Afterlife Why does Matthew Shepard still figure so prominently in the national psyche? By Andrew Sullivan More than a year after his murder, the interest has not subsided. The trials of his killers have received hefty media attention; his name is ritually invoked in the debate over hate-crime laws; long articles have appeared in publications as diverse as Harper's and Vanity Fair. He's made the cover of Time. Gay rights groups have been particularly intent on making Shepard a symbol of homosexuality in our time, sending out countless direct-mail pitches featuring him (my mailbox is full of them) and using his story in multiple press releases and TV ads. Last month, the largest gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), raised more than half a million dollars at a gala black-tie dinner in his honor. His parents made distraught appeals for HRC's legislative agenda from the podium. If the Shepard case proved the need for hate-crime laws, this emphasis might make sense. But the case is a somewhat spectacular example of their superfluity. Shepard's murderers were swiftly caught and brought to justice without any such laws. The first is behind bars for life. The second, denied a "gay panic" defense, may get the death penalty. Even advocates of hate-crime legislation concede this point. They know that such laws would primarily affect much less grave misdemeanors. Similarly, if Shepard's fate proved the ubiquity of anti-gay murders, then his elevation to totemic status might also make sense. But, again, the evidence shows that Shepard is representative of very few gay Americans. According to the FBI, in 1997, the year before Shepard was killed, a total of three hate-crime murders of homosexuals were recorded in the entire United States. This number is not a fiction. Murders are the least underreported of crimes, because bodies have to be accounted for, and the FBI's number is the total reported by some 10,000 reporting agencies across the country. But let's assume that the FBI understates gay hate-crime murders by a factor of five. That makes 15 anti-gay murders a year. Further assume that around five percent of the population is gay. That means that the chance of a gay American meeting the same fate as Matthew Shepard is about one in a million. Or about the same as being hit by a railroad train. No, the resilience of the Shepard case is about political and cultural symbolism. It is about the need for a victim so blameless and a crime so heinous that a story about the relationship between gay Americans and straight Americans can be told in which there are no complexities and no doubts. So Shepard becomes a martyr, even though, unlike martyrs, he did not choose to die. Shepard is "crucified," even though, in reality, he was tied to a post, his body and head slumped on the ground. After a while, as in the case of the religious right's Columbine "martyr," Cassie Bernall, the facts cease to matter. What matters is the message. And the message is that homosexuals are innocent victims and heterosexuals are either saviors or menaces. You are either enlightened or a bigot--on the side of the victims or on the side of the murderers. The political use of Shepard began early. Just after his death, there were appropriate outpourings of grief and shock. But then the organized memorials became political rallies in which any opposition to various legislative initiatives was deemed equivalent to complicity in Shepard's murder. The result was a kind of political blackmail--and it continues to this day. Any qualms, for example, about hate-crime laws, and you are deemed a heartless hater. When the Hate Crimes Prevention Act failed in a House-Senate conference last month, HRC's executive director, Elizabeth Birch, declared that the decision "showed a callous disregard for hate-crime victims and their families." As simple as that. Are you a bad person or a good one? The marketing of Shepard is also a damaging symbolic statement about who gay men
still are in this culture. Other recently murdered homosexuals have not achieved anywhere near the same level of attention. Billy Jack Gaither was killed shortly after Shepard, in Alabama, by two men who bludgeoned him to death and then burned his body on a stack of rubber tires. Unlike Shepard, Gaither had reason to trust his attackers--one of them was a drinking buddy. But, unlike Shepard, Gaither is barely remembered. Or take Private Barry Winchell, a gay soldier stationed in Kentucky, murdered at the same age as Shepard. In a barracks fight, Winchell had bested a soldier who gay-baited him. In retaliation, the straight soldier and a gang of other soldiers allegedly dragged Winchell from his bed and beat him to death with a baseball bat. This crime was committed by U.S. soldiers against someone serving his country and supposedly under the protection of the government. The military is still investigating, but a court-martial of the suspected murderer has been scheduled. Barely heard of the incident? It occurred