WHEN TWO STRAIGHT MEN in Laramie, Wyo., singled out for violence a young gay man in October 1998, the resulting murder made national headlines for weeks. The words "Matthew Shepard" became synonymous for "hate victim" and his murder the inevitable product of a homophobic culture.
When two gay men in Bentonville, Ark., singled out a 13-year-old in September 1999 for violent sex play, the resulting murder made local headlines and a glimmer of national coverage. But "Jesse Dirkhising" isn't synonymous for anything, except in conservative circles.
Among the right wing, "Jesse Dirkhising" stands for two battle cries: the double standard practiced within the "liberal media" and, at a more subtle level, deviant gay sexual culture and its violent consequence.
It's a little too easy to dismiss the media double standard by pointing out the obvious differences in the killing of Matthew Shepard and the killing of Jesse Dirkhising.
The national media fixated on the Shepard murder because the evidence suggested that the two perpetrators were motivated by anti-gay hate. Instead of stealing the pocket change in Shepard's wallet, they pummeled him with a pistol and left him to die, tied to a fence post.
Beyond the sheer brutality of the crime and the "group prejudice" that played a role in it, the resulting cries for hate crime legislation, in Wyoming and elsewhere, were legitimate news stories.
The Dirkhising killing no doubt matches the Shepard murder in brutality and ugliness. He was a teenager far too young to consent to any sort of sexual encounter; he was heavily drugged, his own underwear placed in his mouth and held in place by duct tape, and repeatedly sodomized.
When police arrived at the chaotic scene, his body was smeared in feces and he had only a faint pulse. The two gay men only called an ambulance after one took a break from the "sex play" to eat a sandwich and noticed the youth was not breathing, according to the police report.
But even taken at its worst, gay activists are right to point out, there was no "group prejudice" behind the Dirkhising killing. No one is alleging that the two gay men deliberately planned the teen's abduction to "get" a straight kid. In fact, the available evidence suggests that Jesse was gay, or at least questioning his sexuality.
Without the presence of prejudice based on sexual orientation, or any other sort of "ism" or "phobia," the Dirkhising story doesn't have the same public policy legs as the Shepard killing. To the mainstream press, it's just another brutal crime, this time committed by two gay men.
But are those distinctions, while important, enough to shrug our shoulders and file away Jesse's murder as the random act of twisted minds that just so happen to be gay?
Almost anytime a gay person is victimized these days, our activists are quick to call upon society to recognize its complicity in the crime. What messages are we communicating, they inevitably ask, that might have led those involved to lash out in this way?
In the case of Jesse Dirkhising, the only ones taking the time to look for larger lessons are social conservatives. And that's truly unfortunate.
For one thing, they've got an axe to grind. Social commentators from the right are snooping for evidence to make a broader social point: Gays are social deviants who engage in behavior that is repugnant to mainstream America. And just by publicizing the story, they purposefully feed the claim that gay adults are out to "recruit" wayward youths, with disastrous results.
Before you sniff at such morbid opportunism, admit to yourself that gay activists did much the same thing, though for a cause you support, after Matthew Shepard's death.
Decent conservatives would acknowledge that no gays would take matters so far as they went in Bentonville, Ark., but that wouldn't end the comparison for them - just as most reasonable gay activists allowed that few heterosexuals were waiting to tie us to fence posts.
Conservatives would argue, however, that the sex-drenched gay culture, and the value-less homosexual lifestyle, were bound to victimize someone like Jesse Dirkhising. And while most youths tricked and trapped by predatory gay men don't wind up dead, they do wind up sexually confused, robbed of their innocence, and torn from the values their parents worked hard to instill in them.
Before you dismiss that conservative diatribe, conjure in your head the mental image of Judy and Dennis Shepard, grieving the loss of their son. The sympathy you feel is likely to overwhelm the stubborn "gray zones" of Matthew's murder - especially the mixed motive of his killers and the extent society is really to blame.
Now imagine the parents of Jesse Dirkhising, sitting in court while prosecutors played tapes of his accused killer, telling police, "Jesse really didn't have anything to offer, except maybe sex now and then." Could you stand in front of them and disclaim any responsibility for gay culture in his killing?
As a minority group, we homosexuals have perfected the art of deconstructing mainstream society for its conscious and subconscious homophobia. Our "gay studies" scholars write treatise after treatise on the topic, and our civil rights groups wear out fax machines with press releases on the subject.
But when it comes to examining whether gay culture plays a role in societal ills, we are sometimes as willfully blind as our conservative foes. We are so defensive about "bad press" and passing judgment on anything sexual, we resist the question at a visceral level.
If the gruesome killing of a gay youth won't at least make us look harder at where our culture might bear some responsibility, what will?