straight, white male were to behave in the same way toward female students, you can bet he’d get in trouble for sexual harassment and someone would take him aside and have a chat about appropriate behavior toward his classmates and the need to show respect for his peers. I know I will be accused of saying that the victim was “asking for it,” but that’s not my message at all. There is some evidence that this kid was behaving aggressively and I wish that someone would have dealt with that. Sometimes it seems like people don’t address the bad behavior of people who belong to sexual or other minorities because of a fear of backlash and accusations of bias, and that needs to stop.

    Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 7:15 pm | Permalink
  2. MadGastronomer wrote:

    I think it goes without saying that nobody deserves to be shot on account of their sexuality, manner of dress, or reaction to gender roles/identity in our society.

    Except that, clearly, it does not go without saying, and in fact needs to be said more often and by more people.

    If there’s any truth to the accusation that the victim enjoyed harassing others with public statements like “I know you want me,” then there is a problem with his behavior.

    And you go straight from that into this.

    Sometimes it seems like people don’t address the bad behavior of people who belong to sexual or other minorities because of a fear of backlash and accusations of bias, and that needs to stop.

    And this.

    I know I will be accused of saying that the victim was “asking for it,” but that’s not my message at all.

    Regardless of your magical intent, this is exactly how you come across. You think it’s more important to talk about how this poor dead kid was acting than about his murder and the fact that people are using exactly what you’re talking about to claim that it wasn’t murder at all. You are a part of the systemic problem when you do this.

    Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 9:14 pm | Permalink
  3. Emily Manuel wrote:

    I’m not sure I’d necessarily take the testimony of either peers or teachers particularly seriously on that score.

    A study by GLSEN in 2009 found, for instance, that teachers only intervened in 20% instances of homophobic or transphobic bullying. Schools institutionally support and condone violence against GLBT students, or even punish bullied GLBT students themselves.

    Wtf do his shoes or clothes have do with harassment? That *only* makes sense as a narrative if you consider gender variance to be inflammatory, to be soliticing violence of itself. King was “creating tensions” by being gender variant. Asking for it.

    Not only that, queer sexuality and gender variance *of themselves* have historically been considered predatory – and by sliding from King’s gender presentation to supposed comments, the coverage participates in this history.

    We have NO context of what those comments mean, whether they were a sarcastic rejoinder, a fuck you to bullying or even just bog standard high school hetero jerkitude, whatever. I’m not saying it’s not possible for a queer or trans student to be predatory, but statistically a queer or trans student is far more likely to be bullied than bullying.

    s.e is quite right to be deeply suspicious of the way that such extremely loaded narratives of threatened heteromasculinity are being deployed as a defense by a murderer, and the teachers in need of vindication for letting a murder happen on their watch. All have a vested interest in pushing our view towards the aberrant queer student and not the violent heteronormative environment that created this murder.

    Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 9:25 pm | Permalink
  4. MadGastronomer wrote:

    Oh, right, forgot a bit:

    If a straight, white male were to behave in the same way toward female students, you can bet he’d get in trouble for sexual harassment and someone would take him aside and have a chat about appropriate behavior toward his classmates and the need to show respect for his peers.

    What the fuck school did you go to? Because that certainly never happened to straight cis white boys, or any other boys, in any school I ever went to. You are simply wrong on just about everything here.

    Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 9:25 pm | Permalink
  5. zar wrote:

    We don’t have the context for the “You know you want me” comments (if King ever made them). For all we know, the kid might have made those comments as a comeback to some nasty insults, like:

    Jerk: “You suck, homo!”
    King: “Whatever. You know you want me.”

    Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 10:30 pm | Permalink
  6. SA wrote:

    And lest we forget, it would still NOT BE OK TO SHOOT A STRAIGHT CIS WHITE BOY IN THE HEAD WITH PREMEDITATED INTENT even if he did “behave in the same way toward female students.”

    Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 10:35 pm | Permalink
  7. Brooke wrote:

    Magdastronomer,

    I went to a school, where, as a female student who was sexually harassed by a straight white male, that student was brought to the office for a conversation about appropriate behavior, punished, and made to apologize for the way he treated me.

    As regards the King case, I made clear that he didn’t deserve to be harmed or bullied by others. If you don’t take me at my word, that’s certainly your choice to make. But I have seen instances in which people who belong to minorities of several kinds get away with bad behavior because authority figures are afraid disciplinary action will be viewed as “oppressive”.

