Image Victimization of Gays Get
Little Attention in the Media

By William Butte

"Are you looking at me, you faggot? You know what I do to faggots? I break their necks!"

Melbourne Brunner heard this expression of irrationality, fear and hatred just moments before he was attacked by a stranger last month in front of a restaurant on Fort Lauderdale's toniest street. Brunner's partner had the temerity to say "Good morning" to the would-be assailant when they made eye-contact as he passed by their table.

But Brunner was lucky, so to speak. He survived the assault, since his assailant only used his fists, not a gun.

Across town, Simmie Williams Jr. wasn't as fortunate. The day before Brunner was attacked, the 17-year-old who favored the name Beyonce and was dressed as a woman, was shot and killed on a stretch of Sistrunk Boulevard known for transgender prostitution. Witnesses had heard an argument between Williams and two men that may have included anti-gay slurs.

That Fort Lauderdale's mayor hasn't said anything about either incident isn't surprising, since he still seems more passionately obsessed with men's rooms than Larry "Wide Stance" Craig.

But if you're surprised that these two incidents could happen on the supposedly über gay-friendly streets of Fort Lauderdale, perhaps it's because very few gay-related hate crimes receive mainstream media attention.

Ten years ago, the media's focus on the murder of Matthew Shepard made him an iconic symbol of hate crimes against the GLBT community, but since then, some equally shocking crimes have flown beneath the national media radar.

Ten days before Williams was killed, a 15-year-old boy, Lawrence King, was shot in the back of the head in his eighth-grade junior high school classroom in Oxnard, Calif., by a 14-year-old classmate. While he had been taunted throughout the year in every class as a "faggot," most of his teachers ignored the ongoing abuse.

Inexplicably, this horrific, tragic story has yet to receive the national media attention it deserves. If it had, perhaps the public would be less susceptible to the claims that an organization such as GLSEN wants to enter the public schools to "indoctrinate children into the homosexual lifestyle." Perhaps more people would realize instead that GLSEN wants to educate administrators and teachers that ignoring their students' homophobia can have deadly consequences.

Students at several school shootings — including Columbine, for example — admitted they'd taunted their killer classmates as gay, though this was rarely mentioned by mainstream media.

If the media paid more attention to King's murder and the homophobia behavior that permeates our public schools, perhaps there'd be a public outcry here in the Sunshine State against the Legislature's removal from the proposed Safe School bill language that addresses harassment of GLBT students.

Off-campus, gay-related hate crimes continue to pollute our society, yet go almost unseen by national media. One year ago in Polk County, 25-year-old Ryan Skipper was abducted and stabbed 20 times before he died; 19-year-old Steen Keith Fenrich of New York was murdered by his stepfather, who wrote an anti-gay, racist slur on his skull; and 3-year-old Ronnie Paris of Tampa died of child abuse at the hands of a father who feared his baby might become gay.

If the same level of attention given to Shepard's murder were given to these and all the gay-related hate crimes that have occurred since, our society might be shocked and perhaps outraged that Congress hasn't passed a GLBT-inclusive hate crimes bill.

And perhaps even more Americans would be repulsed by Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern's recent remark that homosexuality poses a bigger threat to the United States than terrorism.

Speaking about Lawrence King's murder on her TV show, Ellen DeGeneres said, "…when the message out there is so horrible that to be gay you can be killed for it, we need to change the message."

But that will only happen when the violent deaths of people killed for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender receive the same national media attention as the rants of the homophobic.

William Butte is a commentator on issues affecting the GLBT community. His column appears the third Friday of each month. E-mail him at wmbutte@bellsouth.net.