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Judging a book by its cover, I assumed this movie was about a boy who was traveling somewhere. I also thought by the stern look on his face that something bad happened. Probably kidnapped, raped, or killed.

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I found it interesting that Hillary Swank was criticized because she took the role playing a trans-man when she is a cisgender woman. Especially considering all of the good things that came out of the film. The director was also criticized because she's a cisgender lesbian. I'm guessing, but maybe the trans community wasn't as large when the film was made and it was much harder to find a trans person to direct the film or star in it?

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The Oscar winner reflected on criticism for portraying a transgender character: "I'm happy that times are evolving and changing."

The independent film boom of the 1990s launched many brilliant actors, but perhaps none flew higher than Hilary Swank. She took the chance on a risky role in a micro-budget film with a provocative subject matter and an unknown director - and walked away with an Oscar. Then a relatively unknown TV actress, she was paid $3,000 for the film. (As she often said, "I had an Academy Award, but no health insurance.") However, in a recent interview at the Crosby Street Hotel to promote the Netflix movie "I Am Mother," she lit up when discussing the heyday of independent film.

"I thought, 'Wow this is my opportunity to break into film," she said. "Famous people weren't taking the risk on independent film, and they weren't getting paid to do independent film, so there was no interest for them. But, newcomers couldn't break into film because the studio system was like, 'We only use famous people.'"

Directed by Kimberly Peirce and produced by Christine Vachon's Killer Films, "Boys Don't Cry" is a seminal work in the queer film canon. Distributed by Fox Searchlight in 1999, it was a critical and box-office surprise success that went all the way to the Oscars. At the time, Swank took a huge gamble on an incredibly challenging role and what was then an incendiary topic.

"I broke into film with that movie. But it was like such a long shot," said Swank. "It was made for nothing; I made $3,000. The idea of making a movie for a certain budget, it was just this brilliant idea of being able to take a risk on telling a story that there is an audience for, you just have to make it to be able to find that audience. Right? Build it, they will come. So it was a super exciting time. Super exciting time for film. And then obviously it took off."

Bill Matlock/Fox Searchlight/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

With sensitivity and heart, the film tells the story of transgender man Brandon Teena's (Swank) first exploration of his gender, early pivotal romance, and tragic murder, all anchored by Swank's powerful breakthrough performance. The effects of the film rippled into audiences who had never seen a sensitive portrayal of a transgender person, much less given any thought to the violence they face every day simply for being themselves.

"I believe ['Boys Don't Cry' will] for sure be the most important thing that I was ever a part of," Swank said proudly.

Following the film's release, Swank became the spokesperson for The Hetrick-Martin Institute, one of the nation's largest LGBTQ youth services organizations. During her 10-year tenure, she helped find a home for New York's Harvey Milk High School, a public high school catering to at-risk LGBTQ youth.

"There are so many hate crimes that are still occurring in the world, not just in our country, that people weren't even aware of until ['Boys Don't Cry'] was made," Swank said. "At the same time, Matthew Shepard and the horrendous crimes against him were like blips in the news here and there. But with that movie, they became more of a conversation."

In many ways, it kicked off the conversation around transgender representation in film that continues to this day. But in recent years, some activists in the trans community have criticized the film for casting Swank, who is cisgender, as a trans man, and for having been directed by Peirce, a cisgender lesbian. On a 2016 visit to Reed College, the filmmaker was greeted with protests.

"I think in some ways it's been criticized and in others it hasn't. And I think if people knew the outpouring of letters and people on the streets who have come up to me in tears, thanking me for telling their story," Swank said. After pausing for a few seconds, she added: "I hold on to that. That's important to me, and to be that spokesperson for that amount of time. I'm happy that times are evolving and changing and that people are getting the opportunity to tell their own stories."

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Hilary Swank Opens Up About 'Boys Don't Cry' Backlash, and Examines Its Legacy

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The Oscar winner reflected on criticism for portraying a transgender character: "I'm happy that times are evolving and changing." The independent film boom of the 1990s launched many brilliant actors, but perhaps none flew higher than Hilary Swank.

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Yet another actress who is afraid of the backlash for saying anything about the films she's been in because she's not LGBTQ. I wouldn't care what the orientation of the person portraying me in a film is. As long as they're doing it in good faith and to the best of their abilities, I don't care. Someone like Chloe Sevigny, however, should be commended for taking a chance on a role that could have destroyed her career. The fact that she took the role, and many other roles like it, shows that she actually cares about the LGBTQ community.

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Chloë Sevigny knows the power of words, so she's very careful with them, warily tiptoeing to the end of an answer when asked about the influence of her seminal trans-landmark film "Boys Don't Cry." The 1999 dramatization of the murder of real-life Nebraskan transgender teen Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank) garnered the 43-year-old indie queen and style icon, who played Teena's girlfriend, Lana Tisdel, an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Director Larry Clark's 1995 film "Kids" came first, with Sevigny portraying an HIV-positive teen. But Sevigny would go on to amass a body of LGBTQ films and roles, including "If These Walls Could Talk 2," "Party Monster," "Will & Grace" and "Broken Flowers," playing Jessica Lange's lesbian assistant. In 2012, she portrayed trans contract killer Mia in the British miniseries "Hit & Miss," a part she now says she'd pass on if it were offered to her today. (Actress Scarlett Johansson recently withdrew from playing a trans character in the forthcoming "Rub & Tug" after facing LGBTQ backlash.)

Currently, Sevigny stars in and co-produces "Lizzie," featuring the actress' first lead role in her 50-film career. The thriller explores infamous 19th-century suspected murderous Lizzie Borden through a queer lens, which, according to this version, goes like this: Lizzie (Sevigny), to rebuke the patriarch who's getting in the way of her romantic pursuit of maid Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart), slaughters her father and stepmother with an ax. And so, Sevigny can now add "real-life killer lesbian" to her abundantly gay resume.
What has led you to so many LGBTQ characters?
The marginalized, the misunderstood, the outcast - you know, I grew up super sensitive as a child, and my brother and I were pretty rebellious in a small town and were really into just questioning the status quo. I have a lot of older peers who are gay and knowing the struggle and what they fought through, and having so much respect and admiration for the times that they've lived through - not that the struggle is over by any means, but just the perspective that I think gets lost. Post Trump, with all the conversations that are being had, and everyone's like "oh god, it's so horrible; I can't watch the news," but thank god everyone is talking about how political the systems are. I really feel like change is happening.
Why do you think you didn't experience the same backlash that Scarlett Johansson did for signing on to play a trans role?
It was just a different time then. When they came to me with that role I said, "I don't understand why you don't cast a real trans person," and they said, "We can't get the funding because we can't find anyone that has a big enough name, in all honesty." And I just felt like it was an important story to tell, and I loved the writing and I loved the creators and I wanted to be a part of it. If that opportunity came to me today, I would pass, for sure, 100 percent. It was just, unfortunately, what was acceptable then. I think it wasn't as challenged, and it should be.
What are your thoughts on whether LGBTQ actors should exclusively be playing LGBTQ roles? And with that in mind, how did you approach Lizzie's sexuality?
Well, I want to respect (the community) and their stories and who they are as people, and I feel like (Lizzie and Bridget's) love was born out of the confines of the environment they were in at the time; they were looking for escape in one another. I feel like it's kind of beyond the boundaries of queer, straight, you know?

We had a good writer, we had lots of out cast members who really respected the story and wanted to be a part of telling it, and I admire them all for being out and for coming forward and supporting the project. I mean, I feel if gay men or women can play straight, I don't know (laughs) if it's fair to do the reverse. But I just hope that there's more opportunities, for everyone - especially the people who are marginalized.
Did it mean something to you to have someone who is not heterosexual, Kristen Stewart, play Bridget, who is also not heterosexual?
It... did. But she was also my first choice just as an actor, not the person. I have so much respect for her choices, and I could go on and on about her performances, but I like her persona. For me, I've always been attracted to directors or other actors that I feel like have more than just that going on - that aren't just, like, theater nerds (laughs). Not that there's anything wrong with theater nerds! But I feel like she really represents something to a lot of generations, with "Twilight" and beyond.
You've said what you had in mind for this film didn't align with director Craig William Macneill's finished feature. How about Lizzie and Bridget's sexuality - was that explored as deeply as you had hoped?
I think when I said that I was more talking about the process because we had been through so many different incarnations of the script. Things were changing even until the last moment. It's the power of the edit, things you have to let go of. There was more between our relationship, kind of questioning it, and deciding she doesn't want to go any further and then coming back. And probably in the overall course of watching the movie it would've muddled things, so you kind of have to accept in the edits how things work and how some things don't, and that's just the process of filming.
There's an intimate scene where Bridget and Lizzie almost kiss, but trepidation holds them back. How were you reading Lizzie in that moment?
She was starved for recognition; she just wanted to be seen as she was and she felt really that she didn't have a voice, and I think she wasn't valued by her family or her community and she found somebody who valued her and could hear her and who wanted to listen to her and talk to her. There was so much physical attraction between them, but also just what that person was for her. She was on a quest for freedom, and she goes to the most extreme thing you can do and in the end kind of loses it all.
As someone who's known for her queer roles, when you get stopped by an LGBTQ person on the street, which film do they tend to most recognize you from?
"Boys Don't Cry," for sure. They say every actor has one thing that they get recognized or known for, and for me it's "Kids," but from the gay community it's probably "Boys Don't Cry." I think there are just a lot of references for that movie and it meant a lot to a lot of people.
Next year marks 20 years since "Boys Don't Cry." How do you reflect on the effect that movie had?
Just like... I just think at that time when it came out there just wasn't a lot of representation of that community, on screen or on television or anywhere - oh my god. So sensitive around this subject. (Laughs) I'm always like, I'm gonna get taken down for anything I say - it's just a hotbed. It feels like it's almost hard to talk about this without feeling under the gun, for some reason. Because it's like, you can't say the right thing.

But I feel like it was important to the world. Not even one community in general. As far as building tolerance and acceptance and educating people and portraying a person and seeing the violence acted out against them and how heart-wrenching it is and humanizing a story, it was a really important thing to be a part of. I had read all the articles about Brandon Teena and was already obsessed with the story before being offered the audition and I wanted to be a part of telling that story.

As editor of Q Syndicate, the international LGBTQ wire service, Chris Azzopardi has interviewed a multitude of superstars, including Cher, Meryl Streep, Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. His work has also appeared in GQ, Vanity Fair and Billboard. Reach him via Twitter @chrisazzopardi.

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Chloë Sevigny Talks Legacy of 'Boys Don't Cry,' Never Playing Trans Again

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Chloë Sevigny knows the power of words, so she's very careful with them, warily tiptoeing to the end of an answer when asked about the influence of her seminal trans-landmark film "Boys Don't Cry."

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Wow! Only 20 years later? You would think that, as the sheriff, something like this happening in your town you would make sure it never happened again. You'd be wrong. Sure, the sheriff eventually gets people to come in to train his deputies, but not because he went out and looked for it. I think he felt obligated, but would have preferred to just "leave it in the past."

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But another figure in this horrifying story remains free.

On December 25, mere hours after being sexually assaulted, Brandon faced a demeaning and dehumanizing line of questioning from the Richardson County Sheriff, Charles Laux, when reporting his attackers. In a recent interview from her L.A. office, director Peirce called it "a third rape."
C: [A]fter he pulled your pants down and seen you was a girl, what did he do? Did he fondle you any? C: He didn't fondle you any, huh. Didn't that kind of amaze you?...Doesn't that kind of, ah, get your attention somehow that he would've put his hands in your pants and play with you a little bit? C: [Y]ou were all half-ass drunk....I can't believe that if he pulled your pants down and you are a female that he didn't stick his hand in you or his finger in you. B: Well, he didn't. C: I can't believe he didn't. C:...Did he have a hard on when he got back there or what? B: I don't know. I didn't look. C: You didn't look. Did he take a little time working it up, or what? Did you work it up for him? C: You didn't work it up for him? C: Then you think he had it worked up on his own, or what? B: I guess so, I don't know. C: You don't know...Did, when he got in the back seat you were already spread out back there ready for him, waiting on him. B: No, I was sitting up when he got back there. C: And you had never had sex before? C: How old are you? C: And if you're 21, you think you'd have, you'd have, trouble getting it in? C: Why do you run around with girls instead of, ah, guys being you are a girl yourself? B: Why do I what? C: Why do you run around with girls instead of guys being you're a girl yourself? B: I haven't the slightest idea. C: You haven't the slightest idea? You go around kissing other girls?....[T]he girls that don't know about you, thinks [sic] you are a guy. Do you kiss them? B: ...I have a sexual identity crisis. B: I have a sexual identity crisis. C: You want to explain that? B: I don't know if I can even talk about it....
I recently re-watched Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir's Emmy-nominated 1998 documentary The Brandon Teena Story, which unearthed this excruciating exchange. The duo spent more than five years researching and reporting the case, even moving into an apartment in Falls City to attend all the trials and sentencings. Without their excellent investigative journalism we would have never learned of the extreme misconduct and inhumanity Brandon suffered from Laux. Hearing his cruelty anew, it finally occurred to me why he seems the cruelest in this cast of characters: There's something particularly perverse about a man entrusted with the duty to protect choosing instead to hurt and humiliate.

Peirce, who also spent more than half a decade researching and making her film, chose to underscore the disturbing and participatory nature of Laux's questions about the crime by playing out the rape scene in flashback with Swank's voiceover, as she gets grilled by Laux. When I recently spoke with Peirce, she noted "a level of provocation and pleasure [that Laux derived] out of making Brandon relive his own torture."

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Two Decades After Brandon Teena's Murder, a Look Back at Falls City

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But another figure in this horrifying story remains free. On December 25, mere hours after being sexually assaulted, Brandon faced a demeaning and dehumanizing line of questioning from the Richardson County Sheriff, Charles Laux, when reporting his attackers. In a recent interview from her L.A. office, director Peirce called it "a third rape."

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Three people were killed that night in 1993, but only one wasn't mentioned in the movie. Phillip Devine. A black man with only one leg. Why was he not included? Not even mentioned at the end of the movie? Was it because he was black?

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I.

Marvin T. Nissen, a.k.a. Thomas M. Nissen, was convicted, in March, 1995, of one count of murder in the first degree and two counts of murder in the second degree in the Richardson County District Court, in Falls City, Nebraska. After making a bargain under which he agreed to testify against his co-defendant, John L. Lotter, Thomas Nissen was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, without possibility of parole. He was twenty-two years old when he was convicted, and is currently incarcerated at the Lincoln Correctional Center, in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Nissen is a slight man with a receding chin and reddish-blond hair, a few strands of which, during his weeklong trial, he had twirled into a shoulder-length rat's tail. "A bugger grip" was the way one of the marshals assigned to the courtroom, and wise to the ways of prison life, described this effect. I attended Nissen's trial, and also, later that spring, that of John Lotter. In February, 1996, Lotter was sentenced to death, largely because of the testimony of Thomas Nissen, who presented himself as a reluctant accomplice to Lotter's killer-in-chief; Lotter is now on death row at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.

In the summer of 1995, I began to correspond with Thomas Nissen, in the hope that I might interview him about the murders. He has an I.Q in the low eighties, but his letters, for all the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, were often acute about how he had got himself in a situation that could only be described as hopeless. With each of my letters, I would include one of my books or a book by my wife, Joan Didion, and Nissen's response indicated that he had read them closely and perceptively. Sometimes he would send drawings that had almost a draftsman's precision, renderings that alluded to his bleak future behind bars. One was headed "Thou Shalt Not Kill," and pictured Nissen's gravestone, as well as an electric chair. Then, in the spring of 1996, Nissen abruptly ended the correspondence:

Dear Mr. Dunne,

Good day Sir. Do to personal and financial problems, I will no longer do any type of interviews. That may change at a later date.

Until then,

/s/ Thomas Nissen

P.S. Please tell your wife hi for me.

2.

"Promote Beef-Run Over Chicken" was a bumper sticker I saw on Highway 50 as I drove down to Falls City from Lincoln on an unseasonably warm day in the late winter of 1994. It was my first trip to Nebraska, a journey for which I had prepared by re-reading Willa Cather's "My Ántonia" and "Obscure Destinies." This was corn and sorghum country; every few minutes, the Top 40 on the car radio was interrupted by the latest crop reports and commodities prices. Family farms dotted the rolling hills, and small herds of cattle grazed on the distant prairie. Outside Humboldt, twenty-six miles northwest of Falls City, I stopped and walked through a tiny, rocky cemetery, where a Czech surname was chiselled on every stone. The dead, I subsequently learned from the pastor of the Catholic church in Falls City, himself a Czech, were the descendants of Middle European refugees who had emigrated to America in the late nineteenth century to escape the dogs of war. Nebraska reminded them of home. They were the spiritual kin of Cather's Bohemians, who had settled in Webster County, to the west, for much the same reason.

The waterfall on the Nemaha River from which Falls City takes its name no longer exists: in the eighteen-fifties, the river channel was straightened, and the town moved to higher ground. "Welcome to Falls City," say the road signs leading into town. "A Great Place to Live," population 4,769. The center of town is dominated by the Richardson County Courthouse; the streets around the square are cobblestone, and on the lawn outside the courthouse is a miniature Statue of Liberty. The sheriff's department is on the third floor, and pinned to its bulletin board was a broadsheet that said, "See Dick Drunk, See Dick Drive, See Dick Die-Don't Be a Dick."

In all, I visited Richardson County four times over the next two years. The separate trials of Thomas Nissen and John Lotter were open-and-shut affairs, each lasting less than two weeks, including jury deliberations. The only suspense was whether Nissen, who was being squeezed by the prosecution, would roll over on Lotter in exchange for not being sentenced to death; for Nissen, this was a no-brainer. Because of concern that it would be difficult to find an impartial jury in a county with a population of less than ten thousand, the jurors and their alternates were selected in Omaha and put up across the street from the courthouse, at the Stephenson Hotel, where rooms went for twenty-two dollars a night. Except during final deliberations, the jury was not sequestered, although Robert Finn, the judge in both trials, suggested that for Omaha people having the freedom of Falls City might be considered a form of sequestration.

In spite of the intense media attention the murders originally generated, I was struck by the absence of a curious local citizenry in the courtroom. When I asked Robert Roh, the pastor of SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church (Catholics are the largest denomination in Falls City), about this apparent lack of community interest, he answered that only a minuscule percentage of his congregation-no more than five per cent, he suggested-knew anyone involved in the case. What seemed implicit in his remark was that the accused and the dead were an embarrassment to Falls City's upbeat, middle-class image of itself. In a promotional brochure, the Falls City Economic Development Board says, "The crime rate is low and the standard of living high." In this part of Nebraska, the high schools are so small that football is an eight-man sport-five linemen and three backs. Outside SS. Peter and Paul, there is a bell tower erected in honor of Steven J. Kopetzky, a football player at Sacred Heart, the Catholic high school. On the tower are inscribed the words "O.K., Coach, I'm ready to go." During a game in 1974, Kopetzky suffered a concussion, was examined by doctors, and then uttered the words now memorialized on the bell tower. Sent back into the game, he collapsed on the next play, and died. In more sophisticated municipalities, the parents would have sued the school and the church; in Falls City, Steven Kopetzky's parents gave money for the bell tower, so that his name and devotion to his team and his school would be remembered.

3.

Richardson County is in the southeastern corner of Nebraska, abutting Kansas and Missouri, and is washed by the Missouri River. It is the heart of the heartland, the America mythologized, in 1943, by Oscar Hammerstein in the lyrics of "Oklahoma!": "We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand." In fact, the sentimental celebration of neighborly values that so contributed to the success of "Oklahoma!" exactly coincided with the peripheralization of agrarian life; the military and industrial dislocations caused by the Second World War essentially finished the rural America of the small family farm, ranch, and homestead passed from generation to generation.

