The Legacy Of The “Boys Don’t Cry” Hate Crime 20 Years Later

[xchrom]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/katrinamarkel/the-legacy-of-the-boys-dont-cry-hate-crime-20-years-later

In December 1993, Brandon Teena, a young transgender man, was raped and murdered in Humboldt, Neb. Two decades later, Brandon’s story still resonates with discussions about rape culture, LGBT youth homelessness, and misgendering trans people.



On the 20th anniversary of his murder, Brandon Teena’s headstone in Lincoln Memorial Park was unadorned save for a slightly faded artificial blue rose between his headstone and his father’s. The marker — almost surely against Brandon’s wishes — still displays his birth name, “Teena Brandon,” with the epitaph “Daughter, Sister, Friend.” Nothing to honor Brandon’s identity as a transgender man, and certainly nothing to indicate that this is the final resting place of a tragic LGBT icon. Two decades after Brandon Teena was murdered near Falls City, Neb., his ghost is in danger of being forgotten. More people remember that Hilary Swank won an Oscar for a film called Boys Don’t Cry than they remember Brandon’s name or where he was from.

Brandon — along with Lisa Lambert and Phillip Devine, two witnesses to his murder — was killed on New Year’s Eve 1993. In Nebraska, the anniversary passed with little commemoration. There were a few feature articles reflecting on the murders in Brandon’s hometown paper, the Lincoln Journal-Star, but little else.

Much has changed in the two decades since Brandon’s death. While members of the Nebraska transgender community express concern that Brandon has been somewhat forgotten, they are also upbeat about the progress that was wrought, at least in part, from Brandon’s death. LGBT activism in Nebraska, much like in the rest of the nation, has increased exponentially in the last 20 years. Parent groups, liberal churches, local government leaders, and transgender individuals of prominence are creating a culture of acceptance and support that would have been unimaginable outside of the very largest American cities in 1993.



Meredith Bacon, a political science professor at University of Nebraska, Omaha, argues, “The murder of Brandon Teena did to the transgender community a lot what the murder of Matthew Shepard did to the gay community. It created anger.” She credits Brandon’s death with the formation of The Transsexual Menace, an activist group that demonstrated in Falls City during the murder trials and continues today as an advocacy group for the transgender community.