    I don’t know whether the teachers who testified to King’s harassing behavior are telling the truth or not, but if they did, he needed to be told it was inappropriate. I find it interesting that that aspect of the case was automatically treated as though it’s part of a conspiracy to smear a dead teenager. I was simply saying that if he behaved that way, someone should have made clear that his behavior was inappropriate. I know that if someone made that remark to me, regardless of whether the speaker was male, female, gay, straight, or anything else (and irrespective of how that person was dressed) and they weren’t close friend, I’d certainly feel harassed.

    I never said that the fact the victim may have acted inappropriately himself in any way provoked or justified his murder. Obviously, it doesn’t. The teen who killed him should be punished appropriately and nobody should be the victim of bullying. I brought up this additional issue because I think it was unfairly glossed over in the original piece.

    Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 10:48 pm | Permalink
  8. MadGastronomer wrote:

    @SA Do we really need to say that? Does this conversation really need any kind of defense of straight white boys? It doesn’t happen often, because that behavior is completely normalized. The trial for a murder of a straight white cis boy would go entirely differently, and so would public opinion about it. I really don’t think “KILLING STRAIGHT WHITE CIS BOYS IS BAD” is relevant.

    Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 12:03 am | Permalink
  9. DK wrote:

    Some people have been wondering if the Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act was even put into effect for this trial, given all of the potential appearances of the “gay panic” defense. Even if you excise the gay issue, harassment still doesn’t necessitate or excuse the introduction of two foreign objects at high speed into the posterior of a living human’s skull from point blank range.

    @Brooke:
    You may prefer the treatments by Garland over at Bitchmedia (written prior to the verdict) or the September 5th article about the trial at the L.A. Times. Both bring up the behaviors of the adults involved and Garland’s piece links to another L.A. Times article where the behaviors of the adults are articulated.

    Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 2:58 am | Permalink
  10. MadGastronomer wrote:

    I went to a school, where, as a female student who was sexually harassed by a straight white male, that student was brought to the office for a conversation about appropriate behavior, punished, and made to apologize for the way he treated me.

    Well, bully for you. But it’s very much the exception in the US. And a gay kid is likely to be not corrected but harassed by faculty in most places.

    But I have seen instances in which people who belong to minorities of several kinds get away with bad behavior because authority figures are afraid disciplinary action will be viewed as “oppressive”.

    And I have personally been harassed by the dean of my high school for being gay. Pretty sure my experience is far more common. And yours is kind of beside the fucking point in this discussion.

    Blah blah blah… Your entire post is “But what about the poor straight peepulz! Gay people who are bad need to be corrected! There’s reverse discrimination!” Fucking shut it. The boy is dead. Do you understand that? He was murdered. Your posts are massively disrespectful, inappropriate and derailing. And they are part of the problem. Whether you think you are saying he deserved to die for it or not, you are still supporting the idea that his death is less important than his behavior, which encourages the attitude that he did deserve to die. You are part of the problem. Your behavior is homophobic.

    Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 3:10 am | Permalink
  11. Ponytime wrote:

    It doesn’t really work to ask “what if this child had been strait and saying these things to women?” The context of a queer kid expressing their sexual identity “aggressively” at the strait children needs to be seen as defense against a culture that often wants us erased. King obviously lived in an environment where his gender could get him killed, so any condemnation of his behavior as “inappropriate” strikes me as hateful. To reiterate: queer children must learn to react to a culture that wants us erased – this murder is an expression of that desire. There is no comparison to a strait boy exercising his male privilege by harassing young girls. It’s pretty callous to raise a kid in a culture that erases their history and then expect them to figure out how not to offend the children who are willing to kill them.

    Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 3:45 am | Permalink
  12. Just a heads up: this thread has seen enough subtle and not so subtle victim blaming and variants that do not differ much from the old “slut had it coming” trope, only this time applied to a queer murdered kid.

    Because of this abundance, any new comment that even attempts to go there in the slightest will not pass moderation. If after reading this horrific story, your only thought is either to point that the victim somewhat deserved it or that cis straight men should also be worthy of our attention, then I am afraid you might need to re-evaluate your approach to commenting, at least on this story. The world at large is cruel enough, why should we expand the hatred by leaving such comments in the open?

    Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 3:54 am | Permalink
  13. Linds wrote:

    Thanks for this post. The murder (and yes, I’m saying murder even if the court disagrees) of this boy is tragic and disgusting in every way. I find the accusation that he deserved it for being “aggressive” in his sexuality to be very reminiscent of “corrective” rape. What an abhorrent idea it is that violence would be justified because this kid dared to explore his sexuality and gender identity.