This part of prairie America may have been grand, but its history was also soaked with blood. During the Civil War, the raiders William Clarke Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, with their legions of poor whites sympathetic to the Confederacy, pillaged the border states of Kansas and Missouri for private gain and personal satisfaction. The James brothers rode with Quantrill and Anderson, and continued, after the war, to plunder and murder, heroes to the disaffected; Henry Fonda played Frank James in the movie. Economic discontent during the Depression turned the killers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow into public darlings and folk legends, because they had the effrontery to rob the very banks posting the foreclosure notices on property that had been farmed into extinction; Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty played Bonnie and Clyde. Nebraska's contribution to this pantheon was Charles Starkweather, a runty garbageman who, in 1958, with his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate, roamed from one end of the state to the other, killing nine people in less than a week; Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek played the Starkweather and Fugate surrogates in Terrence Malick's "Badlands."

Rulo, Nebraska, ten miles from Falls City, sits on the western bank of the Missouri River. It is a hard, rough hamlet of fewer than two hundred people, several bars, and a keno parlor. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, a militant doomsday cult led by a man called Michael Ryan established an encampment outside Rulo; Ryan saw the spot as a perfect fire base from which to defend Anglo-Saxon values against Soviet attack and the resultant breakdown of law and order. He claimed that the parts of the Bible with which he disagreed had been added by the Jews, and that Yahweh, as the cult called God, permitted polygamy, which had enabled him to marry not only a second wife but that wife's two sisters, one of whom was fifteen, as well as their mother. To prepare for the imminent Armageddon, Ryan and his followers stockpiled food, fuel, and seventy-five thousand rounds of ammunition. The lust for Armageddon was standard cult stuff, but Ryan added an individual spin. He designated wayward members of the cult slaves, and proclaimed that Yahweh sanctioned bestiality, sodomy, torture, and even murder if a slave was unrepentant or beyond saving.

An appellate decision handed down by the Nebraska Supreme Court affirming the first-degree murder conviction of Michael Ryan would not seem the likeliest place to find a lurid account of the events that took place in Rulo in the spring of 1985, but the very aridity of the decision's language invokes the gothic barbarism of the incidents. There were two victims-Luke Stice, the five-year-old son of Richard (Rick) Stice, a Ryan enlistee, and James Thimm, an adult member of the group who had been demoted to slave. Luke Stice's transgression was that he had apparently "expressed doubts about Yahweh." As punishment for these "bad thoughts," Ryan "forced Rick Stice to perform oral sex on his son Luke and forced Luke to perform oral sex on his father while the other men watched." Luke Stice died after Ryan "repeatedly shoved him, causing Luke's head to strike a cabinet." After Luke's death, "defendant [Ryan] forced Rick Stice to copulate with a goat on three different occasions."

James Thimm also had questioned the existence of Yahweh, and for this heresy Ryan insisted that he, too, be "forced to copulate with a goat." Next, Ryan "told Thimm that he was going to be sexually assaulted with a shovel handle." After some initial probing, the shovel handle was replaced by a thicker pick handle. Thimm was tied to a farrowing crate with baling wire, and his mouth was taped so his screams could not be heard. The next day, Ryan "told Thimm that he was going to skin a part of him. Defendant put on a pair of yellow kitchen gloves and used a razor blade to make incisions in Thimm's leg, and then used pliers to pull off strips of Thimm's skin." Finally, James Thimm died. When his body was disinterred, autopsies were performed by two pathologists, one representing Ryan and one the Richardson County attorney; the only disagreement between the two pathologists "was whether the victim's penis and scrotum had been cut away or had decomposed."

In 1986, Ryan was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in Nebraska's electric chair. As of June, 1996, Ryan's trials and the subsequent appeals of his death sentence have cost Richardson County more than four hundred and seventy thousand dollars; with the appeals continuing, it is unlikely that the hemorrhage of county resources will end in the foreseeable future. The expense of the Ryan case, along with massive flood damage from the 1993 rains that sent the Missouri over its banks, have essentially tapped Richardson County out.

What the county government did not need was another death-penalty trial that would further drain its exchequer. What it got during the early-morning hours of the last day of 1993 was a triple murder at a remote farmhouse a mile south of Humboldt, murders as singular in their way as the atrocities in Rulo, murders that would result in two more death-penalty trials that would have to be funded by Richardson County.

4.

Anna Mae Lambert lives in Pawnee City, thirty-six miles west of Falls City. She is a small, grandmotherly woman with short, graying hair. For nearly twenty years, she has been a social worker at the Pawnee Manor Living Center, a home for the elderly. She is divorced, and her ex-husband, John Lambert, works at the Campbell's Soup factory in Tecumseh. Late in 1993, their daughter, Lisa, an unmarried single mother with a nine-month-old son, Tanner, was renting, for a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, a ramshackle one-story farmhouse outside Humboldt. Tanner was the product of a brief encounter, and when Lisa became pregnant the boy's father abandoned her. Lisa had graduated from a community college and was working as a nurse's aide at the Colonial Acres nursing home, bathing, dressing, and feeding patients. Slight and pretty, Lisa Lambert was the sort of young woman who collected human strays and invited them to stay at her farmhouse. To supplement her income, she tended bar occasionally at Big Mike's, on Humboldt's town square, and she did not, according to another bartender at Big Mike's, "have an enemy in the world."

Shortly after 10 A.M. on December 31, 1993, Anna Mae Lambert drove up the narrow, rutted dirt path leading to Lisa's farmhouse with some things she had promised to drop off. Lisa's house was set among a stand of trees a quarter mile off the main road. Anna Mae Lambert noticed that the storm door was ajar and the front door was open, unusual in the bitter cold. She knocked on the door and received no response, but when she heard Tanner crying inside she entered. "There was a Negro sitting on the floor in the living room in front of the couch," Anna Mae Lambert testified during Thomas Nissen's trial, fourteen months later. "I just kept right on going. I just went right on through to the bedroom where I knew Tanner's bed was. . . . I went straight to the crib and picked Tanner up." It was then that she turned around and saw Lisa on her water bed, not moving, with blood on her face. The water bed had been punctured, and the floor was soaked. There was another person lying across the foot of the bed. "All I saw was just-just the legs of the other person," Anna Mae Lambert testified. "I never looked at the body of the other person."

Anna Mae Lambert picked Tanner up from the crib and went out to the dining room, where she placed a call to the Humboldt police. "I reported that I was at my daughter's house," Anna Mae Lambert testified, "and that there was bodies there." Then she prepared a bottle for Tanner, heating it in the microwave oven. Scrupulously, she tried to avoid touching anything, explaining to the court that she was an emergency medical technician and had been trained in how to behave at a crime site. "I touched only what I needed to," Anna Mae Lambert said, "and then I only done it with one finger and a thumb, if at all possible." Anna Mae Lambert also avoided looking at the body of the black man in the living room. "When I was sitting with Tanner in the chair," she said, "I didn't look around. I just looked at him and fed him and talked to him." This quiet competence suggests a woman who would not have been out of place driving a covered wagon west across the empty prairie. There in a house surrounded by three bodies, including that of her daughter, her first priorities were to take care of her cold and crying grandson, and to maintain the integrity of the crime scene.

Lying face up on her water bed, wearing a long green shirt, black shorts, and maroon underpants, Lisa Lambert had been shot three times. There was a non-life-threatening wound through skin and subcutaneous tissue on the right side of her chest, and two bullets fired into her brain at such close range that there were powder burns on her head; one bullet entered through her right eye and exited below the right ear, destroying Lisa Lambert's face.

The black man lying against the couch in the living room had been shot twice. He was identified as Phillip DeVine, he was twenty-two years old, and he had come to Richardson County in mid-December to spend the Christmas holidays with a young Falls City woman he had met at the Job Corps training center in Denison, Iowa. Phillip DeVine was physically handicapped, with only a stump for a right leg, and a prosthetic device that attached below the knee. He was wearing both his prosthetic leg and the boot it fit into. The bullet that killed him entered his skull above the right eyebrow and lodged at the base of his brain.

The third victim, the young woman lying at the foot of Lisa Lambert's water bed, was also a recent arrival in Richardson County. Her name was Teena Renae Brandon, she was from Lincoln, and she had been in the Humboldt and Falls City area for less than two months. When Teena Brandon was killed, she was wearing black Jockey-style underwear, sweat shorts, a sweatshirt, a T-shirt, and sweat socks. Her killer had placed his weapon under her chin and fired; the bullet fractured her left mandible and lodged in the base of her brain underneath her right eye. A second bullet had exited the skull just below her right ear. It was impossible for the pathologist who conducted the autopsy to discern which bullet was fired first, but either would have killed her almost instantly, because both caused massive brain damage. Teena Brandon had also been stabbed, a wound that penetrated five inches into the right lobe of her liver and could have killed her if the two bullets into her skull had not.

That all three victims had been shot execution style indicated to investigators that robbery was probably not the reason the intruder or intruders had broken into the farmhouse. Nothing seemed to be missing, and little disturbed, except for the pierced water bed and the open front door, which had been violently pushed in from the outside. Of the three victims, Teena Brandon was the most familiar to authorities. Since her arrival in Richardson County, in November, she had been in and out of trouble with the law. Shortly before midnight on November 27th, she had been cited for M.I.P., or minor in possession of an open bottle of alcohol, after a car she was driving was involved in an accident. Teena Brandon had produced a driver's license belonging to a cousin named Charles Brayman, and it was as Charles Brayman that she signed the complaint, and was ordered to appear for a hearing at 2 P.M. on December 15th at the Richardson County Courthouse, in Falls City. That Teena Brandon had been able to pass herself off as a man to the officers citing her was not that surprising. In the circles in which she moved, she was known as Brandon, a young man down from Lincoln, and as Brandon she, as he, had declared his love for, and slept with, a number of women in Falls City and Humboldt, including Lisa Lambert.

On December 15th, Teena Brandon, still posing as Charles Brayman, had shown up for her court date in Falls City and pleaded not guilty to the M.I.P. charge. Charles Brayman said he had the means to engage counsel and was released on his own recognizance. On his way out of the courthouse, Brayman was approached by a deputy sheriff who addressed him as "Teena" and asked if he could speak to her upstairs in the sheriff's department.

Teena Brandon must have known the jig was up. She made no claim that her name was Charles Brayman, and accompanied the deputy to the sheriff's office, where she was shown three checks on which she had allegedly forged the name of Carrie Gross, a friend and former roommate, including one for $121.35. The checks, drawn on Gross's account at the First Federal Bank of Lincoln, had been cashed at the bank's Humboldt branch. A teller at the bank, shown a photo lineup after Carrie Gross told authorities that the endorsement signatures on the checks were not hers, had identified Teena Brandon as the woman who had cashed them. After the deputy read Brandon her Miranda rights, she confessed to the theft and was arrested on a charge of second-degree forgery. Later that afternoon, in the same courtroom where two and a half hours earlier she had appeared as Charles Brayman, she was remanded to the county jail as Teena R. Brandon, setting in motion the chain of events that ended, as if inevitably, with the murders in Humboldt early on the morning of December 31, 1993.

5.

Willa Cather, when she was a young girl growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, in the late eighteen-eighties, cropped her hair short in the sort of brush cut a Marine lieutenant might favor, often wore men's clothes, and called herself William Cather, and sometimes William Cather, M.D. Cather was so discreet about her lesbianism, according to her biographer Sharon O'Brien, that many critics regard her as either celibate or asexual. Her relationships with women had the virtue of constancy; she shared an apartment in New York with Edith Lewis for almost forty years, and her friendship with Isabelle McClung lasted nearly as long, and was even relatively untroubled by McClung's marriage.

If Cather's literary life was centered in New York, her talent was sustained by Nebraska. She understood what it was to be different in a small prairie town and how toxic its gossip and small-mindedness could be. "This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny," the narrator says in "My Ántonia." "People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution." Cather, however, was a woman of rank, money, and ability, and her observations proceeded from the heights of privilege: for her, this prairie tyranny was ultimately "material," the raw stuff of art.

Teena Brandon was the raw stuff distilled to its very essence, a young woman from that vast constituency living at or below society's safety net. The tyranny from which she could not escape was less that of gender than of class, a prison more tyrannical than Willa Cather's prairie town, especially in white America, where class distinctions are not supposed to exist. Hers was the marginalized world of mobile homes, grungy rentals, public housing, unemployment, welfare, service jobs, minimum wage, social workers, domestic abuse, sexual molestation, absent fathers, paternity tests, teen-age pregnancies, foster homes, court-ordered psychological counselling, learning centers rather than high schools, Job Corps, petty crime, felony convictions, and penitentiary hard time.

She was small and vaguely androgynous. Her hair was cut short and her clothes were loose-fitting, less masculine than unisex. Her background was the kind that in literature the protagonist tries to overcome. Teena's mother, JoAnn Brandon, gave birth to her first child, Tammy, when she was fourteen years old. Teena's father, Pat Brandon, had Sioux Indian blood. He worked hard-hat jobs, and with his young family lived in a mobile home off Cornhusker Highway in northeast Lincoln. When JoAnn Brandon was sixteen, and one month pregnant with Teena, Pat Brandon, only nineteen himself, was killed in an automobile accident. Years later, Teena Brandon would tell psychiatric counsellors that her father was drunk when his convertible rolled over and went off a bridge.

This fragile family background has been compellingly and encyclopedically documented by the true-crime writer Aphrodite Jones, who appeared in Falls City not long after the murders to research "All She Wanted," a book that she published as a paperback original. From the day of her arrival in town, Aphrodite Jones was a high-profile presence. A strikingly handsome woman with a mass of dark hair, she was the most glamorous thing to hit Falls City in a long time, and she was not unaware of it. She did not suffer competitors gladly, and, to make her position clear, she had the foresight to sign the Brandons and other principals in the case to contracts in which the signees agreed to "exclusively supply author with interviews, letters, photos and other pertinent documents to support the author's writing of the book and film project," effectively freezing out other reporters. The contract read that no money would change hands until or unless a "motion picture" was "released" from any book Jones would publish, at which point the signee would receive ten thousand dollars or ten per cent of the book's movie purchase price, whichever was greater; the prospect of this payment was so problematic as to barely exist, and would come to seem, for those who signed, just one more disappearing dream.

These were people for whom dreams tended to disappear. Circumstances-marriage before she was out of junior high school, two daughters and widowhood by the time she was seventeen-had dashed JoAnn Brandon's dream of becoming a model, a career that she thought might be available because she had modelled children's clothes for department-store catalogues. She moved back to her mother's house, where she began the arduous task of raising Tammy and Teena as a single parent, relying on the social-security checks that began to arrive after Pat Brandon's death. Shortly before Teena's second birthday, JoAnn Brandon embarked on a second marriage. She was nineteen; the marriage lasted five years.

JoAnn Brandon was a Catholic, and managed to send her daughters to parochial schools. Teena was a tomboy, her mother and Tammy told the interviewers who sought them out when Teena's murder was leading the news. She played with a garter snake instead of a doll; she liked to tinker with cars and take radios apart; she imagined herself quarterbacking the football team at Pius X High School. Then there were the stories about how she and her sister had been sexually molested by a male relative. It was as if somewhere in this litany of gender uncertainty, rejection by men, and furtive molestation there might be an early clue, a first cause, a reason that would make Teena's subsequent ventures across the gender divide easier to accommodate.

JoAnn Brandon's ability to control her daughters was compromised by her own hard relationships. Like tumbleweed, Tammy and Teena began to move about the underside of Lincoln, in and out of the houses and trailers of friends and lovers who made up a floating hegemony of rootless, unsupervised children. Teena moved in with Traci, then with Tammy, who had been involved with a man who beat her up. Tammy thought Teena might be stealing money from her, Aphrodite Jones reports, and the arguments between them forced Teena to move back in with JoAnn. As if to erase any lingering femininity, Teena bound her breasts with an elastic athletic bandage. When Operation Desert Storm was heating up, she tried to enlist in the Air Force, but was rejected after flunking the written test.

Tammy got pregnant, and decided to give up the child-a half-black daughter, who was adopted by a lesbian couple in San Francisco. Teena was distraught; the idea of being an aunt had appealed to her. Her best friend, Sara, got pregnant, and Teena suggested that she would like to help raise that baby, and perhaps adopt it. Illegitimacy is generally regarded as a black inner-city problem by middle-class whites, a comforting illusion. But twenty-two per cent of the white children born in 1991 were born out of wedlock; more than eighty per cent of these single mothers had only a high-school education or less, and sixty-nine per cent survived on less than twenty thousand dollars a year. On this rung of the social ladder, birth control was seen as a dreary restriction-messy, expensive, and unspontaneous-and, because babies conferred a kind of status on teen mothers with nothing much going for them, abortion was not considered an option.

6.

It is interesting to speculate on the degree of empathy Willa Cather might have displayed toward Teena Brandon. A clue can be found in her portrait of Ántonia Shimerda, the immigrant Bohemian servant girl who is the heroine of "My Ántonia." There was a certain Lady Bountiful aspect to Cather that perhaps led her to invest Ántonia with more decency, spirit, strength, and calm than any character can easily bear. I suspect that Teena Brandon would have made Cather impatient: Teena was socially and economically no more disadvantaged than Ántonia, and one can assume that Cather would have regarded her obsession with gender and its discontents as self-indulgent, and her gender confusion as an excuse to abdicate personal responsibility.

After leaving Sara's place, Teena Brandon was once again forced to live in her mother's mobile home, in a trailer court on Cornhusker Highway out past the state fairgrounds. The court was situated behind V.F.W. Post 131 ("Wednesday Bingo, Public Welcome"), Laura's Hair Care, and Close-Outs Unlimited, an outlet for tools. Across Cornhusker Highway was a line of grain elevators, and day and night a steady flow of Burlington Northern trains pulled away, hauling loaded grain cars to market. Many of the mobile homes had wind chimes, and when a breeze came up the effect was like listening to a concerto for xylophones. It was a place to come from, to get out of, but for Teena Brandon, not yet eighteen, Cornhusker Highway represented a comfort zone she seemed disinclined to leave. Unengaged by school, she failed to graduate from Pius X. She was undereducated, her ambition was limited, she had no specific gifts on which she could capitalize, and, most important, she was without positive sexual identity.

Destiny intervened, in late December, 1990, when a thirteen-year-old named Liz dialled a wrong number. Liz liked the sound of the unknown voice on the other end of the line, and the two began to flirt. The voice said his name was Billy Brinson. Liz proposed that she and Billy get together, and Billy was game. On New Year's Eve, Liz and Billy Brinson went on a roller-skating date. Billy Brinson, of course, was Teena Brandon, and she was finally cast in a part in which she felt comfortable: the Peter Pan mentor to a post-pubescent little girl.

Liz was followed quickly by Heather, who was fourteen, as Billy Brinson effortlessly retooled his name to Billy Brandon. He was a good kisser and an expert cuddler, and he stuffed socks into his shorts to give his groin the appearance of a male basket; later, he would wear a dildo. Billy moved out of JoAnn Brandon's mobile home and in with Heather and her mother, Ruth. He suggested to Heather that he was a hermaphrodite, or, alternatively, a man trapped inside a woman's body, explanations, JoAnn Brandon says, that Teena/Billy picked up from "The Montel Williams Show." Billy told Heather that he had undergone sex-change surgery, but as he refined the story over the next years he would claim that the process had only just begun, that there was something down there, it was small, but it would get bigger by the time all the operations were completed. In carnal situations, Brandon smoothly managed to avoid exposing his genitalia; the butch was always the toucher, never the touched, and in time he worked the references to future surgeries into a routine that passed muster with female companions prepared to take it on faith. Heather was unequipped or unwilling to express any doubts she might have entertained, so when Billy asked her to marry him she said yes; they decided to spend their honeymoon on a cruise.

The metamorphosis of Teena into Billy unhinged JoAnn Brandon. She left messages on Ruth's answering machine, saying that Heather and Billy were lesbians; her tone was so threatening that the police cited her for disturbing the peace. No one believed JoAnn when she kept insisting that Billy Brandon did not exist, that Billy was in fact her daughter Teena. Teena vehemently denied to her mother that she was a lesbian, adding to the strain between them.

Billy was soon calling himself Brandon, and in the teen world of the underprivileged he had become a lady killer of some proportion. Fidelity was not his long suit; Heather was followed by Reanna and Danielle and Lindsay and Gina and Daphne and uncounted others. The reality principle seemed not to apply; Heather went on the pill and Daphne claimed that Brandon got her pregnant. With his sexuality a constant source of conjecture, Brandon was nomadic, moving from place to place, girl to girl, seldom staying anywhere long. He picked up a bogus photo I.D. so he could get jobs as a temp, or a pizza delivery boy, or a vacuum-cleaner salesman working on commission. Brandon's idea of courtship, when some nymphet caught his fancy, was to pitch old-fashioned woo-shower the object of his affection with flowers and candy and pizzas and promise rings and marriage proposals. He rented a hotel suite and wore a tuxedo for a party to announce his engagement to Gina, and charged everything to the room; he collected the photos of this event into a scrapbook that he called his wedding album.

