Yesterday evening, I attended a candle light vigil for Lawrence King in West Hollywood.
My culture tells me that children must adhere to certain rigid rules of conduct, decorum, dress and manners depending solely on the genitalia they receive at birth. If born with a penis children are required to behave as “boys”. The strict boundaries required of “boys” are part of the social conditioning imposed to create conformity in sex roles. Adolescence is a time when children begin the transformation to sexual maturity. For any child it is difficult and confusing. For a significant percentage of children whose sexual/gender orientation does not fit within the normative standards, adolescence is a nightmare. For them my culture has a number of coercive mechanisms to force compliance. Usually peer pressure, a lack of role models, and direct shaming is sufficient to send these sexual/gender outlaws running for the obscurity of the anonymous “closet”.
Occasionally a child is brave enough to defy these mechanisms; brave enough to dare to be who he or she is and to feel no need to apologize or to act in conformity with the arbitrary rules of my culture. Fourteen year old Lawrence King was one of these children. For brave kids like Lawrence my culture has an age old mechanism:
My culture kills them.
This week in the computer lab of an Oxnard California middle school, 14 year old Brandon McInearny pulled a gun from his school nap sack, held it to the head of Lawrence King, and pulled the trigger. Laurence was one of our children. So was Brandon.
My culture taught Brandon to hate Lawrence. My culture taught Brandon to kill. My culture enlisted Brandon to execute Lawrence and thus ended both of these young lives in an instant.
But why?
Lawrence broke the rules. Lawrence dared to allow his true self, a self incompatible with the standards required of “boys”, to emerge and to be given expression in a world obsessed with obeisance to an artifact system of sex roles so obsolete as to have had no functional justification since homo-sapiens first climbed down out of the trees.
My culture displays corporately sponsored and approved forms of androgyny and gender non-conformity. But the media should come with the disclaimer: “Don’t try this at home.”
My culture supports a science that pathologizes individuality in adolescents. Children who fail to conform to normative standards when so clearly motivated by shaming and peer pressure are said to suffer from Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), a disorder recognized by the psychiatric profession and codified in the DSM IV.
My culture teaches me to hate and fear that which is different.
My culture tells little boys that it is good to emulate acts of violence in play; to have toy soldiers and plastic guns, but not to play with Barbies or E-Z bake ovens.
My culture really doesn’t care if I am gay or straight, black, white, brown, yellow red or lavender. My culture hates us all. Hate, ignorance, fear and bigotry, all enshrined by my culture, loaded the gun put in Brandon’s hand and taught him to shoot it.
My culture teaches children to kill children.
Goodnight, Lawrence…I am sorry that my culture decided not to let you grow up.
(photo and text by Alec Henderson)