    I agree it’s likely that there might have been hesitation to charge the kid with murder and hate crimes because he’s young, which is infuriating, because he took another kid’s life away. Nobody wants the straight cis kid to lose his future, but the queer kid? Fuck it.

    I’m really lucky to have gone to a school where genderqueer/gay/etc kids were treated with respect, but even in that environment I was so afraid to express my sexuality that I spent 20+ years hiding it. This poor kid was killed because he was brave enough to be himself.

    Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 5:18 am | Permalink
  14. Megpie71 wrote:

    I’m not sure, but reading the LA Times article (which references King as not only wearing heels and makeup, but also wanting to be referred to by a feminine forename) I wonder whether the question isn’t so much “was he gay and being aggressive about it?” but “was this kid trying to transition gender in a society which wasn’t prepared to let him do so?”

    My impression (from the couple of articles I’ve read, and no other background at all) is that Larry King was trans*, and wanted to be recognised not so much as a non-heterosexual male, but rather as someone who was non-male, or even female. We’ll never know for sure, because Larry King is now dead. But I suspect there’s a certain amount of trans* panic mixed into the whole business. Unfortunately, both “gay panic” and “trans panic” are still considered socially acceptable defenses for things ranging from assault, through grievous bodily harm, to things like sexual assault, outright rape, or even (as in this case) outright murder in a lot of different places throughout the world.

    I keep wondering what it is about the heterosexual male identity which makes it so very fragile, so brittle and prone to be shattered? Why is it that the slightest hint of finding someone non-female to be attractive or physically alluring is enough to condemn a heterosexual man to the pits of despair? It isn’t the same on the female side of the street – we’re encouraged to find other women beautiful, to find other women sexually attractive and desirable, and this doesn’t even put a smudge on the paintwork of a woman’s heterosexuality. Heck, even a full-on lesbian encounter with another woman isn’t considered to make us less heterosexual by default, because it’s assumed we’re still primarily interested in male (or at least masculine) bodies. Gee, who’da thunk the male body and masculine beauty was such a powerful thing – it’s capable of keeping women heterosexual, and making men gay just by noticing it.

    Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 6:26 am | Permalink
  15. anarres wrote:

    This is so sad. I’m struck by how incredibly brave the kid must have been, to be openly queer in such an oppressive environment. The phrase “tensions caused by his flamboyant dress and behaviour” seems wrong to me, since it sounds like the tensions were caused by other students’ homophobia and transphobia.

    Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 11:28 am | Permalink
  16. Jenn wrote:

    I’m thinking the “you know you want me” were attempts by the boy to cover up the hurt mocking and constant harassment caused. I seriously doubt that, with no provocation, he “came on to” straight classmates. I’m fairly certain that comments like that are in response to seriously fucked up bullying. Such as, a bully says something disgusting like “die in a fire, faggot” and he fires back “you know you want me.” Of course, high schools are such a bastion of anti-bullying sensitivity (this is heavy, heavy sarcasm), that the first violent comment is totally ignored or taken as “boys will be boys”, while the come-back is “IEEEE! PREDATORY HOMOSEXUALS!” with all the moral panic(TM) it is likely to induce.

    The whole smear of the victim as a over-sexed, flamboyant homosexual is as old as dirt. It’s just a bunch of excuses and gross murder apologetics.

    In other news, I was stalked, harassed, assaulted, and propositioned almost weekly in high school by dudes I was not interested in. Somehow, I don’t think that anyone would have justified my actions if I murdered any of them. But if I was a dude, and they were all gay dudes, it’s suddenly OH SO understandable.

    Yeah, fuck that noise.

    Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 2:56 pm | Permalink
  17. Ponytime wrote:

    “I keep wondering what it is about the heterosexual male identity which makes it so very fragile, so brittle and prone to be shattered?”

    I wonder about this too. I noticed in the article that it talked about how McInerney was abused and beaten for crying and thus could not cry. I think, and it was my experience, that we routinely train boys to suppress their emotions and deny them any means of expression besides anger and dominance. Even though I was not abused in that way as a boy, I still learned not to cry, as many boys do. We shame and punish them for emoting and then we punish them for acting violently, but we reward them emotionally for it. The phrase “be a man” generally means stop feeling what you’re feeling or mete out some violence. I experienced this socialization as acutely painful and it seems like this kid got it worse than I did. I can’t speak for the straight guys, but male socialization tends to form some pretty fragile identities – most of my adult life I’ve had to struggle to work through that socialization. I don’t really know though, it seems complicated to me. I feel so frustrated that our justice system makes no room for this kind of discussion – we have to cheer for a child being tried as an adult or else let a bigot get away with murder. I just wish our concept of justice allowed us to cast a wider net rather than just focusing on “personal responsibility.” It seems obvious to me that this kid committed murder motivated from homophobia, but I think responsibility just spreads so widely here.

    Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 3:45 pm | Permalink
  18. sarah wrote:

    I can’t understand how this kid could have been shot in the head with a gun..and it’s not murder? And that the teachers are saying things like ‘Oh well, he DID wear ladyshoes and was flirting aggressively’…it makes me sad. At my (catholic, australian) school we had one student who was openly gay. He was one of the most popular guys at the school. The teachers were obviously uncomfortable with him but because he had so many friends there wasn’t any bullying issues that arose from other students that the teachers needed to deal with. Now I keep thinking back to him and wondering what my teachers would have done if he hadn’t been so popular, and the group I went to school with hadn’t been understanding and accepting. It really scares me. I think it’s largely due to him and the way the school accepted him that meant a lot of us could come out as bi and gay later on in life when we were ready.

    (OT- this blog is opening up my eyes to a lot of stuff I haven’t thought about before. I’m facinated but worried how much I have to learn and process!)

    Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 12:03 am | Permalink
  19. carovee wrote:

    I’m confused. Do juries assign sentencing? I thought that was determined by the judge. Guess I don’t watch enough Law & Order. Also, if McInerney told a friend he was going to shoot King and then did so, how can anyone justify a conviction of manslaughter? It sounds pretty premeditated to me.

    Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 11:02 am | Permalink
  20. Will Wildman wrote:

    I don’t have words to encompass the levels of WTF the justice and penal systems have reached if people are reluctant to send a murderer to prison for too long because they think it might be worse than letting him out too early. The defence makes a case that his home life was unspeakably bad (but of course not the source of his bigotry), and somehow the logic of this is that he should be allowed to get back to it as soon as possible?

    I’m all for reforms and restorative justice, but the defence’s argument here seems to hinge on the idea that the prison system is so bad that it shouldn’t be used by anyone. What.

    Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 11:18 am | Permalink
  21. MadGastronomer wrote:

    Carovee: It’s not the sentence, it’s the charge. Manslaughter and Murder are different charges that carry different penalties, and it’s the jury’s job to decide which charge he’s guilty of, and then a judge will sentence him according to that charge.

    Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 5:31 pm | Permalink
  22. Sidra Vitale wrote:

    Riffing off Ponytime: “The context of a queer kid expressing their sexual identity “aggressively” at the strait children needs to be seen as defense against a culture that often wants us erased.”

    It is so damn depressing to read about this murder because it just lays out for us how thoroughly gays (or trans, as later commenters pointed out) having any sexual yearnings at all is considered “threatening” or “aggressive” and how that idea is indoctrinated from day fucking one. I mean, these are kids, which means they’ve had the fewest number of years of indoctrination into patriarchal society, and this kid shot another kid in the head!

    One of the things I hated so much about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” when it first was proposed, is that it’s such an _insult_ to expect someone to hide in a closet because it makes someone else uncomfortable. Someone making you uncomfortable by having their own sex drive? Don’t like Larry’s heels? Well, too bad, Puritan Nation!

    Sigh.

    But what it really comes down to is men socialized to believe that any treatment of them as a sexual being by another man makes them less than a man, and that’s where the perception of threat comes from – because a man, by definition, is a sexual actor, not sexual object, and when objectified by another man (or even hinted at such objectification by another man) has been put into the non-dominant category, which is unsupportable to remaining the man in a patriarchal system.

    Patriarchy, I blame thee. Again, and again, and again.

    Friday, September 9, 2011 at 12:18 pm | Permalink
  23. Mike wrote:

    Good job shining a spotlight on a number of gender issues in one of the most “liberal” states in the country, but I really wish you hadn’t trotted out the old myth of the “Twinkie Defense”.

    In the public imagination Dan White was sentenced to voluntary manslaughter instead of murder because his target was a gay rights icon and the jury was looking to let him off.

    In fact, Dan White showed many signs of depression including a sudden shift in diet (hence the twinkies). While one of his victims was a well known gay activist, targets were apparently chosen apparently because of White’s frustration with his experience in City Hall. He later killed himself via carbon monoxide poisoning.

    The issue of how mental health affects culpability for one’s actions is a tricky one, but in a blog that has been so sensitive to mental health issues it’s really dispiriting to see the specter of the “twinkie defense” rise again.

    Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 11:43 pm | Permalink