To pay for this extravagance, Teena Brandon had fallen into the bad habit of stealing. A.T.M. cards were one source of income, and forged checks another. In general, she, as he, stole only from friends or the parents of friends. Surprisingly, some victims were willing to defend him; they saw Brandon as a Nebraska Robin Hood, in that the presents he charged on other people's credit cards were not for himself but for his girlfriends. Not everyone was so forgiving. In the early months of Teena Brandon's gender masquerade, the Lincoln Police Department started a rap sheet on her; its first listing was "Arrested 03-13-91" for possession of stolen property, "found guilty, fined $500." She also served three days in jail. The arrests mounted up, but in most instances the cases were dismissed, the charges were dropped, or the county attorney declined to prosecute.

In October, 1991, however, Teena Brandon was arrested on a forgery charge, and this time she could not talk her way out of it. Before her case came to trial, however, she had a high-decibel fight with Heather over her true identity: man or woman, Brandon or Teena. In its aftermath, according to Aphrodite Jones, she swallowed a bottle of antibiotics and was rushed to the hospital. A week later, she was admitted to the Lancaster County Crisis Center, in Lincoln, where she was placed under suicide alert. After a week's hospitalization, she was discharged from the Crisis Center, where therapists had diagnosed her as a transsexual with a personality disorder.

In March, 1992, in a Lancaster County District courtroom, Teena Brandon was convicted of second-degree forgery, and was sentenced to eighteen months' probation, under the terms of which she would agree to undergo psychological counseling, not consume alcoholic beverages, get a high-school equivalency diploma, or G.E.D., and make restitution in the amount of $186.49 to Food Bonanza, where she passed one of the forged checks. Probation, even for a felony, did not make Teena Brandon any less feckless. "Attendance is sporadic & infrequent," the psychological clinician assigned to her at the Lancaster County Mental Health Center wrote. Four months later, the counsellor reported, "Teena does what is needed to get by. No changes noted in taking responsibility, personal growth, or attitude." Two months after that, Teena Brandon was terminated from the program. "She told so many different versions of things it was hard to know what to believe," the counsellor wrote in her last report. "Further therapy is unlikely to be of help."

In spite of her probation, new entries piled up in Teena Brandon's arrest history. She seemed blithely unconcerned; lying came naturally to her, and because lying is the lingua franca of the court system she was in her element. She consistently put off court dates, and her excuses were all of the-dog-ate-my-homework variety:

"I have a final that I have to take that can not be taken at any other time, to get through school."

"My grandfather passed away this week. Dan Maupin was his name."

"I have to finish taking my classes and I have only two full weeks to finish them."

"I need to retake my drivers test to recieve my Driver's Permit, and I have another couple of test to take for my G.E.D. for probation that day, and I am trying to not miss to many days of work, sir."

"I had a family emergency that is in South Sioux City. My aunt had been in a hit and run accident and was seriously injured. She has taken care of me since I was little."

"My last requests was because my aunt was in an accident and in serious condition. She passed away Wed 29, 1993, and her funeral is on the Mon 4 of October, and the family would like to go Fri morning-my only transportation up there."

Outside the criminal-justice system, Teena Brandon still functioned as the young man called Brandon, and for Brandon there was always a new girl. Never entirely certain of Brandon's masculinity, these teen-agers explained his attraction in the impoverished and self-dramatizing rhetoric of adolescence: He was the only one for me. . . . He was so cute. . . . I fell madly in love. . . . I worshipped the ground he walked on. . . . He was a perfect gentleman. . . . He knew how a woman wanted to be treated. . . . He gave me a teddy bear. . . . He broke my heart. . . . He was using me. . . . He was the biggest cheat around. . . . He was playing games with me. . . . He made me lose my faith in men. Many of these child-women had experience with domestic abuse and sexual molestation. They resided on a social frontier where women expected to get battered, where violence against their persons was accepted as a clause in the human contract. Brandon's appeal was that he was an unthreatening romantic, a lean and unmuscular quasi-man who offered sex without pregnancy or fisticuffs.

I talked about this appeal with a female-to-male cross-dresser I had contacted in New York. "I did a lot of things Teena Brandon did, but not so rambunctious," she told me. "He made them feel good. And when you start feeling good there's a lot of mental editing that goes on. The butch pays for things. He opens doors, buys the movie tickets." That Brandon might be a hermaphrodite was a story many of his conquests accepted with few questions, in order to reconcile what they were doing with him in bed. "It's a grade-school approach to sexuality," my contact said. Teena Brandon's thievery "was part of the trip. It's a danger trip. She was out on the edge, pushing the envelope." Street culture had penetrated the larger cities of the heartland, and Teena Brandon's constant moving around Lincoln, house to house, trailer to trailer, was life at the squatter's mean street level. "The survival thing can come apart any second," my contact said. "On the street you're bound to meet other social outlaws. You just hope they're not sociopaths."

Even the real possibility of prison did not deter Teena Brandon from forging more checks and stealing more A.T.M. cards in order to meet the financial demands of courtship. By the fall of 1993, she had violated so many conditions of the probation received for her 1992 forgery conviction that a Lancaster County judge had issued a statewide warrant for her arrest. Her friend Gina discovered that the presents Brandon had given her had been charged on Gina's credit card. Early in September, Teena Brandon was arrested for forging a bank withdrawal slip for a hundred and thirty-five dollars, a second felony when she was still on probation for the first.

Teena Brandon's world was contracting. She was a woman whose entire survival strategy was based on not wanting to face certain facts; she had detoured around what she did not wish to see, compartmentalized what she did see, moved on, started over. Imagine her state of mind: If she was sent to prison, she would be adrift in the overt lesbian culture that thrives in confinement. Her continued insistence that she was not gay eliminated retreat into the gay communities of Lincoln and Omaha, where she could have been sheltered and nourished. Her only alternative was to take her sexual ambiguity and lie low in a place where no one knew her.

That opportunity came in November. Daphne had a friend named Carrie Gross. Carrie Gross happened to be crashing in a farmhouse outside Humboldt, an hour and a half south of Lincoln. With Charles Brayman as a fallback alias, Teena Brandon decamped for Richardson County, to hole up in the Humboldt farmhouse along with Carrie, Carrie's boyfriend, Mike, and Lisa Lambert, whose place it was. Her diminishing choices notwithstanding, Teena Brandon's brio remained intact, and she acted as if her problems would never catch up with her.

7.

William Holden, as Hal Carter in the 1955 movie made from William Inge's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play, "Picnic," hopped off a freight passing through a sere Kansas farm town one Labor Day morning, and as soon as his feet hit the ground the hormones of the local females began to bubble. Full of self-pity and grandiose failed schemes, Carter claimed that he'd had a Hollywood screen test, and that the studio had wanted to rename him Brush Carter. In fact, he was only a drifter and braggart who wanted to be anything but the "bum" that, in a fleeting flash of honesty, he said he was. Hal Carter was someone new in the claustrophobic emptiness of a small town, where being "new" offered immediate entrée, and of course he took up with Madge Owens, the prettiest girl in town. Madge's mother, an abandoned wife who had reared her two daughters alone, wanted someone better than Hal Carter for her oldest child, to which Madge, a nineteen-year-old five-and-dime clerk whose sole negotiable asset was her looks, could only reply, "You don't love someone because he's perfect."

The arrival of Brandon in Richardson County had much the same effect as Hal Carter's Labor Day stopover in Inge's Kansas town. Around the lumpen hangouts where the underemployed young gathered, Brandon quickly became a familiar figure, a regular at the Oasis karaoke club and at the Kwik Shop, a gas station and minimart on Harlan Street. "He was hot," said a waitress at the Falls City Frosty Queen, and that was the only reference Brandon needed to start operating again. Lisa Lambert was the first to succumb to his charms, and Brandon's immediate offer to adopt her infant son, Tanner, seemed to vouch for his intentions. Lisa claimed that she actually had intercourse with Brandon, Aphrodite Jones tells us, although Lisa added the caveat that she was drunk at the time. There remained the puzzle, however, of the tampon wrappers someone had discarded into the heating vents at the farmhouse; the wrappers did not come from Lisa's tampons, and her other roommate, Carrie Gross, was pregnant, and not menstruating. It was a puzzle that Lisa Lambert chose not to address.

Brandon was cute, but Brandon was also fickle, and he was already turning his attention to Kelli, another nymphet at the Frosty Queen. Lisa was broken-hearted, and poured out her feelings in a letter to Brandon, wondering how she had failed him, how their love might be repaired. She need not have worried about Kelli, who was only a pit stop on Brandon's romantic odyssey. He had, it seemed, finally found true love. Her name was Lana Tisdel, and to Brandon she was Madge Owens in "Picnic."

8.

The Tisdel sisters, Lana and her elder sibling, Leslie, were a Falls City itch that every local stud at loose ends felt impelled to scratch. Some branches of the Tisdel family were local gentry. Lana and Leslie's aunt, Virginia Tisdel, had spearheaded a drive for a war memorial honoring Richardson County's dead from the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam; a plaque in the courthouse lobby made special mention of "Mrs. Virginia 'Ginny' Tisdel" for her efforts as "Project Chairman & Coordinator." When Lana's father, Leland, wedded Linda Gutierres, the tonier Tisdels thought that he had married below the salt, and kept Linda at a distance. Leland and Linda finally split up, and their daughters, Leslie and Lana, bounced back and forth between their parents. Linda received disability payments, and she and her daughters, when they were around, lived in cheap rentals. In the fall of 1993, the three were together in a Falls City house that was a crash pad for transients, boyfriends, and miscreants either wanted by or of interest to the authorities.

Leslie Tisdel was loud, overweight, hard to handle. In and out of juvenile detention, she was drawn into a series of abusive relationships with men; at sixteen, she attempted suicide, and at seventeen she gave birth to a half-black daughter, Jasmine. Her life was so volatile that her mother, Linda, forced her to grant custody of Jasmine to an older married half sister, Jerrilyn, who had no children of her own. In the fall of 1993, Leslie Tisdel, trying to pull her life together, applied for the federal Job Corps program, and was sent to the Job Corps center in Denison, Iowa, a place invariably identified as the home town of Donna Reed.

Job Corps, however, was not a reflection of the middle-class America portrayed in "The Donna Reed Show." The center was in effect a boot camp for deprived youths. Wake-up was at 6:15 A.M., and students had to be in their rooms by 10 P.M.; profanity and racial epithets were monitored under "behavior management" strictures. The stress was on discipline and "zero tolerance" of drugs and alcohol; any student caught violating zero tolerance was immediately expelled. When I visited the center, in June, 1996, a hundred and eight students had been dismissed in the previous twelve months, forty-five for assault, sixty-three for possession of controlled substances; with a student population of two hundred and eighty-seven, the termination rate was better than one in three. It was in this environment that Leslie Tisdel met Phillip DeVine.

Phillip DeVine's life was not without hardship of its own. Because of a defective prescription drug that his mother had taken during pregnancy, he was born two months premature, with a damaged heart, crossed eyes, lungs that were permanently scarred, and a right leg that ended at the knee. In spite of his physical torment, he had grown into a strapping youth, so agile on his prosthetic leg that he was able to compete vigorously in sandlot sports. When he was still a child, his parents divorced acrimoniously, and he spent most of his time with his father, first in California, then in Maryland. During his childhood, his mother had become an acolyte of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of transcendental meditation. She ran TM seminars, and after a journey of exploration to Ethiopia had changed her name from Phyllis to Aisha, which in Arabic, she said, means "the living one." Ultimately, she remarried, left California, and moved to Fairfield, Iowa, where the Maharishi University of Management is situated. Subsequently, Phillip DeVine decided to join her in Fairfield, but, when Fairfield palled, the Job Corps center in western Iowa beckoned.

Phillip DeVine flourished in Denison. He was active in the center's Business Professionals of America chapter, and was selected to attend a Job Corps conference in Washington, where he met Iowa's two senators and was presented as one of the program's model citizens. It was only a coincidence that he was in Denison when Leslie Tisdel arrived, but that coincidence would cost him his life. In the fall of 1993, he had broken his good left leg playing touch football and had to withdraw from the Job Corps while it healed. Had he not broken his leg, he would, as planned, have transferred to another Job Corps center, in Colorado, and not run into Leslie Tisdel.

The center's rigid rules chafed against Leslie Tisdel's independent nature, but she and Phillip DeVine immediately connected. Leslie hoped to regain custody of Jasmine, and Phillip indicated that he was willing to act as Jasmine's father. Life moved so fast in these circles that it seemed of little consequence that the two hardly knew each other; Phillip DeVine was black, and that made him a perfect step-father candidate for the half-black Jasmine. Leslie Tisdel finally withdrew from the Job Corps, but not before she invited Phillip DeVine to spend Christmas in Falls City.

Leslie's sister, Lana, was nineteen years old in 1993, a femme fatale with a fitful sex drive; she told a friend that once a week was more than enough. Somehow she had escaped the unwed-motherhood that burdened so many of her contemporaries. Lana had not graduated from high school nor was she employed; she passed her time driving around Falls City and singing karaoke at the Oasis. Early in December, 1993, Brandon hit on Lana, an encounter that effectively erased both Lisa Lambert and Kelli of the Frosty Queen from his radar screen. The next day, Brandon took Lana to lunch at Hardee's, and that night took her to see "Addams Family Values" at the local movie house. On December 12th, Brandon failed to show up at the party Lisa was giving in Humboldt to celebrate his twenty-first birthday, bringing that romance to a screaming halt. Brandon moved from Humboldt into Linda Gutierres's house, and Lana Tisdel's bed. The sex was good, Lana reported, and Brandon stood up to pee-a modest endorsement of a heterosexual bedfellow.

Phillip DeVine had also shown up to spend the holidays in Falls City at Linda Gutierres's house, but daily proximity soon made Leslie Tisdel less fond than she had been in Denison. Soon after his arrival, she began complaining that he was too possessive. This minor turbulence seemed only to enhance the ongoing party at the house. The regulars were Leslie, Lana, Brandon, Phillip, and a couple of small-time local ex-convicts, John Lotter and Thomas Nissen. Nissen and Lotter horsed around with Brandon, swapping stories about the slickest ways to get laid, and played cards with Phillip DeVine; they both called Linda Gutierres "Mom," and used her house to hook up with their girlfriends, Missy Wisdom and Rhonda McKenzie. Missy, Linda Gutierres's teen-age half sister, was carrying on with Nissen, who was rarely faithful to his wife, Kandi, a wanderer herself, while Rhonda was the mother of Lotter's infant daughter, Rochelle. Everyone knew everyone else. Life was a beach.

9.

When Brandon was arrested, on December 15th, for forging the checks on Carrie Gross's bank account, he was identified in the Richardson County jail as "Teena Brandon." Teena Brandon's appearance bond was twenty-five hundred dollars, and she spent a week in the lockup, wearing a V-necked orange prisoner's jumper that, Lana Tisdel noticed while visiting her in jail, revealed her breasts when she leaned over. On December 22nd, Lana Tisdel was finally able to make the ten-percent payment that sprang Teena from custody. The two hundred and fifty dollars was written on a signed blank check that Lana's father, Leland Tisdel, had given her to get her hair done, but, because Lana was underage, the bond agreement was actually signed by Thomas Nissen, whom she had met only a few weeks before, and who was already smitten with her and her friends.

Once out of jail, Teena Brandon again tried, as if nothing had happened, to pass herself off as Brandon and lead a social life as an unemployed young man about Falls City. But she was now clearly identified as a woman, and was no longer welcomed by Linda Gutierres, who was furious at her daughter's liaison with Teena. Since Lisa Lambert had thrown her off the farm in Humboldt after the check forgeries, Teena camped out wherever she could, including in Thomas Nissen's house.

Housekeeping and child rearing had never been Kandi Nissen's strong suits; her children ran free and the house was a pigpen of dirty dishes, unemptied waste-baskets, and moldy French fries stuck on couches, but it was a place where Teena could stay. On Christmas Eve, Nissen had a party that turned ugly as the guests-the Tisdel sisters, Teena Brandon, Phillip DeVine, and assorted misfits who had spent too much time inside the penal system-fuelled themselves with liquor. Nissen and John Lotter, strangers only a month before, had become constant drinking companions and fuck buddies, prison toughs obsessed with proving once and for all what they and everyone else already knew: that Brandon was a woman.

Dressed in jeans and a loose-fitting shirt, Teena cooed with Lana Tisdel in the squalor of the living room and was the object of drunken threats from Lotter and Nissen. Teena had always been able to talk her way out of such situations, but Lotter and Nissen were not to be denied. As Christmas Eve wore on, they took Teena into a bathroom and removed her pants and underwear to reveal her pubic symphysis. Even this did not satisfy them. After everyone else left or went to bed, Nissen and Lotter carried Teena Brandon outside to Lotter's Crown Victoria and drove to the Hormel plant at the edge of town, where, in the back seat of the car, they proceeded to penetrate her vaginally and anally. Then Nissen beat her up. When they finished, they drove her back to Nissen's house, told her to clean up, and warned her of the consequences if she reported the assault. While pretending to take a shower, Teena squeezed out the bathroom window; bruised and bleeding, she made her way to Linda Gutierres's house. Leslie Tisdel called the police. Teena's lip was cut, her face was red and swollen, and she had a welt on her back shaped like the sole of a boot. At the Falls City Community Hospital, a rape-kit examination indicated vaginal bleeding and trauma, and there were semen specimens in both her anus and her vagina.

On Christmas Day, Teena Brandon filed a rape complaint against Lotter and Nissen, and was interrogated by the Richardson County sheriff, Charles Laux. It is difficult to listen to the tape of that interrogation without wondering if Sheriff Laux might not have thought that Teena Brandon had only got what was coming to her. He was salacious, accusing, and derogatory, referring to her "box" and to the sex act as "sinking it in." "Why do you run around with girls instead of guys, being you're a girl yourself?" Laux asked. "Why do you make girls think you're a guy?" "I have a sexual identity crisis," Teena Brandon whispered. When asked where she was first entered, her voice was barely audible: "My vagina." It was as if the admission that she had a vagina were a worse humiliation than the actual penetration.

After the Humboldt murders, Laux and Douglas Merz, the Richardson County attorney, scrambled to explain why they had not arrested Nissen and Lotter after Teena Brandon's Christmas Day complaint. Laux argued that Teena Brandon lacked credibility because she had passed herself off as Charles Brayman. For his part, Merz claimed that Teena's charges were insufficiently corroborated, and that even with Nissen and Lotter's extensive criminal records, there was not enough evidence to arrest them and put them in the county jail, if only to cool off over the holidays. Given the results of the rape-kit examination, this was a decision vigorously disputed, in retrospect, by other law-enforcement officials throughout the state. "If this was your daughter, sister, or mother that was assaulted," a sheriff from Scotts Bluff County asked, "would it take this long?" And the sheriff of Clay County: "They should have been arrested that night."

Later that Christmas Day, Linda Gutierres warned Nissen and Lotter that Teena had ratted them out; three days later, both men officially denied to local authorities that they had either assaulted or raped her. The question now facing Teena Brandon was where she could go. If she went home to Lincoln, she faced incarceration in the Nebraska Center for Women for violating the terms of her 1992 probation; in Falls City, she was looking at a felony conviction for forgery. Nissen and Lotter had warned her not to report the rape, and she had. She was a pariah. Her confidence faltered, then returned when Lisa Lambert said that she could come back to the Humboldt farmhouse. Leslie Tisdel had broken up with Phillip DeVine, and he, too, was offered shelter by Lisa Lambert until his mother could forward him the money to buy a bus ticket home to Iowa.

However few her options, Teena Brandon still acted as if being a she-man were a viable role, and in the days that followed she cruised the roads between Humboldt and Falls City, hanging out with Lana Tisdel, avoiding Nissen and Lotter. There was danger, but even though she told her mother that Nissen and Lotter had threatened to kill her, she did not have the imaginative range to consider the idea that she was truly at risk.

