Queer Matters

By Angel Lemke

The first publicly “queer” thing I did was attend a candlelight vigil for Matt Shepard during those hours when the machines were still keeping him alive. I knew I was implicitly outing myself by going. I hadn’t yet been to a gay bar, hadn’t yet brought a girl home to meet my mom, didn’t even own anything with a rainbow on it. By being there, I knew I was saying to the world, this matters to me. And by the logic of homophobia, the deaths of queers only matter to other queers. Maybe their immediate family members, if they happened to be lucky in their birth.

But there were straight kids there, after all. And straight faculty. I particularly remember a stodgy theology professor who I would’ve never guessed was an ally. And what that moment told me was that the homophobic message was wrong. This didn’t matter because that kid was gay. This mattered because that kid was human.

Others have written about how Shepard’s race and class status and relative gender normativity made the problem of homophobic violence, momentarily, visible in ways that so many deaths before his had not. It mattered, too, we must now admit, because that kid was white. I think of Eminem’s statement on the Columbine shooting: “Middle America, now it’s a tragedy/Now it’s so sad to see/An upper class city/Havin’ this happen.” And of course, it is a tragedy. But neither case was anywhere near the isolated incidents they appeared to be in media reports. The tragedies themselves are compounded by our inability to see them as part of a larger system of oppression, the world’s apparent indifference to deaths like that of Angie Zapata, to take one recent example. Matt Shepard dies over and over again.

But in the years since that vigil I have had to believe that–however overlaid with race and class bullshit the media coverage might be–the visibility of both Shepard’s murder and Columbine prevented other tragedies from occurring in all those places that Middle Americans cannot seem to see, if only because, for a brief moment, the country stopped to say these kids and their suffering matter to us all. And for a few of us—queers and allies alike—that was enough to keep us going. It was enough to convince us of the message Dan Savage is now trying valiantly to get to these kids: It can get better.

I don’t know much about Tyler Clementi yet. (If Shepard’s case is any indication, we will soon know his life in excruciating detail, a posthumous interrogation.) I know the pictures I’ve been seeing remind me of the “clean-cut,” “all-American” (read: white) Matt. I know he was attending a relatively elite school and played an instrument not often favored by working-class folks. The media response is uncannily similar – the constant presence of that picture, the focus on his activities before and after, the waffling about how much blame we should put on his attackers. They even brought poor tireless Judy Shepard out to speak on a morning news show this morning.

It’s just short of twelve years since Matthew’s death. The fact that this country didn’t notice that it was still going on during that time infuriates me. Let’s not let that happen with Tyler. We’ve broken through the haze of American apathy for a split second. Let’s use it.

Let’s use it to say this: Matt matters. Tyler matters. Angie matters. To all of us. And not just for this news cycle, but until this story disappears from the earth.

Angel Lemke lives in Ohio where she is fighting the good fight.

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto