A reader might assume the July 19 Newsweek cover story entitled “Young, Gay and Murdered” would bring much-needed attention to the tragic murder of Lawrence King, a 15-year-old openly gay student killed earlier this year by a classmate at his junior high school in Oxnard, Calif.
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Ramin Setoodeh spends most of his article marginalizing King, describing him not as a person but as a spectacle in homophobic, sensationalistic detail. He writes that King would “sometimes … paint his fingernails hot pink and dab glitter or white foundation on his cheeks,” and that once he showed up at school in “hot pink knee-length boots.” The focus on King’s wardrobe is a brazen suggestion that it should weigh heavily in the reader’s mind before any judgment is cast against the killer.
But Setoodeh goes further. He claims King’s biological mother was a drug user and that King was not fed regularly, adding that he was a shoplifter. Such facts, be they true or false, have no bearing on the killer’s motive, nor is Setoodeh interested in exploring that question. Instead, he gives a nod to bigots who will quickly seize on these allegations as “evidence” that non-heterosexuality is an abnormality stemming from family and social dysfunctions.
Setoodeh plays the blame-the-victim card to justify the violence against King, writing: “How do you protect legitimate, personal expression while preventing inappropriate, sometimes harmful, behavior? … [Larry’s] story sheds light on the difficulty of defining the limits of tolerance.”
The article also portrays King as an aggressive bully and a sexual harasser. “[H]e was a troubled child who flaunted his sexuality and wielded it like a weapon,” Setoodeh writes. The parallel between homosexuality and violent behavior suggested by this simile could not possibly be more offensive.
Variants of the anti-LGBT formulations in the Newsweek article are commonly used to promote all forms of bigotry. The capitalist media justifies the most vicious brutality of the oppressors by pointing to the most harmless of “offenses” of the oppressed—and it does not hesitate to fabricate such offenses as needed.
Police still insist the infamous beating of Rodney King by LAPD police officers—caught on videotape for the world to see—was the fault of Rodney King for “resisting arrest” while he lay face down on the ground. The brutal lynching of Black men has been justified with something as innocuous as whistling at white women.
Interestingly, Newsweek’s own readers draw similar analogies. One letter to the editor equates Newsweek’s article to how judges and lawyers historically denied justice to rape victims, instead blaming them for “dressing provocatively” and therefore bringing the sexual assault onto themselves.
In attempting to sway public opinion, bigots turn to innuendo. Racists like Lou Dobbs, as well as members of the Minuteman Project, attempt to legitimize discrimination and violence against Latino immigrants, first by mischaracterizing the root cause of social problems, then by stigmatizing the group in question.
Furthermore, the corporate media draws an equal sign between the oppressor and the oppressed, inventing specious terms such as “reverse discrimination” to justify ending funding for affirmative action or bilingual programs in schools. Such slander aims to protect the historical inequalities that oppressed sectors of the working class continue to experience today.
The LGBT community has organized itself for decades and won battles against homophobic school boards, politicians and others. Through these struggles, the community has won basic rights, such as the right for LGBT teachers simply to be able to teach in school.
The Newsweek article does not miss the chance to attack those gains. Setoodeh casts doubt on the motives of Joy Epstein, the openly gay assistant principal who King turned to for support. He unquestioningly repeats the rumors spread by the lawyer of King’s assailant, who characterizes Epstein as “a lesbian vice principal with a political agenda.”
Workers have nothing to gain from such bigotry, aimed at turning working people against each other. Exposing bigotry whenever it arises heightens working-class consciousness and focuses anger and frustration back onto the exploiting class, which profits from and perpetuates these false divisions.
