The Queer Thing about School Shooters

http://www.republicoft.com/2007/04/25/the-queer-thing-about-school-shooters-pt-1/#more-833

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It started with web page about sexual orientation harassment in schools that made the following statement.



It wasn’t the anti-gay harassment that made me do a double take, so much as the number (more than half at the time this site was last updated) school shootings in which it was a factor. Some of the names I recognized, and remembered the shooting they were responsible for. The rest I found myself researching late into the night, long after I should have been in bed.

I didn’t know that Charles Andrew Williams, who killed two and wounded 13 when he opened fire at his California high school, was actually born here in Maryland. Nor did I know that he endured anti-gay harassment.

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perhaps even more important is simply the "teasing" part. Even in cases where the teasing was not specifically related to homosexuality (or the perception thereof in homophobic students), teasing has almost always occured before these things. In the most recent one, Cho Seung Hui endured years of teasing in elementary and junior high, mainly as a result of his shyness and accent.

Of course, none of this excuses homicide. Hell, if you weren't teased at some point in your younger years, it's probably becuase you were the asshole doing all the teasing. :P

One could just as easily, and just as truthfully, say that most of the shootings involved taunts of being being ignorant or having "bad blood" or living in a trailer down by the river. "You're a faggot" is, unfortunately, a very common schoolyard taunt.

I think the author and the people he cites is on the right path, that these shooters felt that they were perceived as not "masculine" enough, and that their crimes took the form they did to prove their attackers wrong, to show that they were "masculine" by targeting girls who had turned them down or boys who had called them the F word. The author even mentions that "masculinity" is a (paraphasing) construct, more than a reality.

I think he saw the point but didn't say it clearly enough. They were called "faggot" because that's a common taunt from bullies, who want to see themselves as "masculine," and to do so they try to define others as not masculine enough. Hence, words like "faggot," "sissy..." The taunts aren't based on the actual sexual preferences of the shooters, and the taunters don't really see the taunts that way, either. The taunts are meant to exclude their targets from the group, and the group is defined by "masculinity," for boys, and "desirability," often, for girls. These shooters felt that they were outside the group, and the way they got revenge, and at the same time proved to themselves (and in their minds, to others) that they really did belong, even more than the taunters, was by attacking and killing the people who excluded them.

My point, if it's interpretable from the dribble I just wrote, :) is that the whole concept of "masculinity" is artificial. It's just another arbitrary set of boundaries set up by people, or in many of these cases, kids, who need to feel they belong. Like race, like gender. People run out of ways to discriminate, and create more ways. When you read the letters between George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, for instance, you see a lot of hugging and kissing between males not worried about their masculinity. The current popular idea of masculinity is new, artificial, and not a stereotype many of the "manly" men in history would have fit. It's a creation for the purpose of discrimination.

This affects gay and lesbian rights, obviously. It also creates stereotypes of gays and lesbians. Gay men are so often portrayed as effiminate now that popular opinon equates the two. Someone will say "He's gay" because a man shows traits that don't fit the current ideas of masculine. I wonder how many men or women mistakenly think they are gay because they fit the modern "gay" stereotypes.

Ou culture draws too much identity from gender, and that creates stresses that sometimes have horrible results. Not usually of the type the article is talking about. Sometimes it is simply the horror of a person living a wrong lifestyle or seeking fulfilment in the wrong places. To me, that's a horrible horror, though.

Just rambling. Probably wrong, as always. :)

for one thing.

lol -- and now i can't remember what else i was going to say -- but this is a deep topic -- very close to the bone in a country like ours that REVELS in gay imagery in our mass media, sports and entertainment.

oh i know -- i was going to ramble on about how child predators enjoy the strict concepts of masculinity, femininty and social roles -- because they can hise so effectively there.

teasing, etc almost universally includes anti-gay content.

but I do think there is something to the notion that being taunted about being gay over and over again makes people lose it. I know middle school made me feel very low. Being called faggot to your face repeatedly takes both your manhood and name away. There is literally no excuse for shooting up schools but I will say but for the grace of God could have gone I. I likely would have offed myself instead but I had some horrid fantasies.