Boys Don't Cry: Gay Violence in America
Boys Don't Cry: Gay Violence in America
New Year's Eve 1993, in the dead-end town of Falls City, Nebraska, two men shot and stabbed Teena Brandon, a 21-year-old who, in defiance of the laws of biology, wanted desperately to live her life as a man. On October 6, 1998, two men smashed the head of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man, and left him tied to a deer fence outside Laramie, Wyoming. Both killings have become national causes célèbres. Teena Brandon's tale, already the subject of the harrowing documentary The Teena Brandon Story, has now been made into the remarkable film Boys Don't Cry, and a cinematic retelling of the short life of Matthew Shepard cannot be far behind.
With pollsters reporting that most Americans oppose discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, a sea change in just a generation, it is tempting to conclude that intolerance, let alone hate, is waning. But the ugly murders of Teena Brandon and Matthew Shepard reveal another territory—the psychological Wild West, its volatile landscape formed by impulse and passion, fearfulness, and rage. In the year since Matthew Shepard's death, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs has documented 31 gay-bashing murders, and the fact that these murders are often much more violent than the typical homicide is suggestive of the psychological stakes.
As the language of sexual deviance is replaced in public conversation by a rhetoric of rights, these brutal acts become the stuff of martyrdom and the wellspring of political action. Teena Brandon is literally the poster child for this movement: As the ad campaign for Boys Don't Cry contends, she was killed because she "dared to be herself." She and Matthew Shepard are exhibits A and B in the campaign, spearheaded by Shepard's mother and already successful in 21 states, to make a victim's sexual orientation, like race and religion, a reason for prosecution in hate crimes.
Yet real lives are always more complicated and cluttered with inconvenient truths than are morality plays, in which innocence and guilt are distinctly separate. To acknowledge such complexity is not to explain away the terrible deed, but to begin to make sense of it. Boys Don't Cry delivers just such a layered narrative. Its achievement is to pull us deep inside the lives of both victim and victimizer. In doing so, it gives us a political education that no morality play ever could....