10.

Violence is the way stupid people try to level the playing field. Lotter and Nissen: their sociopathic curricula vitae were so similar as to be almost interchangeable. Psychiatric instability, tumultuous family lives, absentee parents, trigger tempers, suicidal tendencies, foster homes, a fascination with lethal objects, juvenile detention, sexual promiscuity, substance abuse, crime (theft and attempted burglary for Lotter, arson for Nissen), prison. As a child, John Lotter was hyperactive and a slow learner, and would use whatever weapon he could lay his hands on-hammer, pencil, knife-to beat up and injure other children. A juvenile court declared him uncontrollable, and he became a ward of the state; he was, in fact, so uncontrollable that he was turned down by Boys Town, which seemed to disprove Father Edward Flanagan's piety that there was no such thing as a bad boy. He stayed in a foster home sporadically, attended five schools in six years, and spent four of the six years before the Humboldt murders in custody. The only person who could get through to him was Lana Tisdel, who had known him since they were children, and with whom he maintained an off-and-on relationship between incarcerations.

Nissen's mother, Sharon, was pregnant with her first child (out of wedlock) when she was fourteen, and married Ed Nissen after a ten-day courtship when she was fifteen; when his parents split up, Nissen, then two, moved to Mississippi with his father. In adolescence, according to Aphrodite Jones, he began stealing cars (including an eighteen-wheeler), flirted with white supremacy, and finally moved back to Falls City to live with his mother, who was now married to an ex-con and carrying a full rap sheet of her own-bad checks, D.W.I., resisting arrest. Nissen ran off to a homeless shelter in Washington state, then returned to Nebraska, where he landed in the arms of Kandi Gibson, a sixteen-year-old unmarried mother with a six-month-old daughter. Their relationship was so volatile that Nissen enlisted in the Army. He soon went over the hill and travelled with a carnival before going back to Kandi. They were married in June, 1992; a few days later, Nissen began cheating on his wife. Twenty-three days after his marriage, he was arrested for setting two fires in Falls City; he was convicted of second-degree arson, and in September of 1992 received a prison sentence of one to three years.

The penitentiary offered Lotter and Nissen the only structured environment they had ever really experienced. Survival in prison is predicated on a simple premise: power rules. Sexual imperialism flourishes; the weak belong to the strong. According to someone who did time with him, Lotter attracted the attention of a convict with the discomforting nickname of "Tugboat." In the predicament they found themselves in after Teena Brandon's Christmas interrogation, Lotter and Nissen reverted to the penitentiary premise. If they had been powerless in prison, here was a situation where they thought they had the power. They did not want to go back to prison, and they thought Teena Brandon could make a rape charge stick. It was as if, having threatened to kill her if she talked, they thought a failure to carry through on that threat would be considered less than manly.

Logic seemed a missing chromosome. Rape is historically difficult to prosecute, and county sheriffs and small-town police in rural jurisdictions are often less than diligent in the pursuit of the accused, who will invariably argue that the sex was consensual. Charges are usually dropped, generally when the alleged victim refuses to testify, as Teena Brandon, whose history was to cut and run in the face of trouble, might well have done. Rape is a crime, moreover, that rarely has witnesses; if charges are brought, the case usually degenerates into a disputatious litany of "he said, she said." That a jury was unlikely to convict Lotter and Nissen of rape, especially given Teena Brandon's gender ambiguity, was a factor they seemed never to consider. What they also failed to consider was that murder would be easier to prove than rape, and that if the putative rape victim was killed they would be the top suspects.

Their plans began to take shape the day after Christmas. "It was a combined idea," Nissen would testify when he appeared as a state's witness against Lotter. "I mean, me and John Lotter arrived at it by talking about and just goin' on and on with the conversation." A special prosecutor from the state attorney general's office asked if they had discussed the method of execution. "To chop her hands and her head off," Nissen answered. His voice sounded computer-generated. "In order that the body couldn't be identified." And the tools for the execution? "Took a hatchet, a rope, and a change of clothing." Why the change of clothing? "In the event that blood was on the clothes."

Thinking that Teena Brandon might have gone back to Lincoln, Lotter and Nissen drove there the day after Christmas with their murder paraphernalia, staking out three residences they had found in the address book Teena had left behind after the rape on Christmas Eve. In fact, Teena Brandon was still in Richardson County. Returning to Falls City, Nissen and Lotter festered through the week, making and discarding plans to murder Teena, and by so doing solve what they still regarded as their only problem. This would also avenge Lana Tisdel, who in their minds had been taken advantage of by a sexual deviate.

Their inchoate rage inflamed by a five-day drunk, Lotter and Nissen finally worked up the nerve to act. In the early hours of December 31, 1993, they set out in Lotter's Crown Victoria to find Teena Brandon. They made three stops before leaving Falls City. From his mother's house, Lotter took a knife belonging to his father and two pairs of work gloves. The next stop was at the home of a friend named Eddie Bennett, who with his wife, Amy, was entertaining another couple. Nissen stayed in the car while Lotter went inside. On the pretext of using the bathroom, Lotter went into the bedroom and stole a .380-calibre semi-automatic handgun that Bennett kept in a dresser drawer; on the way out of the house, Lotter stopped to feel up Amy Bennett. The last stop was at the house of Linda Gutierres, who told them that Teena Brandon, along with Phillip DeVine, was staying with Lisa Lambert, outside Humboldt.

Question to Nissen from the special prosecutor: "As you drove to Humboldt from Falls City that night, was there any discussion along the way of what was going to happen once you got there?"

Answer from Nissen: "Me and John Lotter talked about killing Teena Brandon, and I told John Lotter . . . that if he shot Teena Brandon and there was other people around, that the other people would have to be killed also."

11.

They were in the farmhouse for no more than five minutes. According to Nissen's time line, Lotter first shot Teena Brandon, whom they discovered hiding under Lisa Lambert's bed; for good measure, Nissen stabbed her in the stomach, the only admission of life-threatening behavior in his self-serving account of what happened that night. Nissen said that Lotter was responsible for all the shootings, and he even claimed to have removed Lisa Lambert's son, Tanner, from his mother's arms before Lotter fired the second shot, which killed her. In Nissen's version, Lotter led Phillip DeVine from the second bedroom, where he had been hiding, into the living room; Nissen told DeVine to sit down on the couch, at which point Lotter shot him in the head.

Nissen's account of the murders, devised as it was to avoid a death sentence, lacks coherence. Phillip DeVine was a large, athletic man, and was wearing his prosthetic leg when he was killed. To believe Nissen's chronology, it would be necessary to accept that DeVine was cowering in the second bedroom as shots were fired and both the killers and their victims were screaming at the top of their lungs. It beggars the imagination that DeVine would not have tried either to escape or to come to the aid of Lisa Lambert and Teena Brandon. If he had crashed out a window into the frigid darkness, he could not have been worse off than he ended up. The prosecutors, however, were not interested in such speculation; their priority was to get a conviction, and Nissen's testimony, as given, was enough to put Lotter on death row and Nissen in prison for life.

Five minutes in the farmhouse, three people dead. Nissen and Lotter drove into Kansas on the way home, so as to approach Falls City from the south rather than from the north; if they were spotted, they would be seen coming not from Humboldt but from the opposite direction-con cunning. On the outskirts of Falls City, they stopped and threw the gloves, the handgun, and the knife into the Nemaha River. The river, however, was frozen, and the objects remained on the ice, where investigators found them after Anna Mae Lambert discovered the bodies at her daughter's house, and the alarm went out to pick up Nissen and Lotter. The knife was in a sheath, and on the sheath was marked the owner's name-" LOTTER. "

12.

On winter roads, the twenty-six-mile drive from Falls City to Humboldt takes thirty-one minutes. Rational people might assume that during that half hour the fevers of vengeance would subside. Criminals, except when carrying out a contract Mafia hit or during a territorial dispute among drug dealers, do not deliberately embark on a mission they know will result in multiple murders. At some point, self-preservation kicks in and, with it, the sure understanding that the killing of three people will increase the penalties exponentially. With Nissen and Lotter, there was an almost delusionary disengagement from reality. They were like the characters in Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers," high on doing it. A month before, Nissen had not even known Lotter and Lana Tisdel, and here he was on a murder mission with one on behalf of the other. I kept trying to imagine the scene when they left the farmhouse. There was no escape, no place to run. They must have known that they would be the prime suspects, but they made no attempt to flee. On the ride back to Falls City, did they fight, argue, blame Teena Brandon for what they had done? They both had grown up in Nebraska, knew the bitter cold of the Nebraska winter, knew that the rivers froze, but still they threw their weapons onto the ice-covered Nemaha, because-I can only think-killers in gangster pictures throw their guns into the river after a hit. Their single alibi attempt was to order Kandi Nissen and Rhonda McKenzie to lie if asked what time the two returned to Nissen's house-l A.M. was the time they agreed on. Then they went to sleep, Rhonda and Lotter on the floor in Nissen's living room, Nissen and Kandi in their bedroom. I wondered if they had sex, one last spasmatic release before investigators came the next day to arrest them and return them to a world where Tugboat was sovereign.

13.

The Falls City on display in the courthouse during the trials of Thomas Nissen and John Lotter was a meaner, more marginal segment of the community than the Chamber of Commerce might have chosen to emphasize. The perils of bad weather, too much television, and a sugar-saturated junk-food diet were all too apparent in the abundance of fifty-six-inch waists in the corridors. Awaiting hearings or their turn to testify were women and men with the rolling gait of sailors home from the sea, their girth making it difficult to put one leg directly in front of the other. JoAnn Brandon arrived every morning from Lincoln, a two-hour drive. She was slight, her face all sharp planes etched with grief, a Dorothea Lange character study; she was always accompanied by her now married and pregnant older daughter, Tammy Schweitzer.

There were also supporters like Jennifer, a sixteen-year-old with a teardrop tattoo on her right hand. Jennifer had known Teena for eighteen months, and took a laissez-faire attitude toward her gender disorientation. "It didn't bother me at all," she said. "She was a good person. However she wanted to be, it was her life." I had the distinct impression that for Jennifer the courthouse promised more than any school could offer. In fact, she did not attend school, but went to a Learning Center in Lincoln, where, under the auspices of the juvenile authorities, she was trying to earn her G.E.D. I asked what she learned at the Learning Center. "Shadowing," she said. And what was shadowing? "You shadow people in some job to see what the requirements are. Like if I wanted to be a reporter, I'd shadow you."

The Brandons were available to the press, and to gay and transgender activists, who took an almost proprietary interest in them. One referred to Teena Brandon's murder as "the gay O. J. Simpson case"; it was as if Lisa Lambert and Phillip DeVine were only supporting players. Before the Lotter trial, several dozen transsexuals drawn to Falls City by appeals on the Internet demonstrated in support of Teena Brandon outside the courthouse; many wore T-shirts lettered with the words "Transsexual Menace."

Unlike the Brandons, Anna Mae Lambert politely declined to discuss the case. In the courtroom, she sat with her ex-husband, John Lambert, and her companion, John Lange, weathered men in jeans and flannel shirts. The three of them were an island of quiet dignity, doing nothing to draw attention to themselves or their sorrow. From the photographs of Lisa Lambert, it was apparent how much she would have resembled her mother had she lived into middle age. Yet there was never a hint from Anna Mae and John Lambert that Lisa might still have been alive if Teena Brandon had not turned up in Richardson County. Blame as an idea seemed as foreign to them as resentment. What happened to Lisa was like a plane crash or a car accident, something that had gone terribly wrong.

If there was antagonism in the courtroom, it was directed mainly at the Tisdel sisters and their mother, Linda Gutierres. The three knew that Nissen and Lotter were headed for Humboldt on the night of the murders; they knew they were drunk, they knew of their propensity for violence, they knew of the threats against Teena Brandon, yet they did not telephone the farmhouse. During an early proceeding, I was talking in court to a spectator named Snooks Hayes, a rangy, rawboned woman who wore earrings shaped like tiny handcuffs. Snooks Hayes was, in fact, Lisa Lambert's aunt, and also the wife of the Falls City investigator who, on New Year's Eve, 1993, had gone with other officers to arrest John Lotter and Thomas Nissen. "I'm hateful," she told me. Lana Tisdel, she said, must have known something bad was going down, and she wouldn't go to the telephone. If she had telephoned Humboldt, "three people wouldn't be dead today." This attitude fanned considerable speculation, started by Nissen in one of his numerous conversations with authorities, that Lana Tisdel had gone to Humboldt with him and Lotter. Nissen subsequently withdrew the allegation, and it was not vigorously pursued in testimony.

Because of the ill-concealed animosity, Lana and Leslie Tisdel seemed more comfortable sitting among the Lotter and Nissen relatives when they were in the courtroom. There was a washed-out, Mia Farrow quality to Lana Tisdel's looks; she was toothpick-thin, with long strawberry-blond hair hanging halfway down her back, and she had a constant nervous tic between her nose and upper lip. The first time I saw her, at a preliminary hearing in 1994, she was perfectly made up, not a strand of hair out of place; there were television cameras outside the courthouse and it seemed as if she had dressed to be discovered-that the murder coverage offered her a last best chance for a ticket out of Falls City.

Leslie Tisdel was something else again-heavy, brash, contentious, trying to make eye contact with John Lotter, who without looking around gave friends and family in the courtroom a kind of over-the-head, backhand wave. He was stooped and skinny, his hair gathered into a ponytail held by a rubber band, and he looked not unlike Charles Manson. At the conclusion of an early hearing, Leslie Tisdel tried to speak to Lotter, but she was herded out of the courtroom by Sheriff Laux, who was running for reëlection. "He told me to get out of there real snotty-like," Leslie loudly complained in the elevator. "He didn't have to approach me and be all hateful. He ain't going to get my vote."

It was this self-absorption that made the Tisdels such a bewildering element in the case. A reporter for one of Nebraska's larger papers told me of introducing himself to Leslie Tisdel and asking her what her fight with Phillip DeVine was about. "And she said she was taking a bath," he said. She told him, "Phillip came into the bathroom and he wanted it now. I said, 'No way,' and besides, I was on the rag." The Tisdel sisters were best described by Barbara Jackson, the cartoonist and editorial writer for the Pawnee Republican, the weekly newspaper in Pawnee City, population 1,156. She is married to a family practitioner and, as a newspaper woman and doctor's wife, has seen or heard about most of the bad shit that can go down in a small town. "The Tisdels are like paper boats," Barbara Jackson said one day. "They've got no rudders-they just float through life any which way."

Nissen was convicted in March, 1995, with his sentencing-to either death or life imprisonment-delayed pending his testimony against Lotter. By the time Lotter's trial began, in mid-May, Lana Tisdel looked feral and haggard, "like an animal run to ground," Barbara Jackson said. The continued speculation that she might be placed by Nissen in the Crown Victoria on its run to Humboldt and back seemed to have taken a toll on her. Lana had a new boyfriend, a construction worker with three children and a vasectomy.

Lotter seemed detached throughout the trial; the only time he appeared animated was the day his father came to court, and he showed him his leg irons. The Brandons were in the courtroom every day, and JoAnn Brandon showed photographs of Tammy's daughter Baileigh to anyone who asked. "The light of my life," JoAnn said. "She looks just like Teena." As always, the Lamberts sat quietly by themselves. There was a new regular in the courtroom, Donna Lotter, John's mother, a slightly overweight gray-haired woman in a nondescript raspberry sweater. The mother of five children, Donna Lotter held three jobs (nurse's aide, waitress, and clerk at the Hinky Dinky supermarket) in a vain effort to keep her family together. Donna Lotter sat directly behind John in court, with one or both of her daughters, and occasionally she would whisper bits of local gossip to him across the bar. Snooks Hayes was one of Donna Lotter's co-workers at the Hinky Dinky. What had happened in Humboldt, Snooks told Donna Lotter, was a tragedy that did not involve them and should not affect their relationship.

This view, instinctive and protective, did in fact prevail. During a recess before final summations in the Lotter trial, I sat in the almost empty courtroom going over my notes. When I looked around, I saw three middle-aged women talking quietly in the back two rows. The three were Virginia (Ginny) Tisdel, Lana and Leslie Tisdel's aunt, wearing a swanky sweat jacket; Anna Mae Lambert; and, leaning back toward them from the next row forward, Donna Lotter. They appeared to be talking about children and grandchildren-Mrs. Tisdel about Lana as a child, Mrs. Lambert about Tanner, Mrs. Lotter about what I did not try to discover. It seemed a perfect tableau vivant of small-town life, a moment in which three women-the mother of the accused, the mother of a victim, and the aunt of the beauty whose restless eye had set the story in motion-acted as if there were no freight between them. They all knew each other, and, whatever their private feelings, there was a sense of immense shared sorrow.

I think it was the saddest sight I have ever seen.

14.

"If you can't get laid in Falls City, you have a serious problem," Thomas Nissen wrote me from the Lincoln Correctional Center in the summer of 1995. To clear up any misunderstanding he thought I might have about his attitude toward Teena Brandon's sexual deception, he said in another letter, "I hate, and am totally against homosexuality between men. Between men is sick. Between women, it's such a show of love. I think it's cool." After O. J. Simpson's acquittal, Nissen mused, "One lucky rich nig-well, best not use that word." And about Falls City: "Lots of alcohol and seldom a shortage of drugs. Most of the time the county jail is full. Not much for the younger race to do but drink, drive, and dodge the boys in blue. Lots of unmarried moms and kids. There is very little work to be found. Even when there is work, it doesn't last for long. . . . Good things do come out of Richardson Co. If I ever hear of one, I'll be sure to tell you! That was a joke."

In one of my letters, I asked Nissen if he ever contemplated the element of chance that had put five such disparate people together in the Humboldt farmhouse the night of the murders. Nissen replied immediately. "A million ifs," he wrote. "What if I had never went to the bar in November and met the Tisdels. What if I had just simply been faithful to my wife, or not drank, or not allowed Brandon to live in my home, or bailed him out of jail, or liked him, or not even cared. Had I not been fucking other women, I would never have met Lotter when I did. After all, Rhonda McKenzie would have not been staying at my home had I not left Kandi alone for so many damn lonely nights. What if Brandon had been honest, or told everyone the truth when push came to shove. What if on Dec. 23, Brandon had told me, Tom, I'm really a girl and please take me home because I think I may get hurt. What if Brandon would have ran when the car got stuck on the late night of the 24 of December. He had the chance. What if I had recked the car like I thought of doing on the way to Lisa's home, or what if there had been a gun in Lisa's house, or what if Phil had not got into a fight with Leslie, or Missy been awake when I was at Lana's home on the early hours of the 31st, or if Brandon had been put in jail when we took him to court in Lincoln, or I had been busted on a dirty U.A. [urinalysis] while on parole, or if I had listened to Kandi when she told me not to have nothing to do with Lana, if I had killed myself or if the gun had never been fixed, or if I had simply said, no. This list could go on and on. Yes Sir, fate can be a motherfucker."

15.

Early in the summer of 1996, I drove up the road leading to the secluded farmhouse where Teena Brandon, Lisa Lambert, and Phillip DeVine had been murdered two and a half years before. I did not expect the house to be occupied, but scattered on the postage-stamp lawn were two tricycles, a bicycle, and a new doghouse. Unable to think what I might say to whatever strangers were living there, I turned my car around and drove back out to the main road.

When I arrived in Falls City, the first person I saw was Judge Robert Finn, having lunch at the Stephenson Hotel. A former F.B.I. agent, Finn looks like a movie version of a judge-tall, with snow-white hair, and a calm detachment that I never saw him lose during the time he presided over the Nissen and the Lotter trials. We talked about the local lack of interest in the two cases, and in the social complexity of a small town, the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. If I wanted to see how this applied in real life, he said, I should drop by his courtroom that afternoon, where he would be hearing motions. "You keep seeing the same faces," he said. "I'm into third-generation domestic abuse and restraining orders." What the judge meant was that women were seeking restraining orders against abusive husbands and lovers whose fathers and grandfathers had appeared before him on the same charges in the course of his sixteen years on the bench.

