The lazy way out

Here's one of our own community cliches: bashers are bigots who are fighting off their own gay desires.

Now let me expand that a little bit: we so want to believe that the serial killing of gay men is related to sexual orientation, to murderers who turn their hatred and fear of their own sexuality against others. But what if that's wrong?

Those in the business -- the research business, that is! -- are pointing toward very different explanations. Sex is only a part of it. "The kind of people who are motivated to the rape and murder of strangers choose the gender and physical type they find attractive, so gays kill males," acknowledges Elliott Leyton, Canada's specialist in multiple murder. But more importantly, he believes the victim's social class can tell us about the killer.

As I write this, a serial killer of gay men is on the loose in Rome. He likes members of the cultural elite -- so far, a professional opera house clapper (paid by the singers), a food critic, a theatre critic, a count/pianist, a television director....

Fifteen killings in Rome are unsolved and may be related. The men are suffocated, bludgeoned (a candelabra, a brandy bottle), or both. (Few serial killers use the most efficient weapon: a gun. It may not be intimate enough.)

These are very different from the single murder -- like the drug-addled moron who can't even recall what happened. Or like the allegedly clueless trick who stabs the guy he went home with 45 times, claiming "homosexual panic defence," a hysteria-based excuse that's still on the books in Canada.

Professor Leyton believes that serial killings are about a different kind of hysteria, class hysteria. The Memorial University of Newfoundland academic wrote "Hunting Humans," possibly the most important book on multiple murders yet written.

Leyton notes that the serial killing of strangers is almost unknown in so-called "primitive societies." And that serial killers change as their society changes. These examples all come from his book:

• The 15th century’s Baron Gilles de Rais, a French aristocrat, raped and killed peasant children of both sexes. "The landed aristocracy was in a state of crisis, assaulted on all sides by peasantry and merchants." Feudalism, which gave the baron his power, was dying, and the established order began one last push of savage repression, attempting to re-establish itself. Perhaps that's exactly what the socially threatened de Rais was also trying to do;

• With the 18th and 19th centuries came the industrial era, and new social turmoil. Capitalism was creating a middle class -- so insecure they preyed upon the prostitutes and housemaids who could, unless stopped, pop up the food chain and easily displace the professional doctor or civil servant. Or perhaps it was a question of policing the middle class's new "refinement;"

• In modern times, the serial killer is often the "faded bourgeois," obsessed by his foiled ambitions. He's usually male, white and employed, reacting to his frustration by killing those slightly above him in the rigid structure of society. "But their protest is not on behalf of others, only themselves; their anguish is trivial, not profound; and they punish the innocent, not the guilty.... [A]ll he is protesting is his lack of a crisp identity and his refusal to tolerate the position society has allocated him."

Does this theory work for the Italian stalker? The victims are cultural elites, certainly. But we will know nothing else until the killer is caught.

Even then, this single killer won't give us global insight. No one's done the work on the homosexual side, Leyton said in an a recent (e-mail) interview. "I'd be very interested to see a comparison between homo and hetero serial killers. I can’t think offhand of any scholarly analysis on [the] subject.

"When I was researching and writing 'Hunting Humans' from 1980 to 1984, there were no available *confessions* from homosexual serial killers on which I could base any theory or cases. Within months of the book's publication, case studies of very high quality began to appear -- Tim Cahill's book on John Wayne Gacy, for e.g., or the various work on Eileen Wuornos, Neilsen ('Killing For Company') in Britain and [Jeffrey] Dahmer in America and so on...."

Now we need to bring all that information together.

Our marginalization has a way of making us obsessed with the reason for that marginalization -- our sexual orientation. We gotta get over it. Our assumptions about why homos are killed may have short-circuited the search for real answers.


Originally written in September 2002