The Queer Thing About School Shooters, Pt. 1
Posted by: terrance in current events, education, gay rights, politicsIt may have been suggested by an earlier post, but every since the earliest school shootings were reported, I’ve been interested in the stories and people behind them; in particular, the shooters. Every time another one happens, I find myself pouring over articles about the latest shootings and past shootings. This time was no different. I now have a folder in my RSS reader for the VA Tech shootings, which is starting to fill up with articles and posts.
But a couple of nights ago, I came across something I hadn’t thought about until now. I’d written earlier about the anti-gay bullying and harassment I’d experienced in school, and how as result I identified to some degree with the anger the school shooters obviously felt and some expressed. But it wasn’t until I stumbled across a website that suggested I had more in common with these guys than I thought.
The Queer Thing About School Shooters, Pt. 2
Posted by: terrance in current events, education, gay rights, politicsAs I read, and wrote, all of the above, I kept going back to an essay by Michael Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia.” So I wasn’t surprised to see Kimmel quoted in an old Washington Blade article, “‘Boy Code’ a factor in fatal school shootings?”. Kimmel’s focus is perhaps too specific, as masculinity is just one of many factors in these stories, but his remarks resonate with every story above.
The perpetrators of random school shootings since 1982, all boys, were “overconformists” to the popular notion that being a “real man” means aggressively defending your manhood when it is challenged, such as through prolonged bullying, said Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
And no weapon is more emasculating, or brandished more frequently on schoolyards across the country, than the homophobic rhetoric used to describe anything that makes a young man different from his male peers, Kimmel wrote in a June 2003 article for the journal American Behavioral Scientist.
“We found a striking pattern [while analyzing news] stories about the boys who committed the violence: nearly all had stories of being constantly bullied, beat up, and ‘gay-baited,’” Kimmel wrote.
“And most strikingly, it was not because they were gay — at least there is no evidence to suggest that any of them were gay — but because they were different from the other boys: shy, bookish, honor students, artistic, musical, theatrical, non-athletic, ‘geekish,’ or weird,” he continued.
Instead of the standard review of “what went wrong” with individual school shooters, the media, government researchers and society at-large must understand the roles standards of masculinity play in facilitating violent outbreaks by young men, Kimmel said in an interview for this article.
Of course, the stories of boys like Harris, Klebold, and Woodham, get a lot more attention than a story like what happened to Josh Belluardo.
[This is the last of the series. See parts one and two for background.]
Not queer. Too queer. Not queer enough. It’s probably as maddening as it sounds, though in some ways I wouldn’t know this as well as the school shooters I’ve been writing about for the last couple of days. I’ve been queer. Too queer even, but never have I not been queer enough. That, in some ways, may be a saving grace that boys like the school shooters I’ve been writing about lack.
Returning to Kimmel’s essay for a moment, there’s a statement near the middle of it that came to mind when I started thinking about the triangulation that’s become the theme of this series of posts: not queer, too queer, and not queer enough.
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