Wednesday, Nov. 05, 2003 - 10:21 a.m.
Oh No
Internet Date Leads To Stabbing 11.04.03
By Peter Hacker
(Melbourne, Victoria) A Melbourne teen has been charged with attempted murder after stabbing a man he met in an internet chatroom.
Police say William Alexander Campos, 17, posted a message in a chatroom of a popular gay service saying he was "looking for a good time."
A 24 year old man responded and the pair struck up a conversation. Campos asked if he would be interested in meeting for oral sex, according to Senior-Constable Brendan Muldoon.
"The defendant told the victim he had never been with a man before," Muldoon said.
The pair then made a date. In a local park, as the two were engaging in the sex act, Campos allegedly yelled, "I'm going to kill you" and stabbed the victim in the back with a kitchen knife.
The victim, whose name is being withheld, spent four days in hospital. He is still recuperating at home.
Muldoon said Campos admitted the stabbing, telling investigators he did it because he was angry with himself.
At a bail hearing, Campos' lawyer said that the attack arose out of sexual experimentation, not homophobia. The teen has been granted bail pending sentencing. As a condition of bail, Magistrate Barbara Cotterell imposed a curfew and ordered the teen not to use the internet.
Last week, in New York, a Brooklyn man was charged with fatally stabbing a gay man in the head with a screwdriver after arranging a date in a chatroom.
This news report hits pretty fucking close to home for me, obviously.
I'm not yet connecting with many emotions about my assault—the counselling continues—but I am intellectually curious about a few things this news report touches on. For instance, the assailant's lawyer saying "the attack arose out of sexual experimentation, not homophobia". The statement doesn't particularly make sense: the guy stabbed his park date as an erotic experiment? No, I suspect the lawyer is going to use some sort of homosexual panic defense, that the kid freaked out about having gay sex and therefore should be treated more leniently.
The homosexual panic defense thing has always bugged me. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote a great essay about it several years ago—I believe it was reprinted in Tendencies, but I'm not sure—that I'd like to re-read. I have no idea, obviously, whether Diego's lawyer might try to use the argument in defending him; it doesn't sound like it so far.
I mean, I panicked about my gayness a lot before I came out, but I didn't want to kill fags. I think attacks of this kind are rare, but as the news from Melbourne and New York City in the past week—and my assault this summer—show, they do happen.
Much more common is the tendency of closeted gay men to turn that hatred inwards. We have exponentially higher suicide rates, especially among adolescent queers.
Something more needs to be done. I see the psychosis that led to my being attacked and to the violent episodes reported above as on a continuum with queer suicide and the ever-increasing levels of hate crimes perpetrated again us. It's all part of the same evil: how frightened and ashamed so many of us are of difference.
I'm not as sure as I once was that "hate crime" is a meaningful or helpful social concept. Was the attack on me or the Australian guy or the murder of the Brooklyn man a hate crime? If not, should there be a different, less stringent standard of punishment because it wasn't?
Bah, once I turn to the topic of punishment, sentencing, I lose interest in the argument. I just can't go there, can't get excited about comparing prison sentences. It's not where I'm at. I'll leave the judicial, criminological issues for others to debate.
The questions I come alive to are these: what do you and I need to do to keep ourselves safe, without compromising our openness and our curiousity? how do we keep on combatting shame, in our bodies, our hearts, our society? what's the next bright risky thing sex shall reveal?
