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Homoerotic Violence at Columbine High |
| By Perry Brass
When I first heard about the shootings at Columbine High School in
Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, my immediate feelings were: it's here
again. Now we'll hear the usual breast-beating, "Why is this happening
to us?" and the usual media blast of bringing in "experts," with
close-ups of blood and tears between the commercials.
And I was not disappointed because that was what happened. At this point, everyone is still trying to figure out why did these two, fairly nice, young men—not monsters, not little-Jeffrey-Dahmers-in-training—from nice families, yet, do this. And they're trying to nail what happened on someone: on the parents of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris; on Robyn Anderson, Klebold's eighteen-year-old girlfriend who bought two guns for the boys; on the cops who did not come in and shoot fast enough; on the psychiatrist who treated Eric Harris . . . everyone is desperately looking for someone to pin this misery on.
According to some accounts, they were allegedly "bisexuals," which is a teen-age code term for the "G" (gay) word, which teens, especially high school teens in Colorado, cannot use. Rock stars are "bisexual." Queers are "gay." The boys were constantly taunted for this. They were constantly, openly harrassed by jocks and bullies. The group they formed, the "Trenchcoat Mafia," was put together of outsiders, in reaction to the more "J. Crew" jocks who were the stars of Columbine High, one of those vast, pretty suburban high schools where you are what you drive. In recounting one episode with the Trenchcoat Mafia, one athlete said that, "normally," he would have just "beat the crap out of them," except that he discovered that they were carrying lug wrenches and tire irons under their trenchcoats. "These guys wanted to put us in the hospital, instead of having a regular fistfight," the jock said. A regular fight: uh, that means the jocks win, right? Just fun. The jocks would have gone home happy that they had beaten up the "queers," which is the "normal" run of things, but things don't seem to run "normal" that way anymore. Because something else was going on at Columbine High School, with Eric and Dylan: something that I now describe as "the waking dream."
The waking dream is that state in which sleeping dream material, those
most secret revelations of our innermost desires and fantasies, is
processed either naturally (by memory or association with others) or
artificially (through drugs, movies, CD's, video games, etc.), into
conscious life.
In the second instance, the dream becomes not only processed into consciousness, but becomes extraordinarily hyper-"real." It is no longer just a dream we're extracting out of our own private "dreamlands," but a real part of the pop culture around us, the culture that is now an innate part of our economy. And the "emotional economy" and lives of most kids. Kids now see themselves only in terms of this pop culture, not aside from it. As I have said before, many (if not most) kids now see that there is only Christian fundamentalism on one side and Heavy Metal on the other—with no room for their real selves anywhere in the middle. They are, in short, lost out there in Mall-land. Therefore, it becomes very difficult to differentiate this waking dream from "reality"— which is now normativized by this pop culture of commercialized violence, alienation, suicidalism, and self-rejection. Kids now see themselves in terms of how well they can navigate this environment, how well they can "play" with it (like one vast video game), without being destroyed by it.
So, much of the commercialized pop culture that is now sold directly to kids easily meets and augments the violent waking dream. And our "Pop-goes-the-everything" society has few problems with this, no matter how much public breast-beating it does. We consider this ritualized "blood-letting" a natural part of childhood, and counter that even Grimms' fairy tales were violent and horrific. But then "Little Red Riding Hood" stayed fairly safe in the imaginations of little children, and was not made "hyper-real" by computer effects, which make getting hit in the face by live ammunition in slow motion look like some chic stylized dance. As much as we want to cry into our hankies over the violent waking dream, we will condone it at any point over the erotic waking dream, which really upsets us. The erotic waking dream is terribly censored, and we have all sorts of boundaries that we put around it, even though the normal human hunger for eroticism, something our culture denies whenever possible, still manages to dig through these boundaries. Our corporate consumer culture tries to sell the erotic waking dream to "adults," and pretend that there is no "homoerotic" content in this dream, to upset, bother, bewilder, or delight boys—when its content, in fact, is filled with it. This constant contradiction — lying about what is there — itself, can lead to violence. A good example are the famous Abercrombie and Fitch catalogues with their frankly erotic images of young, barely clothed men. Photographed by Bruce Weber, who shot Bear Lake, a book that took young, naked, white male skin about as far as it could go and still not be labeled porn, the A & F catalogues have become bestsellers (it is actually sold, rather than given away) with kids who routinely deny the homoerotic content of them. By constantly denying this content, the catalogues have become "cool."
But in these cultures, strict mores and very intact family structures allow these violent waking dreams to be processed and contained, without huge amounts of violent spill-overs. (There are exceptions: we read about eruptions of suicide, violent cults, etc. within very staid Japanese society, for instance.) But in our hyper-competitive society, where many families have fallen apart, and being a "loser" means being a nothing, the violent waking dream easily becomes translated into violence. Given access to high-powered weapons, grenades, or bombs, the erotic/violent waking dream means that many kids will not just take this dream back to sleep with them. The "real" possibilities of it are too overwhelming. The dream can become so real that not acting on it, as an option, makes no sense. There are too many ways to translate this dream into everyday reality. None of this is brand new, of course. Wars, traditionally, gave an outlet for the violent waking dream, which became "real" through the associations of other people who felt just as aggressive. And war gives a nice mask to atrocities, where the waking dream really gets to express itself: where it unfolds and strangles everything around it. All of this is done under the mask of the "job," normalcy, patriotism, etc. And again, we have, later, the breast-beating and the "Why did it happen?"
Both young men were from good families, and the horror of their crime, killing 14-year old Bobby Franks, stood out in stark relief from the generally accepted understanding of crime (that it is committed by rootless drifters, by an underclass, "criminal" element). But the homosexual, erotic aspect of this dream was censored as much as possible:that Leopold and Loeb were secret lovers, and that they saw the total rejection of their homosexuality by society as an invitation to embrace the erotic waking dream with all the violence they could bring to it. The popular media, though, will probably never be able to acknowledge or understand what went on during the last year when Harris and Klebold, supposedly, planned and plotted their one morning of hell in Littleton. It will not be able to understand how the erotic waking dream woke up into violence, or how the violent waking dream became so real that not to act on it stopped being an option for these two young men. It will not be able to see that despite the "normalcy" of their activities during that year (a job in a pizza shop, school dances, etc.) their "real" life, the life involved in making these waking dreams of violence "real," was growing concretely. It was involved in getting weapons, making bombs, making lists and plans, and finally acting on them. The dream itself had become too real on awakening to be stopped. Exactly how different their story is from the rest of thousands of boys across America, is something we will find out only in the coming years. Perry Brass latest book, the bestseller How to Survive Your Own Gay Life, is available at community bookstores nationwide. He is also the author of a trilogy of gay science fiction books—Mirage, Circles, and Albert or the Book of Man—that deal, always, in the erotic waking dream. He can be reached through www.perrybrass.com. |
Games like Doom II are being blamed for the rise in youth violence ... 
... but could homoerotic ads like this one also play a part? 
Leopold (left) and Loeb (right) with attorney Clarence Darrow during their trial in the 1920s 
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