The Urge To Kill

Mubarak Dahir

Are bashers killing the gay part of themselves when they attack gay men?

On the evening of July 3, Arthur "J.R." Warren decided to drop in on some friends in his hometown of Grant Town, W. Va. He wasn't seen alive again. Authorities say Warren, a gay 26-year-old African-American with a learning disability, got into an argument with his friends, two teenage Cousins. The boys, David Parker and Jared Wilson, kicked Warren With steel-toed shoes, officials say. Although bloodied, Warren was still alive. The boys then reportedly put him into their Camaro, where Warren climbed over the backseat and asked to be taken home. The cousins are accused of instead attempting to cover up the beating by throwing Warren out of the car and then driving the car over his body four times, Only a frightened 15-year-old boy's eyewitness account kept police from calling the incident a hit-and-run accident.

What prompted a crime of such brutality among friends? According to court documents, Parker argued with Warren over "a rumor that had circulated." The rumor, according to press reports, was Warren's claim that he had had a sexual relationship with one or both of the boys. His death appears to be their attempt to silence him about it.

Warren's death is hardly the only attack in which suspects or convicted killers were reported to have had some kind of gay history. This has been the case in many of the well-publicized assaults on gay men in the past several years. Also, the violence of antigay attacks--which far outstrips the brutality of other bias crimes--shows just how personal the motivation is for such crimes. Bashers are not only trying to kill the victim; they are, in some sense, trying to kill their own gay side and reassure themselves and their friends about their own masculinity. The attempt to destroy in others the homosexuality they see and despise in themselves has been dubbed "projective identification" by psychologists.

"The level of hatred these men have for themselves can be staggering," says Arthur Ciaramicoli, a clinical psychologist on faculty at Harvard Medical School. "They take what they don't want to see and can't accept in their own self-image and project it onto someone else. Then they can hate it because they've divorced it from who they are. Essentially, they're beating out in others what they are scared of in themselves."

Indeed, in a number of the most recent high-profile attacks, there has been an underlying gay connection in the suspect's life. Often these facts emerge after the first crush of media attention and thereby go unnoticed. For example, attorneys for Aaron McKinney, one of two men to plead guilty in the death of Matthew Shepard, argued

Trying to bury the past?

Shepard's killer, Aaron McKinney, was upset about a consensual encounter with a cousin; Schmitz may have slept with Amedure, during his trial that their client had been left angry and confused by a consensual sexual experience with a male cousin. There are several other assaults in which the accused assailant's own gay past has been revealed.

* Pvt. Justin Fisher goaded Pvt. Calvin Glover to take a bat to Pfc. Barry Winchell's skull as he lay sleeping in a cot. Earlier in their friendship Fisher had fondled Winchell's feet, and it was Fisher who initially took Winchell to the Connection, Nashville's largest gay bar. It was a place Fisher repeatedly frequented, flirting and making out with drag queens.

* In Alabama, 26-year-old skinhead Steve Mullins was convicted of killing Billy Jack Gaither. During the trial of Mullins's codefendant, Charles Butler Jr., witnesses testified that Mullins had previously engaged in sex with other men.

* In the notorious Jenny Jones case, Jonathan Schmitz was convicted of having killed Scott Amedure days after Amedure admitted during a taping of Jones's show that he had a crush on Schmitz. However, Amedure's mother said her son told her after the taping that he had had sex with Schmitz.

* Matthew Williams, who is accused with his brother Tyler of killing a gay couple in their home near Redding, Calif., last year, had an intense--but platonic--romance with a man who subsequently came out as gay.

Ironically enough, the idea that the violence of gay bashers may be the result of emotional turmoil has been a key part of their legal strategies. The so-called "gay panic" defense argues that the attacker was justified in turning to violence because of a sexual advance made by the victim. That the reaction is far out of proportion to any rational response underscores the basher's own discomfort and insecurity regarding gay sexuality.

But sometimes there is no prior sexual link between victim and perpetrator. In those instances the catalyst for the attack seems even harder to find.

