Hearing about the death of Stanley Waipouri has made me pretty upset. It seems quite likely now that he died at the hands of straight-but-not-so-straight men who sought to re-establish their heterosexuality through the ultimate act of killing a sexual deviant. At his funeral a friend recalled that he "had a thing for straight men", which could get him into trouble.
This is the most extreme form of compulsory heterosexuality that, I assure you, is particularly widespread in New Zealand. It ranges from the psychological oppression of the moralists, those that would attack you verbally, social isolation growing up and in school, the media, etc., to the more physical oppression of bullying, being beaten, shoved and tripped up in school hallways, chased down urban streets at night, and in the worst cases killed.
I remember how the only guy at my high school to come out, in 4th form, was abused and beaten and quickly forced to drop out. This was a lesson for me. I learnt not only to behave as if I were straight for fear of this abuse, but I also learnt, just like every straight boy at that school, to police other people's sexuality for instances of anything remotely deviant.
The story of Jeff Whittington, especially, was the first and most terrifying instance of violence against gays I remember, and taught me the risk of being gay in a straight society. He was murdered only a couple of km from where I am right now, in fact, on the 8th May 1999. Jeff, who apparently looked a bit too gay, was picked up by two guys at a local petrol station under the pretext of giving him a ride home. Instead, they drove him to a secluded area and proceeded to punch him and kick him in the head, stomping on his head at least once. They later went home and bragged that they had "fucked up a faggot and left him for dead" and that "the faggot was bleeding out of places I have never seen before". Jeff later died in hospital from brain swelling and perforations to his bowel. His attackers thought he was 20 (and thus it was OK?) but when they later learned he was only 14 years old they turned themselves in.
This is one of the more extreme cases, but I can think of at least five murders since that have been motivated by sexuality and literally hundreds of instances of unreported low-level violence that happens everyday. This is the violence of compulsory heterosexuality.
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The fact that Jeff was murdered in Inverlochy Place, literally metres away from 128, always gives me an erry feeling when I walk by Inverlochy Place and look down towards the art school.
The verbal abuse towards and about homosexuals seems never ending and I'm constantly hearing it about the streets. When in Nelson the other week I was biking through a city carpark and overheard a man and a woman's conversation go something like this:
Woman: "you can't do that just because he's gay."
Man (pushing a baby in a pram): I will, I'll fucking beat the shit out of him, fucking faggot."
I immediately turned my bike around and rode back towards them but had no idea what to say or do -so just continued cycling. Besides he seemed stronger than me, and being gay and what some might refer to as quite camp, he probably would have dealt to me too.
I remember when Jeff died, he was around my age, and I'd been at parties that he'd been at, although I never knew him as anything more than a face I'd see every now and then...was still fucking scary to think that that sort of thing could actually happen within the confines of my wider social scene - really confroned me with how fucked up our society must be.
The one more recently that really disturbed me was the murder of David McNee...the idea of a "homosexual panic" defence...jesus, where can you start on that?
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