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From: manis@ubc-cs.UUCP (Vince Manis)
Newsgroups: net.motss
Subject: Re: Turning the other cheek
Message-ID: <125@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 12-Dec-85 21:53:25 EST
Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.125
Posted: Thu Dec 12 21:53:25 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Dec-85 22:30:57 EST
References: <116@ubc-cs.UUCP> <286@Navajo.ARPA>
Reply-To: manis@ubc-cs.UUCP (Vince Manis)
Distribution: net
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science
Lines: 47
Summary: 

In article <286@Navajo.ARPA> reuling@Navajo.UUCP (John Reuling) writes,
in response to a posting of mine regarding the conviction of five teenagers
who murdered a gay man in Toronto,

>Lordy!  The poor guy who happenned to be in the wrong place at the wrong
>time is DEAD, and you're feeling sorry about his murderers who will 
>probably be out on parole in a few years for good behavior?!
>
>It sounds to me as if you think 'homophobia' is some separate 'entity'
>that CAUSES otherwise normal people to do terrible things.  But it
>wasn't homophobia that killed that man in Toronto.  It was five drunk
>teenagers who did it.  Five PEOPLE.  Five PEOPLE who should be held
>accountable for their actions.

No, I was attempting to state the exact opposite. I'm not minimising the
seriousness of their crime, or suggesting that they don't deserve a long
prison sentence. The point I was making was that they are as much their
own victims as Mr Zeller, the man they murdered. In a society in which 
gay people are constantly devalued, young people with no apparent 
homophobic attitudes are nonetheless constantly inundated with anti-gay
slurs and innuendos. In some sense it isn't surprising that under the
influence of alcohol some of the surface tolerance scrapes off, exposing
the bigotry beneath. What's surprising is that it doesn't happen more
often.

So we have to look for causes. Are these five youths responsible? You bet.
They brutally beat a man to death. But what possessed them to think, 
even in a drunken stupor, that beating up a faggot was ok? You have to look
at their social context, at the attitudes of their peer group, and at the
homophobic content of much of the mass media, to realise that they simply
acted out what others only talked about.

So I'm sorry for them, because their lives will be (to some extent at least)
blighted by their behaviour. Perhaps if these teenagers had realised what
their evening's entertainment was going to do to them over the next decade,
Mr Zeller might still be alive today, and perhaps none of them would be
going to prison. 

That doesn't mean they shouldn't be punished, but only that we aren't going
to stop queerbashing by arresting queerbashers (EVEN THOUGH WE MUST CONTINUE
TO ARREST, TRY, AND IMPRISON PEOPLE GUILTY OF QUEERBASHING). The only
genuine way to stop queerbashing is to make everyone aware of what it does
to *him*, in that he is going to go to prison for a long time. [I use the
masculine pronoun because very few women are queerbashers.] 

Final (moralistic) note: you can be very sorry for someone, even as you are
punishing him/her.