Many men feel conflicted about sexual desires they have for other men, says Jack Levin, a criminologist who is director of Northeastern University's Brudnick Center on Violence and author of the book Hate Crimes. Yet most men struggling with their feelings of homosexuality do not respond with violence against gays. Someone who does, says Levin, "is a person for whom the idea of his own sexuality is so unacceptable that the mere presence of a gay person is threatening." To this type of person, he says, the thought of his sexual desires "is an overwhelming threat to his masculinity and self-image."

Such an individual, agrees Ciaramicoli, "is in the extreme situation where his sense of self cannot exist under those conditions. He feels homosexual feelings mean he cannot be loved, tolerated, or accepted in his world."

Those who lash out in violence as a result of projective identification, says Ciaramicoli, tend to share several psychological traits. First, perpetrators are uniformly men and are very young, most often in their teens or 20s. "That's when anxiety about masculinity is at the forefront," he says. Bashers are also likely to come from environments in which they "are taught to idealize aggression and violence as power," says Ciaramicoli, most commonly from "an aggressive father or other male figures."

One key component that distinguishes gay bashing from other hate crimes is that "it's not rooted in economic fears," says Levin. Trace the roots of racism and anti-Semitism, he says, and you will find economic motivation behind the hatred. "You can almost predict those who attack Jews or African-Americans or Latinos are those who are in--or feel they are in--direct economic competition and feel frightened and threatened by that. But gay bashers can come from any economic class."

Sheer brutality is another horrifyingly distinct characteristic of these crimes, adds Clarence Patton, director of public advocacy at the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. "Bias crimes committed against gays tend to be more physical than those committed against other targeted groups," says Patton, who says his organization is "not surprised when we discover cases where the perpetrators are tom by their own sexual issues."

There are even certain "red flags" that antiviolence experts have come to recognize as tip-offs that a case may carry a personal element, says Patton. Foremost among them is what is known as "overkill"--multiple stabbings, for example, or extreme mutilation of the victim's body, especially sex organs. Gaither not only had his throat cut; he was beaten with an ax handle and then set atop a pile of burning tires. Warren was run over four times. Winchell was attacked so viciously that his brains oozed out of his left ear.

Not everyone agrees with the theory of projective identification, arguing that it may not be self-hatred that motivates bashers but rather a more complicated mix of social factors, including fear of what peers think of them. Gregory Herek, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and an expert on hate crimes, warns that researchers are only beginning to understand antigay violence and come up with explanations for it. "It's too early for sweeping generalizations," he says. "Sexual identity is very complex and little understood."

In fact, says Herek, studies of attacks committed by two or more bashers "show these guys are not particularly antigay. Their motivation is often more to avoid social rejection by their group. So it's a mistake to assume all antigay violence is based on homophobia."

While Herek concurs that there "is clearly a pattern of some perpetrators having sexual encounters with men," he cautions against using any single theory to explain gay bashing. He believes social conditions may be just as responsible for stoking violence as projective identification.

"In American society, being `a man' is often a difficult undertaking. It's more defined by what you are not supposed to be than what you are supposed to be," he explains. "But one thing is clear: You're not supposed to be a sissy or a queer. That social pressure can have a huge impact on men who have sex with men and then bash gays. As much as what's going on inside his head, he may be trying to prove to other guys he's not a queer."

Armand Cerbone, former chairman of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Concerns of the American Psychological Association, agrees that one of the most important influences on gay bashers who exhibit gay tendencies is the powerful force of peer pressure: "You have to take both things into account--the environment of sexual orientation prejudice and an individual's personal demons." Young men struggling with their own sexuality "are particularly susceptible to peer pressure," he notes.

Whether it's personal hatred, social hatred, or a combination of both that leads these men to violence, "in some respects it's a rose by any other name," argues Cerbone. "It's that part of society that still has a deep-seated hatred for gays that teaches them their self-loathing."

Dahir has contributed to Time, The Industry Standard, and Redbook.

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