Articles

Tuesday 18 November 2014

How I murdered Matthew Shepard. Bauer. Gscene Magazine. December 2014


How I murdered Matthew Shepard


Here I am reading about the furor surrounding the ‘investigative journalist, TV producer and authority figure’, Stephen Jimenez, who has spent ten years interviewing people about the crucifixion of 21 year old Matthew Shepard. Spending all that time seemingly trying to prove that it even though Matthew was gay, he was not killed because of it.

Some coincidence, because last week, two young men - obviously gay because they were singing songs from Wicked on the back of a Manchester tram - were followed by fifteen thugs and beaten to a pulp. Had they been singing football songs they may have been spared - show tunes apparently a good gay reason to beat the crap out of someone. This follows a litany of supposed liberal-left bashing beginning with my broadcasting associate, Bill Maher. Gosh, the US neo-communists and UK terrafeminists are so frigging tetchy.

Matthew Shepard - who’s memory Obama signed the 2009 Matthew Shepard anti-hate Act for; Matthew Shepard whose legacy is about hate crime irrespective of gender; Matthew Shepard, who up until the recent publication of Stephen Jimenez’s, The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard, was the poster boy for homo hatred, having been both gay and crucified. This same book ‘uncovered’ that one of his executors was gay and there was, shock, drugs involved on all sides. (See how evil these male homos really are? Drugs!) That Matthew Shepard was from an affluent family, (he had it so good - what’s he doing sucking dodgy chode?) He was apparently gang raped by men in Morocco (not a potential for all gay men by virtue of the way some of us have sex?). And the beat goes on…
Coinky-dinky, this week I’m off to see Party Monster and the new documentary which highlights the life and the release from prison of gay male gay murderer Michael Alig, the original club kid, who killed his lover and drug dealer Angel Melendez in 1996. A ketamine death. A gay, male, sex drug, death. Tut tut.
But maybe it’s our lives as outsiders that are to blame - and I stand alongside my gay, male, murdering brothers here. Don’t forget that everyone’s equal in the sauna – so, whether Matthew Shepard was rich or whether he courted dangerous gay men or whether he took drugs is therefore not in question. It’s moot.
Just maybe it’s because he grew up gay, not male, that made him buy all the drugs in the first place and hang out with the degenerate low-lifers - and those degenerates with him. Perhaps, just perhaps, he had a crap life irrespective of the privilege - because he was gay. Maybe, it was his life as a gay man that lead to his murder by another gay man. Maybe it was Matthew’s closet life in Saudi and the lonely journey many gay men seem to have that lead to his execution. Because this is what both Matthew Shepard and Angel Melendez actually represent whether they had been executed by their assailants or by Aileen Wuornos (as tricks), Myra Hindley (as children) Karla Homolka (“It was my husband who killed my sister”) Rosemary West (“It was all my husband’s doing”) Mary Bell (But I’m still a child myself) Ruth Ellis (he deserved to die because he didn’t love me). Margaret Thatcher (Murderer of hope, perfectly placed to add more women to her cabinet…)
The mystery remains. Can women and homosexual men be as cruel and evil as heterosexual homophobic racist misogynists? Interesting? You decide. You can see with all the evidence above that we’re all somehow culpable…
I’m both Matthew and his murderer. Live with it.

Perhaps, just perhaps, given the permanent lack of acceptance of male homosexuality, Matthews death was the result of enduring drug use? Tsk - of course it was. Drugs are and have been a way of coping with the shackles of life sometimes before you even get a chance to live it. Matthew had that crucifix on his back the moment he knew he was gay. To reduce this tragedy into gender blame is an execution in itself.
This book and subsequent ‘free’ comment, states a plethora of terrible accusations that so many of my fellow gay travellers live with and refuse to deny. First that Gay men take significant sexual risks – yes to that. It states that Matthew was HIV+ at the time of his death. (Is this really still used as a hate salvo about gay men’s sexual practice?) OK, so he was a drug fuelled, disparate, HiFIve queer who courted danger. Yes, but there was apparently a shipment of Crystal Meth that the murderers wanted to steal from Matthew. Hang on, so, a drug fuelled, 21 year old, desperate HIV+, drug dealer supporting his habit? I’m sorry, this sounds like a place that so many of my gay brothers are, or have been in, at some point. This goes with the very fabric of many gay mens lives. Apparently, according to Jimenez, “This does not make the perfect poster boy for the gay-rights movement.” Oh, I think it does, Stevie.

All of this is the apparently justifiable reason why Matthew died. Because of his life as a gay man. Because of the trajectory so many gay men take during their sometimes shitty time on this planet. The price of being removed from the male and female heteronorm.

