WE OUGHT TO BE ashamed of the way the gay community has responded to the death of Jesse Dirkhising.
At the age of 13, Jesse was befriended by an adult gay couple in Rogers, Ark., who convinced him to engage in kinky sex play.
On the night of Sept. 26, 1999, Joshua McCabe, then 21, acted out a detailed bondage scene designed by boyfriend Davis Carpenter, 37, feeding the teen tranquilizers, strapping him facedown on the bed, stuffing dirty underwear in his mouth and taping it over with duct tape, and repeatedly sodomizing him. When McCabe stopped to eat a sandwich, he noticed that Jesse had stopped breathing and called for an ambulance. The youth died that night of asphyxiation.
Conservatives have jumped on the case as proof that the mainstream media and the gay press are less willing to report stories when gays are perpetrators than when we are victims.
The underlying aim of these activists was undoubtedly to publicize the case as an example of how they say gay men are predatory toward the nation's youth, and how deviant gay sex - meaning all gay sex, in their eyes - can kill. Backed into a corner, most of the people we count on to speak responsibly on behalf of gay America let their knee-jerk defensiveness overwhelm any compassion over the awful death of this gay teen.
Responsibility for the death of Jesse Dirkhising no doubt lies primarily with the two men who drugged, raped and tortured him. But there are important lessons for us to be taken from this tragedy.
First and foremost, our leaders should reaffirm that gay adults bear an awesome responsibility to respect the confusion and innocence that comes with youth. Teens the age of Jesse Dirkhising cannot meaningfully consent to sex play of any sort, much less the extreme S&M scene that led to his death. Gay newspaper columnist Paul Varnell, who argues in these pages this week that straight society is more to blame for Jesse's death, made a public case in May 1999 that "child sexual abuse," a term he always bracketed in quotation marks, was in fact not harmful to many teenage males, some of whom found it enjoyable and adventuresome.
Varnell by no means bears personal responsibility for Jesse's death four months later, but he does owe it to his readers to re-examine his thesis about whether we can all "breathe easier, glad that something we thought was harmful turned out not to be so harmful after all."
Second, the leaders of the S&M and leather communities should loudly repeat that responsible gays should steer well clear of the line between the fantasy of non-consensual sex and taking physical advantage over another. The violent end that Jesse met may be unusual, but that makes it all the more important to condemn any scene involving physically dangerous settings and drugs that inhibit good judgment.
It will not be immediately apparent to mainstream Americans, and many gays, that fantasizing about raping and torturing another human bears no connection with acting out that fantasy.
This newspaper reported last year that even the larger gay adult studios are producing videos that depict gang rape. The victim, almost always younger and soft-featured, usually winds up enjoying and consenting to the attack - an especially dangerous message to send. These videos and magazines like them almost never feature the "safe words" that are the keystone of consensual sadomasochistic sex.
The burden is rightly on those who would advocate and celebrate such fantasies to make the case that they are not contributing to a culture of violence and abuse that is more likely to victimize its participants. Third, those with a pulpit to talk about gay male culture ought to explore publicly the dangers that can come from treating each other as sex objects, not human beings.
Joshua McCabe told police that he didn't even know Jesse's last name, even though he had spent considerable time with the youth and had sex with him several times before the night of the rape. He told a fellow inmate that his only use for Jesse was for sex every now and then.
Feminists have long made a connection between how straight men objectify women sexually and how that can lead to disrespect, dehumanization, mistreatment and worse. The powerful story of Jesse Dirkhising presents a unique opportunity to see how the same dynamic plays out among gay men. To many, even acknowledging cultural factors like adult-teen sex, S&M sex play and sexual objectification is too dangerous to countenance. They worry that conservatives will enjoy a P.R. bonanza, trumpeting how even gays admit their deviance comes with a body count.
Sure enough, a Washington Times cover story on the Dirkhising case quoted from a Southern Voice editorial that merely asked the question whether gay culture bore any responsibility for what happened in Rogers, Ark. We can reliably expect more of the same anytime we take responsibility for addressing the social ills within our own community.
But we betray our own kind if we allow that fear to silence us. And we make ourselves hypocrites when we then turn to straight America and ask it to accept its complicity in violence against us.
Just this week, Judy Shepard told a college audience in Hollins, Va., that she does not blame the two men who robbed and beat her son Matthew and left him to die on a Wyoming fencepost.
"I blame society for giving them permission to kill Matt," she said instead. "They never thought they would be in any kind of trouble for killing another fag."
As long as words associated with gay men and lesbians are perceived as insults, she argued, society will implicitly condone anti-gay violence. Those are powerful words, and they're hard for most heterosexuals to hear because they don't personally harbor violent feelings towards us and certainly don't feel responsible for the horrific behavior of Matthew's killers.
If we want them to take seriously Judy Shepard's call to change how mainstream society views us, then we should happily and eagerly take up the cause of rooting out anything in our own backyard that could have contributed to the death of Jesse Dirkhising.
Of course there are important differences in how the two young men died. Matthew's brutal treatment was largely the result of hate for him as a gay man. The subsequent calls for bias crime legislation introduced a public policy element that justified the massive media coverage.
Jesse's brutal treatment was not the result of hatred toward a group of people, but more accurately was the product of gross disregard for the worth of a gay kid. That's not something that legislation can address, but it sure is an issue that ought to be of central importance to our community.