The subtext that Judge Finn and I were dancing around, of course, was the matter of class, and the way in which the Humboldt murders had revealed a drifting and woefully underequipped stratum of southeastern Nebraskans distinctly at odds with the place's official view of itself. This was the stratum so noticeably on display, in the months after the murders and during the subsequent trials, on the mud-wrestling that passes for daytime and tabloid television. The Humboldt murders had everything daytime television craves-sex, violence, race, deviant behavior, and gender bending. Maury Povich calling, Montel Williams and "Inside Edition," too.

Before the trials began, Povich nabbed the Tisdels, mother and daughters, John Lotter's sister Michelle, and two of Brandon's old Lincoln girlfriends, Lindsay and Daphne. All their responses seemed programmed by watching too many shows like Povich's. "I thought Brandon was the best person I could have ever met in my whole life," Daphne said, and Lindsay said, "If a guy would look at me, he'd kiss me because he was really jealous. . . . He didn't want nobody looking at me." Linda Gutierres's memories had taken on a more benign gloss since she threw Teena Brandon out of her house and told Nissen and Lotter where she was staying on the night of the murders. "I liked him a lot," she said. "He was a very nice person." Lana Tisdel answered mostly in monosyllables: "Yeah . . . uh huh . . . yes." Only Leslie Tisdel seemed determined to make the most of her five minutes of fame, opting for an audience-pleasing, if gruesome, particularity: "Lisa Lambert got shot in the right eye, the back of her head. Brandon got stabbed. Pierced her liver. She got a shot like in the upper chin part. She got shot in the side of her head. Phillip got shot in the neck, and he got shot in the side of the head."

I watched a videotape of Donna Lotter on "Montel," and was struck by how mortified she seemed. At some point, it was if she realized that she was only cannon fodder. Her sole claim to the audience's attention was that she was the mother of a murderer, and therefore a target of opportunity both for Montel Williams's opprobrium and for his synthetic sympathy. The Brandons were also on that episode of "Montel," and, at Williams's urging, JoAnn Brandon agreed that she and Tammy felt no animosity toward Donna, that she was not responsible for what her son had done.

"Closure" was now the dominant theme with the Brandons, and retribution as well, a reason for living. About Nissen, JoAnn Brandon said, "Every time he goes up for parole, I'll be there to make sure he doesn't get it." With John Lotter, who still maintains his innocence, she was looking forward to years of appeals, and after each stay of execution her opinions would be sought, a sound bite for the local newscasts. "I feel sorry for his family," JoAnn Brandon said of Lotter, "but I hope he burns in hell." I expect that JoAnn Brandon will be a witness at the Nebraska State Penitentiary when John Lotter's appeals are exhausted, ten years or more in the future, and his execution is finally scheduled. She will be a woman deep in middle age, her grandchildren teen-agers, and I wonder if, when the state has exacted its punishment, she will feel a void.

As it happened, there was an execution scheduled at the state penitentiary in Lincoln on my last night in Nebraska. The condemned prisoner-a pedophile former Air Force enlisted man who had murdered two adolescent boys in 1983-had been on death row for twelve years. I stood outside the prison that afternoon, checked the name of the priest who would give the accused Communion and say the last Mass that he would hear, wrote down the menu of the last meal he ordered, counted the number of chemical toilets available to the press and to the pro- and anti-capital-punishment protesters, and jotted down their rhetoric. I thought it was a scene that JoAnn Brandon would one day pass through on her way into the prison for the final closure. Late that afternoon, however, the United States Supreme Court issued a stay of execution; the protesters melted away, and the television crews did their live feeds, then got into their satellite trucks and drove off.

The pedophile murderer was finally executed three weeks later, only the second person to be executed in Nebraska since 1959. On the day of the execution, John Lotter's photograph appeared in the Omaha World-Herald as one of the eleven men on Nebraska's death row. Lotter has said that if a movie is ever made about his case he would be happy to be played by the actor Christian Slater.

On December 31, 1996, three years to the day after the Humboldt murders, I received a letter from Thomas Nissen wishing me a happy new year. He said that tensions between rival gangs had forced a five-day lockdown at the prison, and also that he had fallen in love with a Michigan woman whom he hoped to marry next fall. "Did you hear that I may receive a new trial?" he wrote. "I'm not sure how I feel about that." ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 13, 1997, issue.

Personal History Editing Donald Trump

What I saw as the editor of "The Art of the Deal," the book that made the future President millions of dollars and turned him into a national figure.

Nov. 03, 2019

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I. Marvin T. Nissen, a.k.a. Thomas M. Nissen, was convicted, in March, 1995, of one count of murder in the first degree and two counts of murder in the second degree in the Richardson County District Court, in Falls City, Nebraska. After making a bargain under which he agreed to testify against his co-defendant, John L.

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We've come a long way in just 20 years. Boys Don't Cry was chosen by the Library of Congress on December 11, 2019 to be preserved forever for its "cultural, historic, and aesthetic importance to the nation’s film heritage." Pretty significant when you look at the other films that were included; one of which was made in 1903. With an average wait time of 51 years until these films were inducted into the Library of Congress, Boys Don't Cry's acceptance was relative quick.

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'Boys Don't Cry,' 'Purple Rain,' 'She's Gotta Have It' added to National Film Registry

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The Library of Congress made its latest picks to add to the National Film Registry to be preserved for all time. This year, among those 25 entrees selected for their "cultural, historic, and aesthetic importance to the nation's film heritage" are 1999's Boys Don't Cry , 1984's Purple Rain, 1986's She's Gotta Have It , 1994's , and Disney's 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty .

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As someone who has personally dealt with movie producers taking liberties with the truth, I can attest to the anger that is felt when things you know to be false are put in a movie. It's even worse when it's a story about friends of yours who have been killed. I understand the reasoning the producer has for changing and omitting details that, to the people who were there, are not insignificant, but that doesn't make it any easier.

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In 1994, when Kimberly Peirce decided to make a short film about the life and tragic death of Brandon Teena, she didn't know that she was beginning a five-year odyssey that would result in the making of her first feature-length movie. Nor did she realize the difficulty of finding the story within the morass of contradictory details. And she had no idea that she was wading into a contentious and continuing debate over artistic license and a filmmaker's obligation to accuracy.

All she knew, she recalls now, was that she couldn't let Teena go. "I fell in love with her," she says.

Peirce said that early drafts of her script hewed closely to the facts, but she couldn't get the story to work dramatically. "It was unwieldy," she said. "I hadn't yet found the underlying emotional truth and the mythic structure."

But the sister of one of the main characters in the movie said she has asked the local theater not to show the film when it reaches Nebraska.

"I'm trying to do everything in my power to stop it," Leslie Tisdale said. "It's a lie of a movie."

Originally named Teena Brandon, Teena had been a sexually confused Nebraska youth who, without role models or support, had tried to make a new identity for herself. She was killed in 1993, at age 21, by men who were incensed when they learned she wasn't a man.

Peirce, then a graduate film student at Columbia University, made two research trips to Nebraska. Tom Nissen and John Lotter were convicted, and eventually Peirce amassed 10,000 pages of trial transcript and performed numerous interviews. Still, much about the story remained submerged.

"A lot of things people said conflicted with each other," she said. "Many times people contradicted themselves. It took a storyteller to figure out what the truth was."

Her movie, "Boys Don't Cry," released last October, has won critical praise and garnered awards for its star, Hilary Swank. But it also has come under attack for the liberties it takes with the facts. It's another recent example of how based-on-fact films--particularly contemporary stories such as "The Insider and "The Hurricane"--can run into problems with those who participated in the real-live events.

Lana Tisdale, Teena's lover, who is portrayed in "Boys Don't Cry" by Chloe Sevigny, has sued the filmmakers and the film's distributor (Fox Searchlight), alleging that because of the film, friends and family members now scorn her as "a lesbian who did nothing to stop a murder."

The movie's producers also have been sued by author Aphrodite Jones, whose nonfiction book on the case, "All She Wanted," was to have been made into a movie starring Drew Barrymore. Her lawsuit contends that Fox Searchlight tied up the rights to her book in bad faith. The same studio now is distributing "Boy's Don't Cry."

In her small town, Tisdale had been subjected to abuse even before the movie was made. Many locals reacted with less outrage to the murders than to Teena's deception. Her killers, after all, were local boys, and Teena was from someplace else. She had come into town, tricked the men and romanced the women. She had made fools of them all.

"Once the town of Fall City found out that he was a she, the whole town went ballistic," said Leslie Tisdale, Lana's sister. They're still continually talking about her."

Jones, too, said some of the movie's inventions disturbed her, especially the way it places Lana Tisdale at the scene when the shooting occurred. There was conflicting testimony at the trials as to Lana's whereabouts, and placing her there might suggest that she was an accessory to murder, Jones said.

Many of Peirce's early drafts included the character of Philip Devine, a 22-year-old black man who had been living at the home of Lisa Lambert, where Teena also was living when the shooting took place. Devine was Leslie Tisdale's boyfriend. Teena, Lambert and Devine all were killed, but Peirce eventually cut Devine out of the movie and changed the name of the Lambert character.

"I frown on that," Leslie Tisdale said of Devine's omission. "They're just looking at Brandon Teena, and they're not wanting to think about anybody else. It's like, 'There were two other victims? Who cares.' "

Jones, too, said she is bothered. "Philip Devine was someone who climbed mountains on one leg, literally, in his lifetime, and he was a good soul."

But leaving him in would've required adding Leslie Tisdale as a character to explain who Devine was, said Peirce. "I already had seven main characters," she said. "I didn't have room for Lana's sister."

Peirce maintains that her greater obligation was to Teena. It was her fascination with Teena that caused her to devote five years making the movie, she said. "If I couldn't do honor to Teena, then I couldn't do honor to anybody."

It was revelatory, she says, to watch the story grow stronger as she deleted material and altered facts. "It blew my mind," she said. "You're allowing the myth to take over, which is really what movies are."

Peirce speaks eloquently about the value of myth, of dreams, to illuminate truth, in art as well as life.

"I don't think most people understand the power of dreams," she said. "Dreams take things that are confusing and scary and transform them so that we can understand them." That is what she did with the movie, she said.

"We tell stories so that people can express the things that they are frightened of."

*

REALITY AND THE MOVIES

This is the second of a two-part look at the truth-in-movies debate. The first ran in Sunday Calendar.

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A Filmmaker Fictionalizes to Get at Difficult Truths

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In 1994, when Kimberly Peirce decided to make a short film about the life and tragic death of Brandon Teena, she didn't know that she was beginning a five-year odyssey that would result in the making of her first feature-length movie. Nor did she realize the difficulty of finding the story within the morass of contradictory details.

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I can't imagine what it feels like to have your child violently murdered, but to not honor him/her by continuing to misgender Brandon doesn't endear JoAnn to the LGBTQ community. That being said, I'm a little torn on what should be put on Brandon's tombstone. On one hand, I feel like I would want to put the name I gave my daughter at birth, but on the other, it's a disservice to Brandon to not put the name he wanted to go by. The epitaph says, "Daughter, Sister, & Friend."

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JoAnn Brandon still gets the occasional calls from strangers.

They apologize for the heartache she suffered since two men raped and murdered her youngest child 20 years ago.

"I tell them thank you. I appreciate their thoughts and prayers," she said Thursday as she sat on her sofa and smoked a cigarette.

Brandon, a thin woman who has a shuffling walk and doesn't work because she is disabled, still misses her little girl. She daydreams about where life would have taken Teena Brandon, who preferred to be called Brandon Teena.

"I wonder about how my life would be different if she was still here with me. She would be such a joy to have around. She was always such a happy kid. I imagine her being a happy adult," Brandon said.

If being happy meant Teena living as a man, that would be fine, she said.

Brandon also thinks about John Lotter and Tom Nissen, the men who had befriended Teena and were enraged when they learned the person they believed to be a man was housed in the women's section of the Richardson County Jail after being arrested for forgery.

The holidays are particularly hard for JoAnn Brandon.

It was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1993 that Nissen and Lotter humiliated, raped and beat Teena.

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Brandon Teena's mom: 'We've come a long way'

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JoAnn Brandon still gets the occasional calls from strangers. They apologize for the heartache she suffered since two men raped and murdered her youngest child 20 years ago. "I tell them thank you. I appreciate their thoughts and prayers," she said Thursday as she sat on her sofa and smoked a cigarette.

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In one study, 1 in 2 transgender people will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. In another, that rises to 66%, or 2 out of 3 people. The rate goes up even more when the transperson is also a person of color.

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Javascript is disabled or is not supported by your browser. For this reason, some of the features on this page may not be available.

Transgender victims, like all victims of sexual assault, want and deserve to be respected, heard, believed, served, and supported. This guide will help you do just that.

About This Guide describes why the guide is necessary and offers a list (by no means exhaustive or authoritative) of common transgender-related terms.

Transgender 101 covers the basics of what it means to be transgender. If you need a general understanding of transgender-related issues, read this section first.

Sexual Assault in the Transgender Community reveals the quite high rate of sexual assault within the community and also covers community ramifications.

Tips for Those Who Serve Victims is where you'll find provider-specific advice on how best to serve transgender victims of sexual assault.

Whether you are a health care provider, law enforcement officer, emergency medical personnel, sexual assault advocate, therapist, or support group facilitator, this guide will help you deliver culturally sensitive, respectful care when working with transgender victims and their loved ones.

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Responding to Transgender Victims of Sexual Assault Home Page

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This guide covers the basics of what it means to be transgender, provides information about the high rate of sexual assault within the transgender community, and gives provider-specific advice on how best to serve transgender victims of sexual assault

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I think it's telling how society views, or at least how society used to view, the transgender community, when it's practically impossible to find accurate statistics from only 20-25 years ago. While not all of the people in this report were killed because of their gender, it does seem to represent a higher than normal percentage of violence against the trans population.

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In 2018, advocates tracked at least 26 deaths of at least transgender or gender non-conforming people in the U.S. due to fatal violence, the majority of whom were Black transgender women. These victims were killed by acquaintances, partners and strangers, some of whom have been arrested and charged, while others have yet to be identified. Some of these cases involve clear anti-transgender bias. In others, the victim's transgender status may have put them at risk in other ways, such as forcing them into unemployment, poverty, homelessness and/or survival sex work.

While the details of these cases differ, it is clear that fatal violence disproportionately affects transgender women of color, and that the intersections of racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and unchecked access to guns conspire to deprive them of employment, housing, healthcare and other necessities, barriers that make them vulnerable. HRC Foundation's "Dismantling a Culture of Violence" report demonstrates how anti-transgender stigma, denial of opportunity and increased risk factors compound to create a culture of violence -- and provides clear ways that each of us can directly make an impact to make our society a safer place for transgender people.

As is too often the case in the reporting of anti-transgender violence, many of these victims are misgendered in local police statements and media reports, which can delay our awareness of deadly incidents. In the pursuit of greater accuracy and respect for transgender and gender expansive people in both life and death, HRC offers guidelines for journalists and others who report on transgender and gender non-conforming people.

Sadly, 2019 has already seen at least 27 transgender or gender non-conforming people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say at least because too often these stories go unreported -- or misreported. As HRC continues to work toward justice and equality for transgender and gender non-conforming people, we mourn those we have lost:

Dana Martin, 31, a Black transgender woman, was fatally shot in Montgomery, Alabama, on January 6. Daroneshia Duncan-Boyd, an Alabama-based trans advocate, said that "she was a person that was loved by many."

Ashanti Carmon, 27, a Black transgender woman, was fatally shot in Prince George's County, Maryland, on March 30. "Until I leave this Earth, I'm going to continue on loving her in my heart, body, and soul," said Philip Williams, Carmon's fiancé. "She did not deserve to leave this Earth so early, especially in the way that she went out.

Michelle 'Tamika' Washington, 40, a Black transgender woman, was fatally shot in Philadelphia on May 19. Washington, who was also known by the name Tameka, is remembered by friends and loved ones as a beloved sister and "gay mother."

Paris Cameron, 20, a Black transgender woman, was among three people killed in a horrific anti-LGBTQ shooting in a home in Detroit on May 25, according to local reports. Alunte Davis, 21, and Timothy Blancher, 20, two gay men, were found dead at the scene and Cameron was taken to the hospital, where she died from her injuries. Two other victims were also shot but survived. "This case illustrates the mortal danger faced by members of Detroit's LGBTQ community, including transgender women of color," Fair Michigan President Alanna Maguire said.

Titi Gulley, 31, a Black transgender woman, was killed in Portland, Oregon, on May 27. Her death was originally reported as a suicide but is now under investigation.

Chynal Lindsey, 26, a Black transgender woman, was found dead in White Rock Lake, Dallas, with signs of "homicidal violence" on June 1, according to police. Friends, family and community members took to social media to share their shock at her death, describing her as "smiling" and "a person I had never seen mad."

Chanel Scurlock, 23, a Black transgender woman, was found fatally shot in Lumberton, North Carolina, on June 6. "RIP baby," wrote a friend on Facebook. "You [lived] your life as you wanted. I'm proud of you for being unapologetically correct about your feelings and expectations of YOU."

Zoe Spears, 23, a Black transgender woman, was found with signs of trauma near Eastern Avenue in Fairmount Heights, Maryland, and later pronounced dead on June 13, according to local reports. "She was my daughter -- very bright and very full of life," transgender advocate Ruby Corado, the founder and executive director of Casa Ruby, told HRC. "Casa Ruby was her home. Right now, we just want her and her friends and the people who knew her to know that she's loved."

was among the nine victims killed in a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, on August 4. While Cofer was only out to a handful of close friends and used the pronouns he/him/his on his social media profiles, he is remembered by friends as "extremely bright" and "well-liked." A friend told Splinter News that "Jordan was probably one of the sweetest people you would ever meet, a true saint, but he was also very scared constantly. He tried to give the best to everyone."

Pebbles LaDime "Dime" Doe, 24, a Black transgender woman, was killed in Allendale County, South Carolina, on August 4. Doe's friends and family remembered her as having a "bright personality," and being someone who "showed love" and who was "the best to be around."

Bee Love Slater, 23, was killed in Clewiston, Florida, on September 4. Slater is remembered by loved ones as someone "with a really, really sweet heart" who "never harmed anyone."

Itali Marlowe, 29, a Black transgender woman was found shot in Houston on September 20. She was transported to a nearby hospital where she was pronounced dead, as reported by Monica Roberts of TransGriot. "You deserved to live a full and robust life surrounded by people who embraced and celebrated your real self," wrote Sue Kerr, an LGBTQ columnist.

Nikki Kuhnhausen, 17, was killed in Vancouver, Washington, some time after her disappearance in June. Kuhnhausen enjoyed sharing videos of her dancing and singing on her Facebook, and she often posted memes to entertain her friends. Her loved ones have taken to social media to mourn her passing. "[Y]ou my dear didn't deserve this ... rest with God now."

Yahira Nesby, 33, was fatally shot in New York on December 19. Nesby, a Black transgender woman, was a loved member of the New York ball scene. Her friends and family commented on social media about her death, calling Nesby "a good spirit," "genuinely good people," and said "Every time [Nesby was] around [she] put a smile on my face and others."

Mia Perry, a transgender woman, was killed in Washington, D.C. on December 29.

Layleen Polanco, 27, was found dead in a cell at Riker's Island on June 7. Polanco was described by those who knew her as "a sweet, amazing [...] and generous human being."

Additionally, HRC is deeply concerned about the deaths of Johana 'Joa' Medina and Layleen Polanco, whose stories we are following closely:

HRC has been tracking reports of fatal anti-transgender violence for the past several years. Previous reports can be found: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.

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Violence Against the Transgender Community in 2019

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In 2018, advocates tracked at least 26 deaths of at least transgender or gender non-conforming people in the U.S. due to fatal violence, the majority of whom were Black transgender women. These victims were killed by acquaintances, partners and strangers, some of whom have been arrested and charged, while others have yet to be identified.

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Was a gay man who was tortured, beaten, set on fire, and left for dead in a small town in Wyoming. Captured the nation's attention and helped set the stage for future legislation to protect the LGBT community. Unlike Brandon's mother, Shepard's parents stood by their son after his death and never "misgendered" him.

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The death of a gay student, tortured and tied to a prairie fence in Wyoming two decades ago, shocked America. As Matthew Shepard's ashes are interred in the nation's spiritual home, those who knew him reflect on his remarkable legacy.

