It looks like femiphobia, “man’s fear of becoming a woman,” exacerbated the homophobic hate in the story of those nine young men who lured a gay man to a party that was instead a night of torture that NYC police call the worst antigay attack in recent memory. From the NYTimes follow-up:
Mr. Mendez, who the police said was the ringleader and was known by the street name “Cheto,” lived several miles away from the crime scene, in Bedford Park. Neighbors on his block, marred by graffiti and the scene of open drug markets, said that he had a crew of younger friends who were often with him but that he spent most of his time elsewhere. “He tried to look gangster,” Mr. Perez said. “He walked around like he was one of the neighborhood thugs.”
Several other suspects lived in the blocks surrounding Osborne Place, near the man known as “la Reina,” who worked at an optometrist’s store in the Parkchester section. Every day, he stopped by El Tio grocery, the bodega on the ground floor of his building, for juices, sandwiches and small talk, according to the manager, Xavier Peña. “He was a good friend,” Mr. Peña said. “He’s a very, very nice guy. He called me Papi, Papi.”
Many in the neighborhood used female pronouns to refer to the man, though they said he dressed in men’s clothes. “She’s gay, she’s like a woman, we think of her like a woman,” explained one neighbor, speaking on the condition that he not be named for fear of reprisals.
Another factor, of course, is the hard-core culture of crime and violence that pervades many poverty-stricken communities. We seem content to address that problem not through any substantive means of lifting people out of poverty and bringing them into the broader cultural fold. Rather, we count on the control a course and equally violent criminal justice and prison system.
Commenting on a different case of hateful consequences, Feminist Law Professors’ Katherine Franke suggests we reflect some on the impulse to turn only to criminal law and punishment. Franke points to the work of Seattle Law professor Dean Spade:
In the context of mass imprisonment and rapid prison growth targeting traditionally oppressed groups, what does it mean to use criminal punishment enhancing laws to purportedly address oppression? … Hate crimes laws strengthen and legitimize the criminal punishment system, a system that targets the very people that these laws are supposedly passed to protect … By naming that system as the answer to the significant problem of violence against trans [and lgb] people, we participate in the logic that the criminal punishment system produces safety despite the fact that the evidence suggests that it primarily produces violence … A new mandate to punish trans [and homo]phobes is added to the arsenal of justifications for a system that primarily locks up and destroys the lives of poor people, people of color, people with disabilities, and immigrants, and that uses gender-based sexual violence as one of its daily tools of discipline.
There’s no question those nine men who called themselves the Latin King Goonies deserve to be punished for their heinous acts. But that’s not the end of the story. It can’t be until we begin to look at our role in creating the hate in the monsters who live among us.