A woman was beaten and raped by four men. They terrorized her for close to an hour and, when they were done, left her naked in the street. Throughout the attack, they taunted her with the reason she was chosen: She is a lesbian.
It happened in Richmond, and the attack was so horrific that the Chief of Police lost sleep over it. The sheer brutality assures coverage in the national press and years of citation as a visceral example of a homophobic hate crime.
A hate crime is a crime motivated by the attacker’s prejudice. Hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation are consistently the second most frequently occurring – after race and ethnicity – and are further characterized by a high level of violence and a proportionally higher incidence of personal attacks than the other categories. Hate crimes happen when a society is intolerant of a group of people.
Intolerance used to mean the categorical rejection of a belief or behavior, but since the 1960s, intolerance has come to include the rejection of a personal identity. Lise Noel writes that, whereas the rejection of belief is based on some notion of absolute truth and rejection of behavior on a defined moral order, rejection of personal identity is based on a presumed human hierarchy.
Imagine that some people are intrinsically better than others because of skin color, gender, sexual orientation and a few other characteristics over which they have no control. Actually, it’s not difficult to imagine at all; this reality surrounds us.
Reality is a social construct formed from basic assumptions about how the world works and expressed through cultural norms, some of which are codified into laws. Culture and laws are necessary to satisfy our need for stability and meaning.
And here is where explanations about hate crimes become complicated. Need for stability and meaning notwithstanding, reality changes with each generation, especially for Asian immigrants and refugees who must reconcile their reality with a new one. As long as those changes do not disturb basic assumptions, change happens relatively painlessly.
But try and challenge strongly held basic assumptions, and society’s preservation engines will come roaring to life, desperately trying to prevent having to rethink those assumptions. LGBTs challenge some basic assumptions and are attacked, set apart, denied rights. Denying LGBTs the rights that others have makes them a vulnerable target.
In California, hate crimes are on the rise. In 2007, anti-homosexuality hate crimes constituted 18.4 percent of all hate crimes, up 77 percent from 2006. The level of violence is grotesque: a 21-year-old man beaten to death, a 15-year-old boy shot to death, a 28-year-old woman beaten and raped.
Victims are reluctant to report their cases to the police. Over half of the victims report that the police are indifferent, verbally and physically abusive, or they must endure slurs. We must have touched the most basic of assumptions.
The change we seek is inevitable and our fervent wish for the coming year is that when it arrives, people will rethink their assumptions and not resort to violence.
Was John Wone’s murder a hate crime? The DC gay community is all abuzz about how 3 guys probably set up an S&M Asiaphile to drug, assault, and murder an old college friend, and have for 2 years escaped being arrested or charged of any crime.
Some are going along with the “there isn’t a shred of evidence” and “if these guys weren’t gay it wouldn’t be a big deal”, but why is there no outrage over this from the Asian gay community either that the guys got away with murder, or are being unfairly treated for being gay?
Sick, sexually abusive murders can be committed by any culture, gender, or sexuality, so why is it such a taboo topic for this “mysterious” case where the only mystery is why nobody is willing to state the obvious??
You asked if the Robert Wone murder was a hate crime? No, four men prepared to cannibalize John Wone as he was drugged and stabbed. Four men attempted to eat Wone, but were distracted when a food delivery man came to the wrong house. There are three identified men through court records – one unindentified man through DOJ.
Indentified men – The whole thing is strange beyond measure, not least because the three accused men were all highly successful and seemingly the picture of upper-class gay propriety: Price was a prominent attorney and co-founder of a Virginia gay rights group; Zaborsky was one of the marketing executives behind the “Got Milk?” campaign; and Ward was a Georgetown grad. And they lived together as a self-described “family” and had a veritable dungeon full of stuff …
Unindentified man – is the second Georgetown University graduate, who serves as Dean of School of Continuing Studies for Georgetown University. His file name at DOJ is the ‘cannibal’. Garbage belonging to Rankin was found on the scene but mishandled. Q&A found on Rankin via George Mason University which was overlooked, assists the profile of the murderer of Wone.
Walter Rankin on Fairy Tales and Horror Stories
by Emma Epstein
This princess [Grimm's Cinderella] doesn’t mess around singing happy little songs.
For more information
Read more about Rankin’s book in the The Mason Gazette and on Amazon.com.
Walter Rankin published his first solely authored book, entitled Grimm Pictures: Fairy Tale Archetypes in Eight Horror and Suspense Films through McFarland in fall 2007. We scared him into answering some questions about the similarities between the characters in two such contrasting genres.
Which is your favorite scary movie, fairy tale, and why?
My favorite scary movie is The Silence of the Lambs for several reasons: I think the film provides genuine chills on a deep, psychological level, and it’s incredibly entertaining from beginning to end. My favorite Grimm fairy tale is probably “Cinderella.” When we look at the Disney version, we see this lovely young woman with little birds happily landing on her finger and cute little mice making her a dress. In the Grimm version, Cinderella is a much spunkier heroine, and her sisters are just as beautiful as she is. Now the contest has real merit. And at the end of the tale, she invites her sisters to the wedding and has her little birds peck out their eyes. This princess doesn’t mess around singing happy little songs.
Why do you think certain subjects are considered scary, or taboo?
I think certain subjects immediately create an emotional and physical response of recoiling in disgust – these are the topics that we tend to consider taboo. And these topics have historically caused the same type of reaction in Western society. For example, cannibalism is a taboo topic that has been explored in Greek tales (The House of Atreus) and in satirical works like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” in which he proposes eating children. It’s a theme in several of the Grimm fairy tales and in films like The Silence of the Lambs. Yet, there are a number of real instances of cannibals, such as Jeffrey Dahmer or Armin Meiwes, the so-called “German cannibal,” who actively recruited human meals in a cannibal chatroom. Taboo topics tend to be those topics that most horrify us, because we know that they can also happen in real-life, not just in works of fiction.
What do you think is the purpose of telling a scary story and why do you think people like to listen to them?
Scary stories and films offer us the safe opportunity to enter a dark, dangerous, taboo world. Occasionally, there is a lesson built into the tale, but I doubt that this is really the draw. For those of us who enjoy being scared and judging by most box office results, we are in the minority when compared to those who enjoy comedy, fantasy, and romance these types of works can also be oddly comforting. They tend to follow the same type of formula and the audience knows what to expect. Like fairy tales that have been told again and again, these works tell us a simple story with a predictable outcome. And best of all, when the story ends or the credits roll, we can turn on the lights and soothe our nerves with a glass of milk, some cookies, and a loved one.
Rankin serves as Deputy Associate Dean of undergraduate Academic Affairs of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1992 from Christopher Newport University and completed his PhD in 1997 at Georgetown University.
Attempting to eat Wone is not milk and cookies as forensic evidence belonging to Rankin is not a horror movie’s credits. Re-open the case, the court needs to hear the case EN BANC, otherwise nobody gets sentenced for the murder of Wone.