Time moves on. It has been one month since Lawrence King was murdered.The resolve of the world community to remember, and to act in remembrance of, this young life cut far too short, remains strong. Yesterday, Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education (GLSEN) network released a public service announcement in remembrance of Lawrence King: http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/news/record/2277.html.
The announcement calls on us to work to eradicate hate from our schools. It challenges us to make the murder of any child identified as gay in any school unthinkable.
GLSEN’s website links to rich resources for educators seeking to address school bullying, particularly of children identified as gender-inappropriate. Among these resources is an enlightening article providing new details of events preceding the murder of Lawrence King. Paul Pringle and Catherine Saillant’s “Taunts, Family Lives Emerging as Factors in Gay Teen’s Killing” (http://www.mercurynews.com/crime/ci_8512111) notes that Larry had been routinely tormented in school even before he identified himself to others as gay:
The anti-gay taunts and slurs that Larry endured from his male peers apparently had been constant, as routine for him as math lessons and recess bells. The stinging words were isolating. As friend Melissa Reza, 15, put it, Larry lived much of his life "toward the side ... he was always toward the side."
She and others recall that the name-calling had begun long before he told his small circle of confidants that he was gay, before problems at home made him a ward of the court and before he summoned the courage to further assert his sexual orientation by wearing makeup and girls' boots with his school uniform.
This information is important for “mainstream”
For that reason, it’s extremely important for the mainstream media, for parents, educators, and churches, to hear what Pringle and Saillant are reporting: Larry King was already being tormented even before he came out as a gay youngster. Larry turned to “flirting” in self-defense, as a way of countering the taunts. He was pushed by his tormentors to a point at which he sought to turn the tables by “flirting.”
It would be grotesque if this all-too-common story is dismissed as a tale of deserved punishment, as a morality narrative about how a gay boy who flirts with other boys gets his just desserts. Of course, given the heinousness of this crime, no one will make that text explicit. And it goes without saying that the fourteen-year old boy, Brandon McInerney, who shot Larry King deserves compassion. McInerney is, in many ways, himself a victim--of a disturbed family life; of a culture that links machismo to violence, and which suggests that the appropriate response to another male who exhibits "feminine" characteristics is violent assault.
To say this, however, is not to justify the subtextual gay-panic discourse already lurking in some media accounts of Lawrence King’s murder.
The churches, our schools, and the media, must honor Lawrence King’s memory by examining far more closely what actually goes on in our schools. The real narrative that must not be missed here is one of undeserved torment of countless youngsters identified as gay by their peers, who have nowhere to turn when this happens. The true story is a story of parents, school officials, and churches turning a blind eye to bullying of children deemed gender-inappropriate.
In behaving in this fashion, churches, schools, and the media become facilitators of violence, collaborators in hate. It is time for this collaboration to stop.
As an educator and theologian who was punished in the past year for citing GLSEN in a single meeting of faculty leaders in a church-based institution of higher learning, I call on all churches, all teachers, all schools, to think more carefully about what goes on in the lives of children taunted for being gay. I challenge the churches to make hate rhetoric and hateful actions premised on homophobic prejudice unthinkable.
I urge churches which sponsor schools that train teachers for American classrooms to address this serious social problem pro-actively, appropriately. In choosing faculty for your education programs, make a strong commitment to educating for diversity a key characteristic of the faculty you recruit. Do not aid and abet homophobia by turning a blind eye to instances of homophobic prejudice among your own faculty, among your administrators, among the church officials who sit on your boards.
Do not punish faculty and faculty leaders who call for open dialogue about the destructiveness of homophobic violence. Do not reward faculty who use homophobia to undermine or silence faculty leaders who try to promote such dialogue.
In behaving in this way, you undercut the social justice statements of the churches that sponsor your colleges and universities. In behaving in this way, you become part of the dynamic that issues in violence against gay youth. In behaving in this way, you make null and void statements such as the declaration of the United Methodist Social Principles, "We support efforts to stop violence and other forms of coercion against gays and lesbians."
No other American child needs to meet the fate of Lawrence King. We can stop this violence. It will not be stopped until we decide to make it unthinkable: the key to ending this violence is in our own hands. We simply have to commit ourselves to end it.
I don't imagine the families of either of these boys are exactly what the Family Values folks have in mind when they preach about the sanctity of the family. I would humbly suggest they spend more time on these examples of heterosexual families, and far less on gay families. But then I forget, the whole thing is really about THEIR families. Screw the rest.
ReplyDeleteColleen, you're right--the news report I cite in the posting indicates both boys came from exceptionally troubled homes. I agree with you that the religious right's rhetoric about family seldom touches on what really goes on in many American families. I often get the impression that, as long as the religious right and its supporters imagine things are okay with their own families, they couldn't care less about other families.
ReplyDeleteAll the more reason, I think, that schools and religious communities need to provide safe, healing, accepting, and positive educational environments for these children with disrupted family lives. If they don't get such support in those two institutions, I'm not sure WHERE they'll get it.