More A Way Of Life… Look, this is just between you and me

Thirteen Years On

(This started out in my mind as quite focused, but became less so as I wrote it.  Apologies for any lack of coherence.)

Thirteen years ago today, Matthew Shepard was lured to a remote rural spot, tied to a fence, tortured and left for dead.  When he was found unconscious the next day the person who found him initially thought he was a scarecrow.  He died in hospital without regaining consciousness five days later.  His murderers each received two life sentences, one having made a deal against the other to avoid the death penalty.  Their girlfriends testified at their trial that they had set out to target a gay man, which Matthew was.

Matthew Shepard's murder is seen by many as a defining moment in the long history of anti-LGBT violence.  It shocked his own community of Laramie, Wyoming, and galvanised the wider American gay world to address the problem of hate crimes as they affected LGBT people.  As a consequence of the Shepard murder President Clinton attempted to add crimes targeting the community (as well as those against people with disabilities and women) to existing hate crimes legislation but was defeated in Congress.  The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act as the legislation was finally called, eventually became law in 2009 and encompassed sexual orientation, gender identity (actual or perceived) and disability to the hate crimes designation.

I'm not planning on debating the thorny topic of hate crimes legislation, but I do feel like discussing the wider subject of plain old hate.  Last month 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer committed suicide after a relentless campaign of bullying by his schoolmates, the latest in a depressingly long list of queer teens who've seen no way out of their despair but to end their lives.  The It Gets Better Project is doing an amazing job in getting the message out that there can be a better solution, but clearly the hill to climb is huge.  And the fact is that following his death those schoolmates who bullied Jamey ended up chanting that he was better off dead at a homecoming dance.  To my mind that goes somewhere past a bullying mentality and into the realms of ingrained hatred.  Among schoolchildren in 2011... which puts all the progress it sometimes feels we've made and are making into context.

It's hard to put into words how directly I sometimes feel this indirect, unfocused hatred.  I see politicians like those who want to be the next Republican President of the US lining up to burnish their anti-gay credentials by signing vicious pledges to prevent our relationships being legally recognised, (and standing silently while the audience at one of their 'debates' booed a gay American soldier), I hear the leaders of groups like the American Family Association and the Family Research Council, treated as respectable commentators in the media,  spewing hatred against me and people like me without ever meeting me or knowing anything about me.  The leader of the FRC, for example, maintains that there's no correlation between anti-gay bullying and gay teen depression and suicide - in his twisted mind it's because LGBT kids know that there's 'something wrong with them' that causes them to kill themselves.  (And note that those groups also on principle tend to hate non-Christians, Native Americans, non-white Americans and generally anyone not exactly like them - equal opportunity bigots, basically.)

On this side of the Atlantic this week, in a move I'll happily give him credit for, David Cameron announced that he supports gay marriage, not in spite of being a Conservative, but because he's a Conservative.  From the leader of a party which inflicted Section 28 on this country barely more than twenty years ago, this is huge, and taken in isolation could be seen as a very positive sign.  But of course there was the inevitable religious backlash (against an updating of a civil status - I see no point on which they have room to comment), and it's in the context of an increase in anti-LGBT (especially T) crime in the UK.  So I can be relatively sure that David Cameron wouldn't want to kick my head in just for existing, but I can't say the same of everyone I encounter in the street.

I tend to count myself as lucky - I've only ever been on the receiving end of actual or threatened violence three times because of my sexuality.  I've been on the receiving end of personal verbal attacks more times than I can count, and of indirect ones (every time I read the outpourings of the more extreme homophobes) even more frequently.  But hate crime laws and an inch-by-inch more theoretically progressive society just don't ever quite rid me of the expectation that at some point I'll be on the receiving end of some form of anti-gay hatred again.