That's how Judy and Dennis Shepard knew it was their son in the hospital bed.

"Bandages and stitches all over his face," Judy says, "and bandages around his head where the final blow had crushed his brain stem.

"His fingers and toes were curled in a comatose position already. Tubes everywhere enabling his body to stay alive.

"One of his eyes was partially open so you could see his blue eyes and the tubes in his mouth. You could see his braces, so of course it's Matt.

"His face was swollen, actually kind of unrecognisable till you got closer."

Two nights earlier, on Tuesday 6 October 1998, Matthew Shepard walked alone into a dive bar in Laramie.

The openly gay University of Wyoming freshman had just met up with friends to plan LGBT awareness week on the town's campus.

But he couldn't persuade them to join him for a beer afterwards.

At the Fireside Lounge, the 21-year-old somehow ended up chatting to two roofing workers, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, both the same age as him.

The pair saw an easy mark in the 5ft 2in, slightly built student.

Albany County Sheriff Dave O'Malley, who was lead investigator in the case, says: "McKinney's own statement said he and Russell went into the bathroom at the Fireside bar and they planned to act like they were gay to try to gain Matthew's confidence.

"And so the sexual orientation issue started right at the beginning of that contact."

The killers would tell police they planned to lure Shepard into McKinney's pick-up truck so they could rob him.

Once in the vehicle, McKinney pulled a gun, beat Shepard and seized his wallet, which contained $20.

They drove about a mile out of town down a dirt path that ended in a rocky prairie of sagebrush and range grass.

Henderson used a clothesline to tie Shepard to a log fence.

McKinney began to ferociously pistol-whip their captive.

Sheriff O'Malley says the student was "struck in the head and face between 19 and 21 times with the butt of a very large Smith and Wesson revolver".

"The only time I've ever seen those dramatic of injuries were in high-speed traffic crashes, you know, where there was just extremely violent compression fractures to the skull."

McKinney and Henderson stole their victim's patent leather shoes and left him to die.

He would remain tied to the fence for 18 hours in the frigid cold.

The following evening a teenager fell off his mountain bike and noticed nearby what he thought was a fallen scarecrow or Halloween costume.

He realised it was a person.

Policewoman Reggie Fluty responded to the scene.

Standing at the spot now, the former patrol officer recalls: "Matt was on his back with his arms behind him. His respirations were far and few between.

"And I thought he was way younger than what he was just because his stature was so small."

Fluty - now 57 and retired - attempted to open Shepard's mouth to clear his airway. But it was clamped shut.

She remembers trying to revive him, saying: "Baby boy, I'm here kiddo, you're going to be OK, hang in there, don't give up, come on, you can do this."

Today the buck fence where Shepard was bound and bludgeoned is long gone.

The former crime scene is still a windswept field studded with cacti and criss-crossed by antelope spoor.

But there's nothing to indicate this is the site of a deadly assault that changed America.

As well as a crushed brain stem, Shepard suffered four skull fractures from the blows of McKinney's .357 Magnum hand cannon.

His parents rushed to the Colorado hospital from Saudi Arabia, where Dennis Shepard worked as an oil rig inspector.

Their son never regained consciousness. He died five days after the attack.

The manner of his killing - the New York Times likened it to the Western custom of nailing a dead coyote to a fence to ward off intruders - detonated national outrage.

Two days after Shepard passed away, tearful politicians and celebrities gathered on the steps of the US Capitol to address a vigil of thousands.

President Bill Clinton condemned the attackers as "full of hatred or full of fear or both".

Candlelit vigils were held across the nation.

Matthew Shepard died as a cultural age of innocence - some would say blissful ignorance - was coming to a close for America's millennials.

The whir and warble of dial-up internet was beginning to be heard in homes around the country. The president had two months earlier admitted an affair with a White House intern. Self-proclaimed "Antichrist Superstar" Marilyn Manson had just topped the album charts. The Columbine school massacre was seven months away.

Few back then could imagine - least of all Shepard's parents - that people would still be talking about him today.

A collection of his personal effects - donated by his family - has just gone on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in the US capital.

His school work, theatre scripts, photos and sandals are among the exhibits.

On Friday, his remains were interred at Washington National Cathedral, spiritual home of the nation.

Shepard now rests in the crypt of the neo-Gothic edifice, alongside the likes of former President Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller, the pioneering deaf-blind academic, and George Dewey, the 19th Century naval officer for whom the rank of admiral of the navy was created.

It is a momentous honour not even accorded to another prominent gay martyr, Harvey Milk, the San Francisco politician assassinated in 1978.

At the Denver city centre offices of the LGBT rights foundation named after her son, Judy Shepard, 66, is fighting back tears.

She predicted Friday's ceremony would probably be more emotional for her than the funeral because she felt so "numb" immediately after her son's death.

The original service, amid snow flurries in the family's hometown of Casper, Wyoming, on 16 October 1998, was picketed by an anti-gay preacher from Kansas.

Reverend Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church and his flock, who included children, held placards daubed with homophobic slurs and shouted to mourners that the dead student was burning in hell.

Dennis Shepard, 69, remembers law enforcement making him wear a bullet-proof vest to step outside the Episcopal church, which had been scoured by bomb-sniffing dogs.

Swat teams were positioned at the front and back of the building, police snipers on surrounding rooftops.

The couple have kept their son's urn of ashes at home until now, partly out of concern any memorial might be desecrated.

Judy says: "This is a huge relief to us to know that he'll be safe and protected forever."

She recalls that as a boy Matt always asked her: "Do you think I'll be famous someday?"

"I guess he got there," she adds.

The couple remember how they shrugged it off when he came out to them as a teenager, since they had already guessed.

At the time of his death, Judy says, he was just putting his life back together after being sexually assaulted on a high school trip to Morocco. Shepard was gang-raped there by some locals.

His mother says: "We just felt like he was finally coming around to being himself again. And uh, um, and then this happened."

Shepard was studying political science and dreamed of working as a diplomat for the Department of State.

His family have mixed feelings about his secular sainthood.

They believe he would be uncomfortable with his consecration as some sort of "perfect icon".

Judy points out that her son was not found on the fence in a crucifixion pose, as was wrongly reported at the time.

Wyoming - which has almost as many pronghorn antelope as people (half a million or so residents) - is a rural, conservative heartland.

Shepard's murder stoked the perception of Cowboy Country and flyover states in general as a danger zone for gay people.

But at his office in the city of Cheyenne, McKinney trial lawyer Dion Custis maintains it was a robbery gone bad, even while he accepts sexual orientation was a factor.

"They [McKinney and Henderson] basically were just kind of two lost kids," he says, "that were using meth daily, at least weekly for a long period of time.

"People who use meth, chronic meth users, they lose the ability to rationalise, and [have] all kinds of problems mentally."

However, McKinney's own gay-bashing rhetoric damns him in the eyes of many.

During a police confession, he said he began to attack Shepard because the student had put his hand on his leg during the car ride.

McKinney said he replied: "Guess what? We're not gay, and we're going to jack you up."

Yet in another statement to police, he said Shepard simply looked like he was about to grope McKinney.

From the jailhouse after his arrest, McKinney reportedly wrote to another inmate's wife: "Being a verry [sic] drunk homofobick [sic] I flipped out and began to pistol whip the fag with my gun, ready at hand."

At trial, McKinney's lawyers argued that Shepard had made their client fly into a rage by touching his leg.

But the judge dismissed this "gay panic" claim.

Such a legal strategy - where criminal defendants in cases of violent assault argue they were provoked by an unwanted same-sex sexual advance - is still admissible in all but three US states, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.

Sheriff O'Malley rejects any attempt to downplay the anti-gay element in the murder.

"We have never discounted ever that the initial motivation was robbery," he says. "The robbery motive stopped really early in that contact.

"In my opinion, it was a hate crime."

Both killers are serving two consecutive life terms for kidnapping and murder.

Neither would agree to interview requests, said the Wyoming Department of Corrections.

The court proceedings are also remembered for a counter-protest that is commemorated by a mural in Laramie, just a few blocks from where it unfolded.

When Westboro Baptist Church returned as Henderson pleaded guilty in April 1999, Shepard's friends were not prepared to let them steal the limelight again.

"We had this idea for big ass angel wings that would block out the signs," says Jim Osborn, who was chair of University of Wyoming's LGBT association at the time of the student's death.

Wearing outfits made of white sheets, duct tape and PVC piping, they stood in front of Phelps and his congregants, turning the other cheek to their bigotry.

Osborn recalls the minister and his flock saying: "You're a disgrace. We can smell the whiff of brimstone about you."

Another counter-protester, Nichol Bondurant, says she could literally feel Phelps' breath on the back of her neck.

The moment was re-enacted as a climactic scene in 2002 HBO movie The Laramie Project.

Dubbed the angel action, it was replicated two years ago in Orlando, Florida, when Westboro Baptist Church tried to disrupt the funerals of gay people killed in a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub.

Shepard's death would go on to inspire plays, a musical and poetry. Elton John penned a song, American Triangle, comparing the slaying to a deer run down by two coyotes.

The dead student's family set up the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which helped expand federal hate crime law to include offences motivated by sexual orientation, gender or disability.

Judy and Dennis were at the White House with then-President Barack Obama in 2009 to see the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act signed.

James Byrd Jr, a black man, was murdered in Texas in June 1998 by three white supremacists who dragged him behind a pick-up truck.

The Shepards have travelled the US and more than two dozen countries advocating for LGBT rights.

The cause has made a quantum leap in the last two decades in America. When their son died, same-sex marriage was banned in every US state.

Now it's the law of the land.

But activists say their battle for equality is not over.

Wyoming is among five US states that have no criminal hate crime law.

In another 15 states, hate crime laws do not expressly cover a victim's sexual orientation, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

It also says LGBT Americans can be fired for their sexuality in 29 states.

Judy feels gay rights "took a U-turn" under the Trump administration.

"All of them are in that circle of familiarity of extreme right-wing religious attitudes," she says of the president's cabinet, "in particular to the gay community, to anybody who's not straight white Christian."

Wyoming is celebrated as the home of train robbers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

With its air of Western romance and cult of the outlaw, it is a place where the line between hero and villain can blur.

Many residents of Laramie - they call themselves Laramigos - believe their town has been unfairly tarnished by the Shepard case.

Some think media coverage was classist - the victim was educated at a Swiss alpine boarding school; the culprits were labelled "trailer trash" and "rednecks".

A number of townsfolk assert the murder was actually a drug deal gone bad, as the court heard Shepard - like many a student - had dabbled in illicit substances.

However, Sheriff O'Malley makes clear that theory is not supported by the evidence.

The Old Buckhorn Bar & Parlor in Laramie has a mirror pocked by a bullet hole, and walls that bristle with mounted antelope, buffalo and bobcat.

One patron, Justin Brummet - who proudly describes himself as "third class white trash" - says US progress on gay rights since Shepard's death is to be commended.

But he and his friend Bryce, a lumberjack, are sceptical the murder was ever a hate crime.

"That's the thing about Wyoming," 29-year-old Brummet, a carpenter, says outside the pub as he smokes a cigarette, "is that it's just all about myth and stories and tall tales.

"Who really knows what happened, you know? You have one side of the divide that thinks it was a hate crime, and I think they needed it to be a hate crime.

"Then the other side is the kind of shit that happens in the state all the time."

More on this story

Across town is a different world - in the middle of the University of Wyoming's impressive $1bn sandstone campus stands the state's only public memorial to Matthew Shepard: a bench.

His family had to be persuaded to agree to that dedication, fearing it might be vandalised. It hasn't.

Some LGBT students gathered by the seat say they generally feel safe in Laramie, though tend to be more vigilant when venturing beyond college safe spaces.

Jess Fahlsing, from Rock Springs, Wyoming, says she would not dare walk around town holding hands with a partner.

Gem City, as it is known, has no gay bar, though its second annual PrideFest last summer was deemed a success.

"There's this notion [in Wyoming] that you can live your own lifestyle," says 22-year-old Fahlsing, who identifies as queer and came out a year ago, "and be whoever you are as long as you don't shove it into someone's face."

Back at the end of the last millennium, many Wyomingites apparently thought gay people were as rare on the high plains as jackalopes, the state's mythical antlered rabbit.

Shepard's murder - together with the 2005 gay cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain - helped dispel that misconception.

Cathy Connolly, a University of Wyoming gender and women's studies lecturer, explains.

"I think 20 years ago some people in Wyoming honestly didn't believe they had met anyone who was gay or lesbian," she says.

"Today that isn't the case. Everyone understands that there are gays and lesbians in their communities.

"That being said, it doesn't mean that everyone believes gays and lesbians are welcome or wanted in Wyoming."

In 2008, Professor Connolly was elected as the first openly gay member of the state legislature.

She recounts facing a "horrific" backlash last year from angry voters when she introduced a gay rights measure.

A Democrat, she is one of a handful of female lawmakers in Wyoming. It calls itself the Equality State - because in 1869 it was the first to grant women the right to vote - but its legislature currently has the lowest female representation in the country.

Shepard's murder is often said to have spurred national soul-searching.

At least one American ended up renouncing his lifelong prejudice.

Step forward, Sheriff O'Malley.

"Prior to this investigation I was pretty homophobic," the mustachioed law-giver admits. "Um, I was mean spirited towards the gay population.

"I would be the first person that would tell a joke about gay Americans and, uh, the word fag rolled off my tongue very easily.

"And when I got involved in the investigation, I was forced to interact with Matthew's friends, many of which were gay and lesbian.

"And I very quickly started to lose my ignorance."

If such a change of heart becomes Matthew Shepard's legacy as he is finally laid to rest, the Equality State will truly live up to its name.

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Matthew Shepard: The murder that changed America

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The death of a gay student, tortured and tied to a prairie fence in Wyoming two decades ago, shocked America. As Matthew Shepard's ashes are interred in the nation's spiritual home, those who knew him reflect on his remarkable legacy. That's how Judy and Dennis Shepard knew it was their son in the hospital bed.

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This book, by author Aphrodite Jones, was the inspiration for Boys Don't Cry. Jones maintains that the film company, Fox, tied up her book instead of making a movie from her writings like she was told. According to the reviews, Jones goes into detail about the people involved in the "Teena Brandon" story, regardless of how far removed from Brandon they were.

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All She Wanted book. Read 62 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. The basis for the Oscar-winning film, Boys Don't Cry!All NEW intro...

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Interesting take on the movie with a lot of self-reflection. The fact that they had to put a disclaimer at the beginning apologizing for the mistake of labeling Teena Brandon as "butch" instead of "Transgender" or "male" shows how difficult the subject is to navigate. Also, that the author considers this movie a "romance story" is pretty sad.

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The years I spent in high school, from 2002-2006, were a popular time for high school theater departments to mount productions of The Laramie Project, a play about Matthew Shepard written by Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Company in 2000. Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, died in 1999 after two homophobic attackers beat him and left him tied to a fence. The play was based on interviews Laramie, Wyoming residents, and a decade after Shepard's death, President Barack Obama signed the so-called "Matthew Shepard Act" into law. It moved to include hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity into already existing federal hate crime legislation, and it was spearheaded by Shepard's mother. The bill cemented Shepard, a white, cisgender, gay man who graduated from what Business Insider called one of the "most exclusive boarding schools for the super-rich," as the face of the '90s gay "tolerance" movement.

I craved queer mentorship, and the film gave me a framework for how to cope with the inevitable violence against queer people I'd encounter in my own relationships. Yet being primed to believe that queerness was lethal while living as an adult in a world where queer people have gained certain footholds is also destabilizing.

But Teena died, in equally brutal fashion, six years before Shepard. His name never went on any hate crime bills. Although trans people, including Kate Bornstein and the activist group Transexual Menace, mobilized to demonstrate at Teena's attackers' trials, the story was largely ignored by mainstream media. And unlike Shepard's measure of parental support, Teena's mother continued to misgender him after death; his headstone is still marked with his deadname. Along with the GLAAD Award-nominated documentary The Brandon Teena Story, Boys Don't Cry remains one of the only tributes to Teena's legacy.

The end of the film is such a difficult watch that I'd frequently deploy the Titanic trick of the era: only watching the first VHS tape in the two-tape set, thereby avoiding its tragic final act. Except Boys Don't Cry was short enough for one VHS, so I'd just cut it after Brandon and Lana's final sex scene in the barn. I still had to endure Brandon's humiliating outing, sexual assault, and horrifically botched rape investigation by Falls City police. But I also got to watch Lana masterfully hold space for her wounded boyfriend - a skill I later found I'd need when I inevitably saw powerful butch facades crumble in my own relationships. I saw the now-ubiquitous binding-and-packing scene that made me feel like I was living in a queer Norman Rockwell painting when I watched butches do it in real life during my early relationships. And I got to see a sweet, handsome boy with a wallet full of girls' pictures playfully chase crushes at the roller rink during a time when the only other masculine-of-center characters on TV were lecherous middle-aged butches (who are also my type, to be clear, but not in a way I felt ready to explore at 14).

Boys Don't Cry was part of the patchwork of my initiation as a femme at a time when I had no femme role models in my real life. In fact, I was continually regarded as one by my peers, as someone who'd come out early and begun navigating sex and relationships right away. It was true that I had more experience, but all my discovery was self-led; I was never taken under any protective elder wings myself. I craved queer mentorship, and the film gave me a framework for how to cope with the inevitable violence against queer people I'd encounter in my own relationships, for which I'm grateful.

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When Boys Don't Cry Was Your Only Teen Romance Movie

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The years I spent in high school, from 2002-2006, were a popular time for high school theater departments to mount productions of The Laramie Project, a play about Matthew Shepard written by Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Company in 2000.

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According to this article, Matthew Shepard, the young, gay man who was killed 6 years after Brandon, was killed for drugs, not because he was gay. Why is that relevant to a discussion on "Boys Don't Cry?" The movie wasn't made until the year after Shepard was killed which made national headlines. He came from a prominent family, unlike Brandon, and he was gay, not trans. All things that made Shepard's story more "palatable" to the American public.

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he horrific killing of Matthew Shepard in 1998 is widely seen as one of the worst anti-gay hate crimes in American history. Matthew was beaten by two assailants, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. They pistol whipped him with a gun then tied him to a fence in freezing conditions and set fire to him before leaving him to die.

The attack became a cause célèbre: it precipitated a national backlash against hyper-macho culture and tacit tolerance of homophobia. As a result of Matthew's death, many good things have happened for the gay community. The play The Laramie Project has toured the US and many other countries, telling Matthew's story and encouraging campaigns against bigotry. Politicians and celebrities pledged support and funding to combat anti-gay hate crime. The Shepard family have become campaigners for gay rights. Judy and Dennis Shepard run the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which funds educational programmes and an online community for teens to discuss sexual orientation and gender issues. There have been numerous documentaries, dramas, books and events based on the story.

The men responsible for his death were convicted of first-degree murder and given two life sentences. They were not charged with a hate crime, as that wasn't possible under Wyoming's criminal law. But after lengthy wrangling in congress, President Obama finally signed the Matthew Shepard Act in 2009, a law which defined certain attacks motivated by victim identity as hate crimes.

But the Matthew Shepard story is not yet finished. A new twist came last year with the publication of another book, this one by investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez, who has spent 13 years interviewing more than 100 people with a connection to the case. His conclusion, outlined in The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard, is that the grotesque murder was not a hate crime, but could instead be blamed on crystal meth, a drug that was flooding Denver and the surrounding area at the time of Matthew's death. This new theory has, understandably, caused a lot of anger.

Jimenez has faced a barrage of criticism since the publication of his book and has had readings to promote the book boycotted. Jimenez claims, however, that many of his critics have not actually read it. The Advocate, America's leading LGBT magazine, published a piece last year entitled: "Why I'm Not Reading the 'Trutherism' About Matt Shepard". Jimenez has been accused of being a revisionist, a criticism usually reserved for extreme rightwing ideologues that deny the Holocaust, and labelled a homophobe.

"People object to the idea of the book, rather than what is in the book," says Jimenez. "The anger directed at me has been pretty extreme."

