Openly Straight?

A 21 year old college student was brutally murdered by two heterosexual men. The men both lived an openly straight life in a small town in Wyoming. Each had an opposite-sex partner. They met their victim in a known straight bar. Both of the accused hid their heterosexual orientation and passed as homosexuals on the night of the attack. The defendants may seek to employ the heterosexual panic defense, by claiming they reacted with violence and fear because the victim allegedly flirted with one of them. It is unclear how flirtation justifies murder, as heterosexual and homosexual women have survived the advances of heterosexual men for centuries without resorting to violence.

Now there is a news story you will never read. In the paragraph above, the language usually used to describe homosexuals is applied to heterosexuals, and it reads pretty awkwardly. Yet the use of words and phrases, like "openly gay" and "homosexual panic defense" are routinely used and no one seems to notice that they perpetuate homophobia. What is clear is that these phrases identify the other, the one who society has chosen to brand as different. That brand of other means any word or action on the part of the minority toward the majority, including flirting, can have deadly consequences. And it means that the ones in the majority can feel justified in whatever they do against the other, including using someone's actions as a legal defense for killing them

What does "openly gay" mean and why don't we also use "openly straight"? Straight is the socially accepted norm, and in a society that has to clearly demarcate what is right and what is wrong, which cannot seem to tolerate having many things be simultaneously right, these labels mark territory. Anything deviating from that norm has to be explained and identified, so that the danger to the status quo is clear.

Straight men and women require no labelling of being openly straight, whereas a man or woman who has the temerity to love someone of their same gender requires special explanation. Women who have sex with men do not have a special label. Women who have sex with other women need to be identified separately as lesbian. Conversely, there are men, and then there are gay men.

If you are a straight man in a right-and-wrong culture, and heterosexuality is considered the normal and natural state of sexual relations, then the prospect of some man flirting with you becomes a threat to your sexual identity. If sex between men makes men different, queer, abnormal, then receiving attention from a gay man could be construed by the paranoid as a threat to straight masculinity.

The so-called homosexual panic defense is a sham. It is also misnamed, and should be the "heteroseuxal panic defense" as it is heterosexuals who panic and use it as their excuse for harming homosexual men and women. And if improper flirting was grounds for murder, the morgues of the world would be overflowing with straight men.

Straight men have been sexually harassing women for centuries, under the guise of flirtation, and women do not react with violence. From cat calls to being groped, to sexual assault, women have survived straight men's crude advances. Yet let a straight man even think another man is looking at him funny, and homophobia breaks out like the plague that it is. What will the guys think? Will they believe I did something to invite this kind of attention? For some straight men, the only way out is to hurt someone.

The thing is, we have only the word of the accused killers that Matthew Shepard flirted with them. It is far more likely that Matthew Shepard did nothing but exist, as a gay man, in their presence. In our homophobic culture, that is enough to get someone killed.