Laramie, Wyoming

Who's on top and who's on the bottom seems to be a matter of enormous intensity in this city, perhaps even more than in the rest of America. The feminist movement has never been very strong here, and the incidence of rape and domestic violence against women and children is extraordinarily high. Last year, approximately one in twelve local women reported battering or sexual assault on herself or a child to Laramie's antiviolence project. That's shocking, considering that more than half of all rapes and battering cases are never reported at all. Most media coverage has attributed Shepard's murder to the supposed backwardness and endemic homophobia of rural people, inflaming the bitterness Laramieans have felt for years over the fact that the rest of the country sees them as dumb yokels. (The uneducated and poor are especially despised here because of the sense that they contribute to that image.)

In fact, Laramie was the likeliest place in the state for an antigay murder to happen, not because of its backwardness but because of its progressiveness and its pockets of wealth and poverty. Explaining why gets tricky, because we are in the realm of cultural memes that bear only the slightest relation to reality. Comfort and voluptuousness (and, of course, consumerism) have been linked in the public mind with effeminacy and homosexuality for decades. Most antigay murders, in fact, aren't committed on the prairie but in liberal cities like New York and San Francisco, where the perception of gay privilege and boys' brutally inculcated fear of being feminine results in scores of antigay murders every year.

The left has never been particularly eager to examine the ways that class, victimhood and violence are coded in the language of gender, but examining this could help us understand why so many boys and men of all classes between the ages of 15 and 22 are so worried about being on the bottom that they search gay-friendly neighborhoods for gay men to attack. Cultural dogma holds that men must demonstrate at every turn that they are not on the bottom, even if they actually are.

Laramie, the only college town in a state where a number of people hunt for food, is obsessed with status, and Russell and Aaron were reviled for being "losers," dropouts and poor. They were also addicted to crystal meth. Long ago, Russell had been an honors student and wanted badly to go to college, but instead he wound up as a roofer earning $12,000 a year. Aaron, for his part, saw himself as such a moron that when he won some money in an insurance settlement after his mother's death from a botched hysterectomy, he went out and bought an enormous necklace that displayed his nickname, "Dopey."

Almost no one in our society is comfortable seeing straight men as victims, certainly not the men themselves. But until they do, men like Russell and Aaron will continue to prove their nonvictim status by attacking men like Matthew. And no matter how many gay people homophobes know--like the ones Russell and Aaron knew in Russell's girlfriend's family--gay people will continue to be seen as the enemy.

Picture the three of them at the Fireside, a bar downtown where university and non-university people mix. Even Aaron and Russell's friends treat them like wimps--they often put Aaron in a headlock and call him "the shrimp"--and tonight the Fireside's bartender is shunning them because literally they have dirty hands.

And maybe also because they can't afford to tip. They don't even have the $5.50 to pay for the pitcher of beer they just drank, and they're turning their pockets inside out looking for it, annoying the bartender. It's humiliating. All their cash is in nickels and dimes. Then a beautiful boy at the end of the bar asks if he can help.

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