Jimenez had no intention of causing such controversy. He's an award-winning writer and TV producer, and visited Laramie shortly after the murder to gather material for a screenplay about the case. When he started he was convinced that Matthew died at the hands of homophobes, but he soon discovered that Matthew's tragedy began long before the night he was killed.

Jimenez found that Matthew was addicted to and dealing crystal meth and had dabbled in heroin. He also took significant sexual risks and was being pimped alongside Aaron McKinney, one of his killers, with whom he'd had occasional sexual encounters. He was HIV positive at the time of his death.

"This does not make the perfect poster boy for the gay-rights movement," says Jimenez. "Which is a big part of the reason my book has been so trashed."

Matthew's drug abuse, and the fact that he knew one of his killers prior to the attack, was never explored in court. Neither was the rumour that the killers knew that he had access to a shipment of crystal meth with a street value of $10,000 which they wanted to steal.

Matthew was born into an affluent family and had attended state school in Casper, Wyoming. The 21-year-old political science major at Laramie University stood only 5ft 2in, and his blond hair, braces and slight frame gave him an air of vulnerability and innocence. In his junior year of high school, Matthew moved with his family to Saudi Arabia. There were no American high schools in Saudi at the time, so he was sent to the American School in Switzerland. By the time he enrolled at Laramie he spoke three languages and had aspirations to be a human-rights advocate. Somewhere along the line, however, Matthew fell from being a grade-A student to a drug-addicted prostitute who diced with danger. He suffered periods of depression, possibly as a result of being gang raped a few years earlier while on holiday in Morocco. But this is not the Matthew Shepard who became a celebrated figure for the gay-rights movement in America.

Laramie is considered the most liberal town in Wyoming. It sits in a flat, treeless sweep of high plains. With the ranching industry in decline, employment here is dominated by the University of Wyoming. It has a quaint western charm: tree-lined streets, beautiful parks, and a renovated historic downtown at the edge of the railway yard with small shops and restaurants. It is surrounded by rolling prairie, ranches, the Snowy Mountain range and vast, wide-open spaces. But the town also has a number of mobile home parks at the edges, some more rundown than others.

On the evening of 6 October 1998, Matthew went to the Fireside bar, a local hangout that was purportedly gay-friendly. It was karaoke night, and locals rubbed shoulders with workers calling in for a swift drink on their way home. Shortly afterwards Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney arrived. The three men chatted briefly before leaving the bar and getting in a truck belonging to McKinney's father.

In the truck Matthew was robbed of his keys, wallet and shoes and beaten repeatedly by one or both of the men. He was then taken from the truck, pistol whipped up to 18 times on the head, and kicked between the legs. Matthew was tied to a fence, set on fire, and left unconscious.

Fifteen hours after the attack, student Aaron Kreifels was out riding his bike when he discovered Matthew tied to the fence, barely alive. He initially mistook him for a scarecrow. Matthew's face was covered in blood, aside from tear tracks on each side of his cheeks.

The first officer at the scene was Reggie Fluty. "The only thing I could see was partially somebody's feet and I got out of my vehicle and raced over," said Fluty, her short blonde hair, fringe, and wire-rimmed glasses making her appear more social worker than police officer. "I seen what appeared to be to a young man, 13, 14 years old, because he was so tiny, laying on his back, and he was tied to the bottom end of a pole. I did the best I could..."

After leaving Matthew tied to the fence, McKinney and Henderson headed for Matthew's home, but on the way encountered two young Hispanic men, Emiliano Morales and Jeremy Herrera, slashing tyres for fun. The men got into a fight, resulting in McKinney cracking open Morales's head with the same gun he had used on Matthew. Police officer Flint Waters arrived, grabbed Henderson (he and McKinney had run in different directions), and found the truck, the gun, Matthew's shoes and credit card.

I spoke to Waters, who has since retired from the police, having seen him praise The Book of Matt on social media. "I believe to this day that McKinney and Henderson were trying to find Matthew's house so they could steal his drugs. It was fairly well known in the Laramie community that McKinney wouldn't be one that was striking out of a sense of homophobia. Some of the officers I worked with had caught him in a sexual act with another man, so it didn't fit - none of that made any sense."

But when Matthew's friends Walt Boulden and Alex Trout heard of the attack they rushed to the hospital. They contacted the Associated Press and a number of local gay organisations that same day. Boulden, a 46-year-old college instructor who says he was the last person to talk to Matthew before he met McKinney and Henderson, linked the attack to Wyoming legislature's failure to pass a hate-crimes bill. Boulden later said the assault was identified as a hate crime by a policeman.

Stephen Jimenez is an award-winning journalist and gay man. So why has he put such time and effort into attempting to prove that Matthew's murder was not a hate crime, especially as it has seen him accused of being an ally to the rightwing Christian fundamentalists who deny the reality of homophobia?

"The view was that homophobic rednecks walked into a bar and saw an obviously gay man with money and targeted him and beat him to death for that reason," says Jimenez. "But that isn't what happened. Nothing in this book takes away from the iniquity and brutality of the crime or the culpability of his murderers, but we owe Matthew and other young men like him the truth.

"Aaron and Matthew had a friendship. They'd been involved sexually, they bought and sold drugs from each other. That complicates the original story of two strangers walking into a bar and targeting Matthew - someone they did not know - because he was gay."

Although McKinney has never acknowledged that he knew Matthew, Jimenez found a dozen sources that had seen them together. One is Kathleen Johnson, the former owner of Laramie antiques store Granny's Attic, who knew Henderson, McKinney and Matthew.

The young, unemployed men had not had easy lives. Henderson's mother was a chronic alcoholic who had been repeatedly beaten by his father. McKinney had spent much of his childhood alone, left by his mother with his grandparents, who locked him in the basement to keep him out of trouble. "Russell Henderson used to hang around with gay people," Johnson told me. "Laramie had a big gay population. I knew what people's sexual orientation was because my best friend's son was gay. I saw them hanging around with Russell."

The police did not investigate the killers' relationship to the gay community.

Five days after the attack, on 12 October, Matthew died. On 14 October a celebrity vigil was held on the steps of the US Capitol, attended by the likes of Ted Kennedy and Ellen DeGeneres. Elton John sent flowers to Matt's funeral, Barbra Streisand telephoned the Albany county sheriff's office to demand quick action on the case, and Madonna called an assistant to university president Philip Dubois to complain about what had happened. The day Matthew died, President Clinton told journalists at the White House: "In our shock and grief one thing must remain clear: hate and prejudice are not American values."

The funeral was attended by more than 1,000 mourners - and picketed by the Westboro Baptist Church, led by Fred Phelps, a defrocked minister and founder of GodHatesFags.com. To counter the protest, Matthew's friends dressed as angels.

JoAnn Wypijewski, an author and former senior editor at the Nation, was one of the many journalists who came to Laramie after the news of Matthew's attack. She was there for Harper's Magazine and was the only journalist to suggest early on that methamphetamine may have played a role in Matthew's death. "The case was used to highlight the fact of violence against gay people," Wypijewski told me. "Hate-crime legislation under Clinton included provisions for race and enhanced penalties for crimes against women - these were used as sweeteners [to those on the Left]. They were like the identity politics of criminal law. This is what gave some other groups the idea that hate-crime legislation was a good thing."

Wypijewski thinks the reason some sections of the gay community are so angry about the Jimenez book is obvious: "Jimenez has taken away their angel, and there is the reflexive sense that as a community its suffering was being at last recognised. The people shaping the news require a very simple story - they have to be angels and villains."

John Stoltenberg is a gay-rights activist who lived with the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin until her death in 2005. He's a long-time supporter of The Laramie Project, but has also blogged positively about The Book of Matt. "Keeping Matthew as the poster boy of gay-hate crime and ignoring the full tragedy of his story has been the agenda of many gay-movement leaders," he says. "Ignoring the tragedies of Matthew's life prior to his murder will do nothing to help other young men in our community who are sold for sex, ravaged by drugs, and generally exploited. They will remain invisible and lost."

Ted Henson is a former lover and long-term friend of Matthew's. The pair originally met when Matt was growing up in Saudi Arabia. Henson told me he believes that The Book of Matt is "nothing more than the truth" and that he was "never certain" that the murder was an anti-gay hate crime. "I don't know why there is so much hostility towards Steve," he told me. "Matt would not have wanted to be seen as a martyr, but would have wanted the truth to come out."

Other Laramie residents believe there is another form of prejudice at work in the way Matthew's story has been told. One that concerns the oft-repeated notion that Wyoming is full of gay-hating bigots. Ray Hageman reported on the case for Wyoming radio in 1998 and was always sceptical of the media construction of the story. "National media couldn't resist a narrative that fits with its preconceived notions about people in rural western states," Hageman told me. "Y'know, us simple folks with the piece of straw hanging from our mouths, spitting tobacco and shooting pop cans from the front porch. The folks in Laramie just had to take it, because a fellow who happened to be gay was murdered in their town."

The Matthew Shepard Foundation stands firm about the murder being fuelled by homophobic hatred. I asked for a reaction regarding the book, but was sent a pre-prepared statement by executive director Jason Marsden, who was a friend of Matthew's. "We do not respond to innuendo, rumour or conspiracy theories," reads the statement first issued when The Book of Matt was published. "Instead we remain committed to honouring Matthew's memory and refuse to be intimidated by those who seek to tarnish it. We owe that to the tens of thousands of donors, activists, volunteers and allies to the cause of equality who have made our work possible."

On 16 September the Casper Star Tribune, the local paper in Matthew's home town, published an editorial claiming that an award Jimenez had recently received for his book "deserves rejection", saying: "From the beginning there have been those who want to ignore the sadistic homophobic motives of Shepard's attackers and instead insist the matter was a drug deal gone bad."

The debate will no doubt rage on. Matthew Shepard's murder will always be, for some, a symbol of the hatred many lesbians and gay men face in the US and beyond. The town of Laramie can take some comfort from reacting with such dignity and humanity in the aftermath and lending its name to The Laramie Project, which has changed hearts and minds. But the mystery remains - not so much why Matthew died, but why the gay community, after almost five decades of campaigning for equal rights, relies so fundamentally on the image of the perfect martyr to represent the cause.

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The truth behind America's most famous gay-hate murder

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he horrific killing of Matthew Shepard in 1998 is widely seen as one of the worst anti-gay hate crimes in American history. Matthew was beaten by two assailants, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. They pistol whipped him with a gun then tied him to a fence in freezing conditions and set fire to him before leaving him to die.

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The author, Carolyn Gage, doesn't buy in to the notion that Brandon was transgender. Gage, herself a lesbian, states that "gender dysphoria" due to PTSD caused by incest when Brandon was a child is to blame for Brandon's behavior. She also states that a friend of Brandon's said Brandon's response to "Brandon" was, "Brandon was gone. Her name is Teena." That exchange happened between Brandon's beating and Brandon's killing a week later.

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Carolyn Gage
Brandon's Gender Expression

Brandon didn't like wearing dresses to school. When her mother asked the reason for this, Brandon told her that dresses were cold (this was Nebraska) and that the boys could look up them when the girls climbed the stairs. Because she attended a school that required uniforms, she wore the pants and ties that were standard for the boys, but that girls were also allowed to wear. According to her best friend Sara Gapp, "People kept saying she dressed like a guy. She didn't... She dressed in clothes that she felt comfortable in. She didn't go to the guys' section to buy those clothes. Those were women's clothes she was wearing. She just liked baggy clothes. She wore short hair. Does that make her a guy?" (Jones, 55) Brandon's Lesbophobia
Conclusions

As an adult, Brandon exhibited behaviors consistent with a diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome associated with incest survivors. Gender dysphoria has been clinically identified as a response to child sexual abuse and incest, and it is logical to question whether or not it was therapeutic in the case of Teena Brandon to diagnose transsexualism and recommend surgical reassignment in lieu of focusing on diagnosis and treatment of Complex PTSD. If healing from child sexual abuse and incest requires retrieval and assimilation of dissociated material, a strong case can be made that Brandon's transsexualism diagnosis served to enhance her dissociation, impeding recovery from the incest and enabling an escalation of high-risk behaviors based on a dissociated identity.

As a final footnote, one of Brandon's friends has shared this story about the week between the rape and the murder:

On Christmas day of 1993, when Lisa brought Brandon back... from Falls City, [a friend] met him[Brandon] at the door and said "Hi Brandon" In reply [the friend] was told by Brandon that there was no Brandon, Brandon was gone. Her name is Teena. That didn't change at any point in that last week. (private email, December 20, 2004).
Brandon reported that in October 1990, she was raped. That same fall, when she was almost eighteen, Brandon tried to join the army. According to her friends, she was eager to be a part of Operation Desert Storm. Unfortunately, she did not pass the written exams. This appears to have been a turning point for her. According to her mother, "She was really upset... She started to change." (Jones, 47)

One of the biggest questions about Brandon's choices is "Why didn't she identify herself as lesbian?" She may well have been trying to do that when she attempted to enlist. Why would a transman want to enlist in a strictly segregated, all-female environment? The military, in spite of its homophobic policies and witch hunts, has always appealed to lesbians, because it has historically provided a same-sex living and work environment for four years.

Although rape and sexual harassment occur in the military, a survivor who associates her violation with isolation and ongoing exposure to access by males might feel there was safety in an all-female environment, and especially if she had just been raped. Also, army regulation uniforms provide protective covering that de-emphasize sexual characteristics and discourage sexual objectification. It would be naive to assume that Brandon, who had, by high school, identified her sexual attraction to women and who had already moved in with one girlfriend, was unaware of the association of lesbians with the military. She may well have been looking for the lesbians, and this may explain in part her extreme reaction to failing the entrance exam.

If this is the case, then why didn't she go looking for the communities of lesbians in her hometown? Because "don't ask, don't tell" was not a policy that applied to working-class gays and lesbians in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1990. The homophobia there was overt and potentially life-threatening. Harassment could take the form of anonymous, obscene phone calls, drive-by threats and insults, and physical assault. Because rape is viewed by homophobes as a "cure" for lesbianism, harassment can take the form of threats of rape, or the act itself.

For a young woman who had a horror of male sexuality and who had told friends that rape was one of her biggest fears, and who had just been raped, the prospect of this kind of harassment must have been terrifying. The October rape may, in fact, have been a homophobic assault directed against her, as a woman who didn't date men and who had a history of cohabitation with a girlfriend.

But there was another reason why Brandon wasn't identifying herself as lesbian: Lesbianism had become a power issue between Brandon and her mother.

In March of 1991, shortly after Brandon's rejection by the army, a teenaged girl named Liz Delano dialed a wrong number and reached Brandon by mistake. Liz mistook Brandon for a teenaged boy, and Brandon played along, calling herself "Billy." For a joke, she put a sock in her underwear and met Liz at a skating rink as Billy. Liz continued to call the Brandon home and ask for "Billy," and JoAnn began to understand that her daughter was posing as a boy. She was not happy.

A few weeks later, Brandon began a relationship with Heather, a fourteen-year-old friend of Liz. She moved in with Heather, posing as a male and calling herself "Ten-a." JoAnn Brandon understood that this relationship was a sexual one, and she began telephoning both Heather and Heather's mother, insisting that the young man they had taken into their home was her daughter. Heather, like Brandon, was an incest survivor. According to the account in Jones' biography, the focus of Brandon's relationship was intense, romantic role-playing, not genital sex, and Heather responded initially with gratitude for the thoughtful behaviors and absence of sexual pressure. Brandon deeply resented JoAnn's attempt to sabotage the relationship, and she especially resented her mother's attempt to cast her in the role of a sexual (lesbian) predator.

To explain away her mother's persistent calls, Brandon told Heather that she had been born a hermaphrodite, but that JoAnn had chosen to raise her as a female in order to "keep her for herself." (Jones, 89) According to Heather, "He [Brandon] had a legitimate answer for everything. He'd tell me his mother couldn't accept the fact that he was male, that she wanted two little girls, that she was just playing a joke." (Jones, 67) Brandon's knowledge of hermaphroditism had come from an episode of the Phil Donahue show.

JoAnn herself tells a different story: "I knew that all of a sudden there were beer parties going on and I have an eighteen-year-old daughter over there that's not supposed to be drinking or doing anything."(Jones, 67) She understood that any sexual activity between Brandon and the fourteen-year-old Heather was statutory rape. JoAnn was outraged by Brandon's claim of hermaphroditism. "I gave birth to her; I know what sex she is. There were no attachments anywhere that had to be removed." (Jones, 68)

JoAnn stepped up her campaign to "out" her daughter. She sent two lesbian co-workers to visit Heather's mother. They had photographs of Brandon as a little girl and a copy of her birth certificate. In response, Brandon tore up every picture of herself she could find. Perceiving lesbianism as her mother's attempt to break up her relationship, Brandon began binding her breasts, lowering her voice, and using men's rooms in public.

In June 1991, Brandon filed a complaint against her mother for harassment. She and Heather took the tape from their answering machine to the police. On it was a message from JoAnn calling them lesbians and threatening to expose them. Her mother's insistence on Brandon's lesbianism had become a serious enough power issue to involve the police.

Lesbianism was a family issue in another sense. The winter following Brandon's attempt to enlist, her sister Tammy had given up a baby for adoption-to a lesbian couple from San Francisco. Brandon had urged her sister to keep the baby. She had wanted desperately to be an aunt. Later, one of Brandon's gay male friends would report how "He [Brandon] hated lesbians; he was totally against lesbians," (Jones, 93) citing the adoption as the reason for this hatred.

That same summer, Brandon began forging checks in order to buy groceries and gifts for Heather. She had obtained a fake identification card and was getting jobs as a man. She began telling friends that she had gotten a sex-change operation in Omaha. By October, she had been cited on two counts of second-degree forgery. Brandon's illegal activities began to accelerate, as did her drinking, compulsive behaviors, and eating disorders. Finally, Sarah, her best friend, decided to take matters into her own hands. She met with Heather and explained to her that Brandon was a female. Heather terminated the relationship and Brandon attempted to kill herself by taking a bottle of antibiotics. This landed her in a crisis center, and here, finally, she was able to receive professional counseling.

The Gender Identity Disorder Diagnosis

Brandon spent seven days at the crisis center. Dr. Klaus Hartman wrote up the initial report. Brandon's history would have included twelve pending charges of forgery, a possible charge of sexual assault on a minor, an untreated rape in October 1990, eating disorders, binge drinking, and an ongoing sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl. The diagnosis? A mild case of identity disorder. After just a few days of counseling, Brandon told her mother that a sex change operation had been suggested by her therapist.

Was transsexualism Brandon's idea or the therapists'? Mental health clinician Deb Brodtke took over Brandon's case at the crisis center and continued to treat her for almost a year on an outpatient basis. Brandon is reported telling Brodtke she wanted to be a male, "to not have to deal with the negative connotations of being a lesbian and because she felt less intimidated by men when she presented herself as male." (Jones, 83) If this is true, what Brandon told her therapist was not that she felt like a man trapped in a woman's body, but a woman trapped in a world where it was dangerous to be female, and especially dangerous to be lesbian.

Jones' book does not record any attempt on Brodtke's part to challenge Brandon's internalized lesbophobia. There is no record in her narrative of efforts to supply Brandon with information about lesbian culture or lesbian history, information about lesbian coming-out groups or groups for young lesbians. There is no record of her attempting to connect Brandon with an adult lesbian who could counsel or mentor her. The "gender identity disorder" (GID) diagnosis reflects the historical heterosexism of the mental health field, which has traditionally understood gay and lesbian desire as evidence of the desire to become a member of the other sex.

Brandon's diagnosis appears not to have included alcoholism. It's interesting to note how prevalent the use and abuse of alcohol is in the documentary, the biography, and the feature film-and yet how absent it appears to have been from the treatment plan. If alcohol abuse had been identified as even a contributing factor to the chaos and torment of Brandon's young life, it seems logical that there would have been some attempt to incorporate a recovery program into the treatment plan.

And finally, Brandon's GID diagnosis, so replete with homophobia and gender bias, also appears to have ignored the "elephant in the living room"-the incest. The account of Brandon's treatment and diagnosis does not appear to include Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome commonly associated with survivors of child abuse, and especially survivors of incest. This is remarkable given the fact that, at the clinic, Brandon presented with a record of years of untreated child sexual abuse, a report of a recent rape, an escalation of criminal activity, a history of multiple identities, sexual predation toward under-aged girls, extreme risk-taking behaviors, avoidance of medical care from fear of routine examinations, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, terror of being in a female body, expressed fear of men, preference for protective clothing, and compulsive bathing-six or seven showers a day with changes of clothing. (Brandon's obsession with cleanliness would continue throughout her life, and, according to friends, even in her last years, she was still taking three or four showers a day.)