four months ago, but it has none of Shepard's staying power. The reason, I suspect, is that Shepard's image serves certain political purposes. Winchell and Gaither were clearly men, not boys. One was a soldier; the other was a middle-aged, burly, working-class figure with only average looks. They weren't upper-middle-class; they weren't well-educated; they weren't waifs. They provoke far more mixed reactions. They threaten the weak, effeminate stereotypes of gay men that the victimologists require and that many heterosexuals are more comfortable with. They were more prudent than Shepard was. Confronted with violence, they were more likely to fight, as Winchell did, than to retreat. They suggest a gay world that is strong and grown-up and mainstream--exactly the kind of world that has no need for pity. They suggest the kind of homosexual world that needs protection from crime--as we all do--but has no need for special sympathy or treatment; a world in which a man might want to serve his country or marry another man, but in which the desire for special state protection is less pressing than the desire to be left alone. Such a world does not exist in the iconography of Shepard or the politics he has
inspired. The way he is discussed suggests a child rather than an adult. The name of his memorial website, www.matthewsplace.com, summons up the idea of a child's safe space. The website depicts him crouched sparrow-like on a waterfall, gazing cherubically into the distance while music plays. The point of this iconography is to divest Shepard of any maturity, any manhood, any adult sexuality--for that matter, any true humanity. It is literally to infantilize him, to turn him into a symbol that is at once pitiful and utterly unthreatening to the stereotypes that still burden most homosexual men, stereotypes that continue to weaken our self-confidence and self-respect. There was a time when African American men were also routinely referred to as "boys," but I don't think civil rights groups ever emphasized this image in order to gain equality. They realized instead that it was only when black Americans stopped being viewed as children that equality was conceivable. The marketing of Matthew Shepard in death is nowhere near as horrifying as what was done to him in life. But that doesn't make it any more palatable. Or any less detrimental to the cause of homosexual equality as a whole. From Andrew Sullivan's website : www.andrewsullivan.com |
THE NEW REPUBLIC - FROM WASHINGTON Us and Them by Andrew Sullivan Post date 03.22.01 | Issue date 04.02.01 What happened on September 26, 1999, to 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising can only be described as evil. Two men who had become friendly with Jesse and his family invited the boy over for the day. According to prosecutors at the trial now under way in Bentonville, Arkansas, the two men drugged Jesse, tied him to a bed, shoved his underwear into his mouth to gag him, added duct tape to silence him, raped him for hours using a variety of objects, including food, and then left him in such a position on the bed that he slowly suffocated to death. Unless you frequent rabid right-wing sites on the Internet or read The Washington Times, you've probably never heard of this case. The New York Times has yet to run a single story about it. The Washington Post has run only a tiny Associated Press report--and an ombudsman's explanation of why no further coverage is merited. Among certain, mainly gay-hating right-wingers, the discrepancy between the coverage of this case and the wall-to-wall coverage of the similarly horrifying murder of Matthew Shepard proves beyond any doubt that the mainstream media is guilty of pro-gay bias. Do they have a point? My first, defensive, reaction was no. And reading the accounts from some right-wing outlets, any gay person would be defensive. Some on the far right clearly want to use this case to raise vicious canards about gay men. They want to argue that this pedophilic rape-murder is representative of the "homosexual lifestyle" and to wield it as a weapon against the notion of gay equality and dignity as a whole. A similar argument was made recently by Mary Eberstadt in The Weekly Standard, a magazine that never misses an opportunity to demean and disparage homosexuals. In two lengthy articles she asserted that pedophilia is an increasingly prominent part of gay life and is condoned by gay leaders. For Michelle Malkin, writing in the right-wing Jewish World Review, the Dirkhising case is evidence of Eberstadt's thesis: "The defense of gay pedophilia has metastasized deep and far into the national conscience." This is ugly nonsense. There's no credible evidence that gay culture is more accepting of pedophilia than it was, say, 20 or 100 years ago. On the contrary, while pedophilia has always been a vile undercurrent in some gay circles (as in some straight circles), the vast majority of homosexuals are rightly horrified by the sexual abuse of children. But, difficult as it may be to admit, some of the gay-baiting right's argument about media bias holds up. Consider the following statistics. In the month after Shepard's murder, Nexis recorded 3,007 stories about his death. In the month after Dirkhising's murder, Nexis recorded 46 stories about his. In all of last year, only one article about Dirkhising appeared in a major mainstream newspaper, The Boston Globe. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ignored the incident completely. In the same period, The New York Times published 45 stories about Shepard, and The Washington Post published 28. This discrepancy isn't just real. It's staggering. In The Washington Post, a news editor argued that the paper covers only crimes that are local, inflame local opinion, or have national policy implications. The Shepard story was news in a way the Dirkhising story wasn't because it "prompted debate on hate crimes and the degree to which there is still intolerance of gay people in this country. It was much more than a murder story for us." But wasn't the media's instant blanket coverage part of the reason for the debate? If the Dirkhising murder had been covered instantly with the same attention to gruesome detail, wouldn't it, too, have prompted a national conversation? You might argue that the Shepard murder was a trend story, highlighting the prevalence of anti-gay hate crimes. But murders like Shepard's are extremely rare. In 1997, a relatively typical recent year, the FBI identified a total of eight hate-crime murders in the United States. The number that were gay-specific was even smaller. Most years, two or three occur at most. How common is a rape-murder like that of Dirkhising? In 1999 there were 46 rape-murders nationwide. If you focus not on the rape-murder aspect but on the fact that Jesse was a child, there were 1,449 murders of minors. There are no reliable statistics on how many of these murders were committed by homosexuals, but let's generously say 5 percent. That's a paltry 72 cases. In other words, the murders of Shepard and Dirkhising are both extremely rare, and neither says much that can be generalized to the wider world. So why the obsession with Shepard and the indifference with regard to Dirkhising? The answer is politics. The Shepard case was hyped for political reasons: to build support for inclusion of homosexuals in a federal hate-crimes law. The Dirkhising case was ignored for political reasons: squeamishness about reporting a story that could feed anti-gay prejudice, and the lack of any pending interest-group legislation to hang a story on. The same politics lies behind the media's tendency to extensively cover white "hate crimes" against blacks while ignoring black "non-hate crimes" against whites. What we are seeing, I fear, is a logical consequence of the culture that hate-crimes rhetoric promotes. Some deaths--if they affect a politically protected class--are worth more than others. Other deaths, those that do not fit a politically correct profile, are left to oblivion. The leading gay rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign--which has raised oodles of cash exploiting the horror of Shepard's murder--has said nothing whatsoever about the Dirkhising case. For the HRC, the murder of Jesse Dirkhising is off-message. Worse, there's a touch of embarrassment among some gays about the case, as if the actions of this depraved couple had some connection to the rest of gay America. Don't these squeamish people realize that, by helping to hush this up, they seem to confirm homophobic suspicions that this murder actually is typical of gays? The irony is deepened by the fact that Jesse may well have been gay himself. He trusted his gay neighbors; he worked with one of them at a hair salon; his mother let him stay at his neighbors' place on weekends; it's even conceivable that at the beginning he went along with some part of their sexual game, as defense lawyers have argued. But he was also a child, in no position to consent to anything of this nature--a child who needed the support of his elders, not their monstrous betrayal. It's difficult for me to fully express my fury at this kind of behavior. For a young, impressionable boy like this to be used for sick sexual predation is an outrage to any homosexual who remembers being young or who has ever seen the need for guidance and support of a young gay soul. That some gay activists seem not to have experienced the same punch in the solar plexus that they felt when they heard of Shepard's murder is a sign of the moral damage that identity politics has already done. It has inured us to simple matters of good and evil. All that matters now, it seems, is us and them. This article was found on THE NEW REPUBLIC website. |
THE FOLLOWING EDITORIALS WERE WRITTEN BY ANDREW SULLIVAN Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at THE NEW REPUBLIC and also has his own editorial site at www.andrewsullivan.com |
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