These lives (my life) according to some haters - both male and female, are good enough reason not to support advocating services for the protection of young gay men. Like not giving money to Band Aid because you’ve just found out that not every child in Africa is starving. Or perhaps that every recently dead Palestinian baby is, by definition, a dead jihadist.


I’m both Matthew and his murderer. Live with it.



Tuesday 4 November 2014

How Downton Abbey shat on Social Reform. Bauer. Gscene magazine. November. 2014



Middle class Downtime  

I’ve managed to avoid most of that vile revisionist nonsense known as Downton Abbey. I mean – it isn’t even a proper Abbey and not really a stately home either. It’s not even a Television series - it’s been labeled as a soap with no hope. What it really is, is an exercise in lemon scented class driven romanticism, centered around the well- heeled Etonian canon-fodder stompers somewhere between World War One and the Abdication.

The carefully chosen narratives romanticize the working class as never before - I’m thinking Her Benny on diazepam here. Inadvertently, the writers remind us of the halcyon times when those awful suburbs hadn’t yet been invented – the ones that housed the gauche middle classes and their misplaced social views. Hurrah for the then halcyon period of English drama before social reform stole the hearts and drives of the subservient working class. Poor people dying and suffering had BIG currency up to this point - go read some Dickens - the finest literature before that awful Marxist ideology crept in …

Back then, the arrogant rich thought that they would never topple. The poor scumbags (my ancestors) had no intention of going anyplace in the foreseeable future - they’d been wedged up that same chimney of abject poverty since time began. Hell, the rich and the poor ‘got along’ back then according to all the revisionism - and ‘everyone knew their place’. A mythical marriage made in history.

But the invention of the middle class also gave way to a completely stand-alone brand of bitterness. They were desperate to be caring towards the poor and socially mobile, when all the time they knew that they could not be both. Of course they claimed they were Fabians and Socialists and the rest, but they would have loved to have a go on a real crown. Because the middle classes could not mobilise themselves upwards (they would have to marry into the aristocracy) they assisted the poor to spite the rich. They did this by rushing social reform through the house right under the noses of the Edwardian Lords who were still smarting from the prolapsed empire as it gradually slipped away. 

Today there is a feeling that the middle classes themselves are ebbing away. All those values and three story terraces on nicer streets are finally falling into disrepair. They've all over-extended themselves, and now all those tenured lectureships and socialworking posts are being offered to part timers who’ll do it up the back alley for a Mars bar and zilch pension rights.  In a way I’ll be so glad when they are once again extinct and the poor can just live out our Downton Abbey avatars and doff our caps at the squire all over again.

Downdraws Abbey skillfully reminds us that we (the born poor) used to know our place in the world. And we were once damn grateful to be around those baronial types in their palaces. Although, occasionally, a pikey would be asked for one’s opinion, but only when it could be used as some sort of reference tool or barometer for something grander, something to be considered then tossed aside as the feeling arose.

I wish the recently departed Debbo’ Mitford-Devonshire would have figured in the stream of things.  I would have loved to see Downton Abbey full of English Fascists and Blackshirts - taking high tea with Dowager countess of Grantham. With Grantham later to become Margaret Thatcher’s stomping ground. (nice heads-up there, Downton.) 

Of course today, Downton Abbey the building, would be an international business centre populated by the very ancestors of the same industrial capitalists - but this time as paying guests. It is to this class that the then middle classes migrated. A place where an economic slump has the same ring as losing a colony. Leaving only - yes the lower and the upper classes. With the monarch on the top of the pile and everyone below cow-towing upwards with their values as buffers of social consciousness, never again will they promise the poor things like education, health care; and culture.
 
Of course, the other side of the pond LOVES Downton. America responds to the feeling of something that is forbidden within a capitalist society. The feeling of entitlement and history they never had until they threw out the British. It’s a good way to imagine the whole race thing away for white American precolonialists. But they seem to love the curtseying and preening and references to the monarch. Perhaps they realise that within Downton, that their nation would soon take over the new world order and, for a while, kill off the arrogance of royal entitlement - only to reapply it on its own terms later in the century with government ‘agencies’.

The romanticism of this Edwardian system knows no bounds. Don’t forget, it was also a time when all those Harrovian/Sandhurstian/chinless nincompoops went over to Northern France - as clueless as everyone else as to what the First World War actually entailed. Once there, they endlessly sent lines of regional Tommies over the trench wall because they knew of nothing else to do. Had they been better prepared for a modern war, these chaps would have come up with a more effective way of protecting themselves and their class – something they are adept at only with the right preparation.



 Published version HERE