Instead of a diagnosis related to trauma, the therapist apparently sent Brandon home with information about "gender reassignment" surgeries, which would include such procedures as suturing the vagina, removing the breasts, ovaries, and uterus, transplanting the nipples, constructing an appendage using skin grafts from the thighs, and administering steroids. Brandon's friends reported that Brandon expressed a marked ambivalence about these recommendations.

Her sister Tammy remembers the family's reaction:

Basically, we were getting worried about Teena. And we couldn't get any help for her... you know, not help to deal with her being gay or anything like that, but help to deal with her trying to figure out herself. Maybe she needed some counseling. And she had mentioned to us about committing suicide, so we kind of used that as a reason of getting her to there [Lincoln General Hospital], and the psychologist there said that Teena needed long-term help... which I don't know if that was really the case, but they did send her out to the Crisis Center, and... I wish I really knew what Teena had told them or what those doctors had told Teena, but basically, she came out of there saying, 'I want a sex change,' and... 'They told me I need to do this and that.' And they might have told her that, but I don't know if that's really what she wanted to do." (Muska) In advocating for the surgery that would facilitate Brandon's transition, the therapist advised her of the professionally-mandated, year-long probationary period, a period in which the patient would be required to live as a man. Had Brandon described her current strategies for passing as a man in relationships-strategies involving the deception and statutory rape of naive and inexperienced minors who were unlikely to be assertive or educated enough to confront Brandon's sexual subterfuges? If the therapist did address the legal, ethical, or safety issues of these strategies, Brandon never saw any reason to revise them. In fact, armed with the official diagnosis of "Axis I: transsexualism," Brandon escalated her deceptions and seductions.

After this counseling, her repertory of lies expanded to include tales of her grandmother's plans to send her to Europe to have the surgery done, and of scheduled dates in June 1993 for a bilateral mastectomy. She told her various girlfriends at various times that her vagina had been sewn up, that "something" had been implanted that would eventually grow into a penis, and that she had begun hormone therapy. Like the stories of hermaphroditism that preceded the transsexual diagnosis, all were untrue.

Misogyny, Dissociation, and GID

According to the studies of Jacobs and Herman, the victimized daughter's repudiation of a female identity and her internalization of an idealized male represent responses to childhood sexual abuse.

If gender is considered an aggregate of sex-caste markers in a system of dominance based on biological sex, then it is simplistic and misleading to characterize it as "performative." Viewed in the context of a patriarchal culture, gender is emblematic of a system of dominance in which women are universally oppressed as a caste.

The victimized daughter who adopts a male persona is not "fucking with gender." Gender has fucked with her, and, in attempting to identify with the power that has hurt her, she is adopting the strategy of a desperate child whose only option has been to alter her perception of herself.

What the transgender movement calls gender-fucking is simply an exercise in moving markers rather than any fundamental change in gender. Gender still exists. It is still an organizing structure for society. What's different is that you just 'do' it differently: it is 'allowed' to be attached to different bodies. The aim of transgender politics is to allow you to be 'be' the gender that you 'are.' However, being your gender still means what you wear, what you do, how you express yourself and is still attached to fundamental notions of what it means to be men and women... And it's no surprise that what is female and what is male in this view exactly tracks what is already defined as male and female. (Corson, 3) Transgender politics does not disrupt the positions of men and women in the gender hierarchy, but what it does do is "render women's choices to oppose this hierarchy as women and on behalf of women incomprehensible."(Corson, 3)

In addition to its participation in the larger political system of male dominance, the GID diagnosis also acts on a more personal front to protect the perpetrators. If the victimized daughter's "gender dysphoria" is a post-traumatic response to sexual violence, it reflects an attempt to dissociate, or split off, the trauma.

A trauma that cannot adequately be represented or narrated remains estranged. It is an alienated chunk of experience that resists any assimilation into the personhood of the host on whom it feeds. Dissociation can also be understood as a narrative act. It narrates fragmentation, breakage, rupture, disjunction, and incommensurability. (Epstein and Lefkovitz, 193) Dissociation is a survival strategy.

It provides a way out of the intolerable and psychologically incongruous situation (double-bind), it erects memory barriers (amnesia) to keep painful events and memories out of awareness, it functions as an analgesic to prevent feeling pain, it allows escape from experiencing the event and from responsibility/guilt, and it may serve as a hypnotic negation of the sense of self. The child may begin by using the dissociative mechanism spontaneously and sporadically. With repeated victimization and double-bind injunctions, it becomes chronic. It may further become an autonomous process as the individual ages. (Courtois, 155) Dissociation is a way of altering consciousness. As millions of survivors can testify, these dissociated memories have not really gone away. Whether or not they ever surface to the conscious mind, they continue to exert their influence through somatic disorders, flashbacks, sleep disturbances, intrusive dreams, and dissociative disorders. Repressed memories do not go away because one wishes them away. The survivor takes control of her life by understanding and assimilating repressed trauma, not reinforcing the split. And this is precisely why the GID diagnosis is so potentially pernicious when applied to the victimized daughter.

When the GID diagnosis is substituted for identification and treatment of PTSD, it reinforces the splitting that was a result of childhood trauma. However "queer" the diagnosis, it does not deviate from a model of normativity based on traditional sex-caste roles. The GID diagnosis that recommends transsexualism as a "cure" seriously compromises the victimized daughter's potential for recovery from the effects of her trauma. Instead of offering techniques to aid her retrieval of memory and reintegration of dissociated material, the GID diagnosis enables and encourages an even deeper investment in the disorder, by offering a false promise of legitimizing this ahistorical dissociative identity through "reassignment" of gender. It exploits, rather than deconstructs, the syndrome.

Revictimization

Finally, when the transgender identity is an extension and amplification of the victimized daughter's identification with the perpetrator, a divided consciousness continues to inform the survivor's psyche, playing itself out in scenarios of revictimization.

In both the play and imagination of the survivors, a tenuous relationship exists between the internalized male abuser and the violated female child... While the introjection of the perpetrator may at times mask the daughter's identity as victim and thus contribute to the construction of a false persona, patterns of revictimization reveal the extent to which the unprotected and violated female self also inform the personality of the victimized daughter. (Jacobs, 99) Revictimization was the story of Brandon's short adult life, as she played out serial fraudulent identities that resulted in arrest and incarceration, seduction of under-aged girls who rejected her when they discovered her secret, and increasingly dangerous alliances with violent and homophobic males. Brandon's sexual deceptions, deceptions that escalated after her official diagnosis as transsexual, put her girlfriends at risk in very real ways. Her girlfriends in Lincoln had been teased and harassed by their friends, but when Brandon moved to the more provincial Richardson County, the stakes became even higher. Both of Brandon's Humboldt friends, Lisa Lambert and Lana Tisdel, were being harassed at their workplaces and at social events. One of Lisa's friends described Lisa's dilemma: "Everyone in Humboldt knew about Brandon. Lisa didn't try to hide it. Lisa couldn't believe something like this happened to her. She made it clear that she was too caring to shut Brandon out. She was mad and hurt about it, but she didn't want to hurt him [Brandon], didn't want to turn him out on the streets." (Jones, 205) Her compassion would cost her her life.

Lana's situation was complicated by her friendship with ex-convicts Tom Nissen and John Lotter. When Brandon was arrested for forging checks on December 15, 1993, she had phoned Lana to bail her out, but Lana was horrified to discover that her "boyfriend" was being held in the women's section of the jail. Instead of going herself, Lana sent Tom, her former boyfriend, to bail Brandon out. The arrest was reported that week in the Falls City Journal, making public Brandon's biological identity as female, and, consequently, Lana's participation in what would be perceived as a lesbian relationship. Friends of Brandon believe that the bailing-out was the beginning of a set-up for the subsequent rape. Nissen and Lotter appear to have felt deceived and humiliated by Brandon's gender presentation. In the words of one friend, "He [Brandon] played a player and [the player] got even for it." (private email, December 20, 2004)

According to Jones, however, Lana had attempted to protect Brandon, even after she realized she had been deceived. She told her family and Tom Nissen and John Lotter that she had seen Brandon's penis. But Tom and John were not convinced, and they performed their own investigation-strip-searching her. These were both men with histories of violence, and they decided to take matters into their own hands. It may have been that Lana's safety was seriously compromised once it was known by these men that she had participated in a sexual relationship with a biological female and had lied to protect the fact.

Three days after Brandon had, at Lana's urging, gone to the police to report the rape, the police questioned John and Tom, but did not arrest them. John denied the rape, but said that Lana had asked him to find a way to determine Brandon's sex. On December 30, the two men went to Lana's house looking for Brandon, but Brandon, who was no longer welcome there, had taken shelter at Lisa's farmhouse. Lana reported that John said he "felt like killing someone" and told her she, Lana, was next. This may have been why Lana's mother told them where Brandon was hiding. After they left, no phone calls were made to warn Brandon or Lisa that the men were on their way. Conflicting testimony suggests that Lana may have actually been in the car, or even at the house, on the night of the murders.

Treatment Considerations

Many aspects of Brandon's life would have been easier in a culture that was not transphobic, but recovery from incest trauma would not have been one of them.

Recovery from traumatic sexualization... begins with the process of reintegration whereby the original trauma is brought to consciousness. Only then can the idealization of the perpetrator give way to the reality of his sexual violence. With the deconstruction of the idealized father, the daughter can begin to reclaim and redefine the female self, diminishing the impact of the internalized aggressor. (Jacobs, 165) When the internalization of this ideal has become incorporated into the gender identity of the victimized daughter, specifically as a response to the trauma, this kind of deconstruction is impeded. These may have been so damaged by the incest that it might appear more expedient and more therapeutic to adopt a differently-gendered identity that is not so apparently freighted with traumatic associations. This identity, however, cannot-by definition-offer the integration that characterizes recovery.

So, how does the victimized daughter heal? In Victimized Daughters, Janet Liebman Jacobs elaborates some of the stages associated with recovery, noting that not every survivor will experience these changes: (Jacobs, 136)

The choice to wear baggy clothes is consistent with the choices of many survivors of sexual abuse. Brandon's "passing" as a man began later as a practical joke on a teenaged girl who dialed Brandon's number by accident and mistook her for a boy on the phone. According to Sarah, "Up until Liz Delano [the mistaken caller], if you had called her a boy, Teena would be offended. She didn't want to be recognized as a guy. She didn't feel like a guy." (Jones, 54)

Brandon has also been described as indulging in male role-playing. According to her sister Tammy,

The church was really significant to her. We went to Catholic school, and I think they kind of brainwash you in kindergarten on being priests and nuns. They always bring in priests and nuns to talk about how they got the calling and how you'll know if you have the calling... Teena never wanted to be a nun; she always wanted to be a priest, and I thought it was funny because I had to participate in her masses, and I'd get really bored half the time, 'cause she'd read from the Bible and make us sing. I thought it was just a game she played; then every once in a while she'd say, 'Oh, I want to be a priest someday.' (Jones, 34) Was Brandon identifying with the power to officiate or with the gender? In light of the Church's ban against women priests, which denies women the prestige, ceremonial office, and opportunity for leadership associated with the priesthood, it would be irresponsible to attribute Brandon's desire to be a priest to "gender dysphoria"-a term that, when applied to females, could as well be defined as "sex-caste resistance." Identification with gender roles in a male dominant culture cannot be separated from identification with the privileges that accompany those roles. As pioneer psychoanalyst Karen Horney notes, "We live... in a male culture, i.e. state, economy, art and science are creations of man and thus filled with his spirit." (Horney, 152)

Brandon's discomfort with her developing body has been documented. In her book, Aphrodite Jones reports that Brandon hated the pain caused by her developing breasts, and that she also complained of the pain of menstrual cramps and the inconvenience of having to deal with a monthly flow of blood. Were these the objections of a "male trapped in a female body," or of a particularly self-assertive and articulate girlchild appalled by the inconvenience, embarrassment, and pain of the adult female body?

Brandon's discomfort ran deeper than annoyance. She reported that it would "make her feel sick" (Jones, 47) to have anyone stare at her chest. Again, a girl need not be an incest survivor to register disgust at the sexual objectification of her developing body at puberty, but the female incest survivor who has internalized a masculine ideal faces a different set of obstacles:

While puberty represents a painful time for many adolescent girls, for daughters in incest families this transition into female adulthood may be especially difficult and confusing as her body signals not only the passage into female adulthood but the recognition that the internalized masculine ideal is truly a fantasy of other and can never be the real self. (Jacobs, 86) The rejection of the female self can offer an explanation for the prevalence of eating disorders at puberty among incest survivors. Brandon, at the time of her attempted suicide, was reported as manifesting serious eating disorders.

For the incest survivor, her body becomes the symbol of her victimization and thus the focus of her desire for control. Further, the obsession with a thin, boyish body, rather than an expression of femininity, may represent an unconscious rejection of the female self through which the daughter attempts to integrate the internalized male ego ideal with an external image of a masculinized child's body. (Jacobs, 88)
Teena Brandon is remembered today as the female-to-male, transgender victim of a brutal murder motivated by transphobia. When she was eighteen years old, three years before her death, she had been admitted to a crisis center as a result of a drug overdose, which may have been intentional. At the time, she was seriously underweight from an eating disorder and taking seven showers a day, with seven complete changes of clothing. Drinking heavily, she faced twelve pending charges of forgery and a possible charge of sexual assault on a minor, was suffering from a recent, unreported and untreated rape, and was involved in an ongoing sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl, in which she was passing as male. She reported to therapists that, as a child, she had been a victim of years of sexual abuse perpetrated by a male member of her family. According to her biographer, she was diagnosed with "mild gender identity dysphoria," reporting to her friends that a sex-change operation had been suggested. I want to talk about an inconvenient truth. I want to talk about the fact the person who was named Teena Brandon was a survivor of incest. You won't hear this mentioned in Boys Don't Cry, and you won't hear it mentioned in the documentary "The Brandon Teena Story." You won't read about it in the current Wikipedia entry. It is, like I said, inconvenient.

"Inconvenient" means "causing trouble or difficulties." The inconvenient truth of Brandon's incest history causes trouble because incorporating information about child sexual abuse into the narrative of Brandon's life pathologizes the transgendered identity adopted by Brandon and for which she has become an icon. This is perceived as disrespectful and transphobic-as an attack on Brandon's identity and a posthumous attempt to appropriate a victim's identity.

But the omission of Brandon's incest history is disrespectful and phobic to survivors of child sexual abuse. It also constitutes a posthumous attempt to appropriate a victim's identity. As a survivor, I am disturbed by the revisionist histories of Brandon that omit Brandon's status as a victim of child sexual abuse-and all of the subsequent inconvenient truths accompanying that status.

Inconvenient truths have a way of remaining unarticulated, because they exist outside the frame of reference that has been established. The first difficulty one encounters in telling this inconvenient truth about Teena Brandon is the issue of pronouns. Brandon was sexually abused as a female child, born biologically female, by an adult male perpetrator who was a family member. The gender of victim and perpetrator are clinical details that are critical to the understanding of the perpetration and the impact it had on Brandon. Because of this, I will be using a female pronoun to refer to Brandon as a child, even though, in adulthood, Brandon would identify as male. This places my narrative outside the accepted protocol of respectful dialogue about trans identity.

In this essay, I will refer to her as "Brandon," because, as an adult, she chose to adopt her given surname as her personal name. In titling the essay, I have used her legal, given name "Teena Brandon." It is another inconvenient truth that Brandon never used the name "Brandon Teena." This name was posthumously ascribed, and then picked up by the media. It was a convenient untruth, because it constituted a clever reversal of Brandon's birth name, flipping the name to correspond with flipping gender. "Brandon Teena" is a PR-savvy metaphor... and a fiction.

The Incest

In Aphrodite Jones' biography, All She Wanted, the first narration of the sexual abuse shows up in an interview with Sara Gapp, Brandon's best friend when Brandon was twelve. "She [Brandon] told me that one of her relatives was doing something to her that she didn't like. She just kinda said that, you know, he would kinda whip this thing out and kinda play with it a little bit... and she said occasionally he'd have her touch him and then he would play with her and tell her, 'oh, you like it. You know this feels good... You know you don't want me to stop.'" (Jones, 43) According to Sara, "At that point in time, she didn't want anyone to know about what happened. She didn't want the guy mad at her... She was embarrassed. No matter what he did to her, she still loved him." (Jones, 43)

Brandon's therapist later confirmed the story of the abuse, adding that, according to Brandon, the sessions of abuse would last for hours and that the molestation continued for a period of years, from childhood into adolescence. In one counseling session, Brandon confronted her mother JoAnn about it, but requested that she not confront the perpetrator, who may have been one of JoAnn's relatives. Brandon's sister Tammy, also a victim, confirmed Brandon's account. It is possible that this abuse was a factor in Brandon's decision to leave home at sixteen, get a job, and move in with her then-girlfriend, Traci Beels, an older classmate.

Victim Responses to Incest

In her book Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self, Janet Liebman Jacobs states that incest represents "the most extreme form of the sexual objectification of the female child in patriarchal culture." (Jacobs, 11) She makes a compelling case for the fact that incest has a major impact on female personality development, including gender identity.

Jacobs' book highlights significant developmental issues that influence the personality formation of sexually abused daughters, and among these is identification with the perpetrator. Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud and the founder of child psychoanalysis, elaborates on this process:

A child introjects some characteristic of an anxiety-object and so assimilates an anxiety-experience which he [she] has just undergone... By impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself [herself] from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat. (Freud, 121) Turning away from her mother, whom she perceives as an untrustworthy betrayer-of-her-own-kind, the victimized daughter looks toward the male perpetrator, who, because he is her abuser, is perceived as powerful, and who, because he is male, still hold the potential for objective idealization. "Female," for the daughter, has become identified as the subjective gender for victims and betrayers. According to trauma researcher Judith Herman, "In her desperate attempts to preserve her faith in her parents, the child victim develops highly idealized images of at least one parent... More commonly, the child idealizes the abusive parent and displaces all her rage onto the nonoffending parent." (Herman, 106) Describing her research with survivors of father-daughter incest, Herman notes, "With the exception of those who had become conscious feminists, most of the incest victims seemed to regard all women, including themselves, with contempt." (Herman, Father-Daughter Incest, 103)

Rejecting the mother and her own female identity, the victimized daughter begins to imitate the aggressor. E. Sue Blume, author of Secret Survivors, describes how the daughter reinvents herself through identification with the perpetrator.

...child victims often recreate themselves, developing alter egos who offer a positive live alternative to their own. Most commonly, this is a male persona: female survivor clients may either substitute alternative male personalities, or attach to a male fantasy companion. This is simple to understand: as a victim, and a female, she associates her vulnerable state with defenselessness; males, however, are seen as physically stronger, and not easily targeted for victimization. (Blume, 85)

Deconstruction of the idealized father.

Recognition of the sense of self constructed around the ideal of maleness embodied in the perpetrator.

Separation from the perpetrator.

Identification of the self as victim (which may include identification with other powerless members of society, and which allows her to deconstruct the "bad self" at the core of her development).

Recognition of past victimization integrated in the context of original sexual trauma (which may result in establishing and maintaining better boundaries in potentially victimizing relationships).

Reclaiming the sexual self (a result of deconstruction of the idealized perpetrator and development of a separate sense of self, which may involve controlling dissociative responses and intrusive flashbacks, and the restructuring or elimination of sexual fantasies that signifies disengagement from the perpetrator).

Self-validation and reconnection to the female persona (through therapeutic transference that models respectful caretaking, or reconnection or empathy with the mother, or identification with female spiritual power).

Reintegration through creative imagination.

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The Inconvenient Truth about Teena Brandon

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Carolyn Gage Brandon's Gender Expression Brandon didn't like wearing dresses to school. When her mother asked the reason for this, Brandon told her that dresses were cold (this was Nebraska) and that the boys could look up them when the girls climbed the stairs.