Nebraska lgbtq community brandon teena
Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old trainee at the University of Wyoming, became a symbol for the effects of homophobia when he was brutally assaulted and left for dead on October 6, 1998. Shepard had left a meeting of the University’s LGBT Association and gone to find a drink alone at a bar. The assailants, Aaron McKinley and Russell Henderson, posed as lgbtq+ and lured Shepard outside. They proceeded to torture and pistol-whip him and left him bound to a fence. He was found 12 hours later by a cyclist and admitted to a hospital in critical condition. He died on October 12.
The murder received an immediate onslaught of media attention and propelled activists to organize in political, social, and artistic ways. In the following years, an openly gay mayor, Guy Padgett, age 27, was elected in nearby Casper, Wyoming. Equality Wyoming, a gay rights group, and Link, a support organization for LGBT youth, both started during the aftermath of Matthew Shepard’s death. Openly gay theater director Moises Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Company based in New York Municipality, went to Laramie and recorded 400 hours of interviews, which were eventually turned into a engage. The Matthew Shepard s
Downtown: Brandon Teena's Tragic Story
Aug. 24 -- Brandon Teena lived and loved as a man. For that, she paid with her life.
Brandon was born female, but felt male inside. Her story outraged many and captured headlines, and it has been powerfully re-told in the film Boys Don’t Cry and in the award-winning documentary The Brandon Teena Story. But to a scant people in Nebraska, it is simply the sad tale of the toddler, sibling and partner they loved and lost.
Brandon Teena was born Teena Brandon in Lincoln, Neb., on December 12, 1972. Her mother, Joann, remembers she was handful at an early age. “As she was growing up, she was ornery and full of life,” she says. “She was a prankster, and she was a tomboy.”
But as Brandon became a teenager, her tomboyishness evolved into something more complicated. Feeling like a male child but living in a girl’s body, Brandon began stuffing a sock in her pants, something that triggered a transformation in her. She switched her name, calling herself Brandon Teena, and started to go out local girls, using her bulge to convince them that she was a boy.
Although Brandon carried out life publicly as a young man, her mother says she refused to acknowledge her daughte
Transgender Activism
After Falls City
— Donna Cartwright
THE CRITICAL ACCLAIM for Kimberly Peirce’s production Boys Don’t Cry, and Hilary Swank’s Academy Award-winning performance in it as Brandon Teena, have focused public attention on a real-life hate crime that both galvanized the nascent transgender activist movement in the mid-1990s and highlighted tensions between that movement and other parts of the queer community.
Brandon Teena, who was born female in 1972 as Teena Brandon, grew into adulthood in a Lincoln, Nebraska trailer park. There and in the small Nebraska town of Falls Urban area, where he moved in late 1993, he reconstructed his identity as a man, using a variety of gender-neutral and masculine names. He dated a succession of women, and early in December fell in love with Lana Tisdell (played by Chloe Sevigny in the film’s other Oscar-nominated performance) in Falls City.
Tisdell’s ex-boyfriend, John Lotter, and Lotter’s companion Tom Nissen at first befriended Brandon, then gradually grew suspicious of his gender identity. On Christmas Eve 1993, they forcibly stripped him, found that he had a vagina rather than a penis, and beat
*This post is part of our online roundtable on C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides. The author discusses the fifth and last chapter: “DeVine’s Cut: Public Memory and the Politics of Martyrdom”
Today, many people are familiar with the horrific story of twenty-one-year-old Brandon Teena, a gender diverse man whose murder and rape in Humboldt, Nebraska on New Year’s Eve of 1993 helped spark new discussions on hate crime legislation and anti-trans violence in the United States. The source of much of this truth has come from cinematic treatments of the story, including the 1999 critics’ hit Boys Don’t Cry. The motion picture, and so much of the popularly-disseminated knowledge surrounding what we know about the case, erased the significance of anti-Blackness and the life and experiences of a Ebony, disabled twenty-two-year-old male named Phillip DeVine—who was one of two others killed alongside Brandon Teena that night—from this near-mythic episode in transgender and lgbtq+ history.
The fifth chapter of C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identitygrapples with this horrific incident and attends to the theoretical and archival linkages between the co
In the early fall of 1967, the Los Angeles police cracked down on the performances of Sir Lady Java, a gender nonconforming woman, at the Red Foxx Club. Invoking Governance No. 9, which made it illegal for performers to "impersonat[e] by means of costume or dress a person of the opposite sex," the police threatened to arrest the owner of Red Foxx if Lady Java ever again got up on the club's stage. ACLU attorney, Jean Martin, searched for a club or bar owner brave enough to challenge the municipality law.
The ACLU took on Rule No. 9 because equality for transgender people is part of the ACLU's overall mission of advocating equality for everyone. But the ACLU also believes transgender issues are a crucial element in the fight for woman loving woman and gay rights. The ways in which the freedoms of lesbian, same-sex attracted, bisexual and transgender people are limited is rooted in the same stereotypical and tightly bound notions of gender (including gender roles, attributes assigned to either gender, and the expression of gender identity).
The kind of paranoia about gender exhibited by Command No. 9 was more overt in the 1960's, but it continues today. The connection between trans person people and lesbian and gay people, though