Source: Newsweek

King shooting

The Newsweek story by Ramin Setoodeh adds more detail to the story that has been missing from the mostly local coverage given the story by Ventura County Star and Los Angeles Times.

Setoodeh's report offers far more detail about King's schooldays and his homelife, but in doing so comes dangerously close to blaming King for his own murder.

It's a danger that Newsweek editor Daniel Klaidman is aware of. "By the time he entered E. O. Green he had become highly assertive, even taunting, in his sexuality," Klaidman writes in the Editor's Desk column. He writes that Larry King's own behavior "perhaps played a role in the ensuing violence," but quickly adds, "as if anything could be said to justify murder."

The editor summarizes his magazine's cover story:

Larry King was in some ways a disturbed kid, who wielded his sexuality as both a weapon and a shield. So while his life -- and its terrible ending -- is in some ways an extreme case, it also points up a larger reality: schools are caught between their desire to protect legitimate sexual expression and their obligation to prevent inappropriate, and potentially harmful, behavior.

Setoodeh talked to many of the students and teachers who knew King at E.O. Green and others who knew of him. He offers more detail about King's flamboyant appearance at the school:

In January, ... Larry decided to dress like a girl. He went to school accessorized to the max, and his already colorful personality got louder. He accused a girl to her face of having breast implants.

Another girl told him she didn't like his shoes. "I don't like your necklace," Larry snapped back. Larry called his mom from Casa Pacifica to tell her that he wanted to get a sex-change operation.

And he told a teacher that he wanted to be called Leticia, since no one at school knew he was half African-American. The teacher said firmly, "Larry, I'm not calling you Leticia." He dropped the idea without an argument.

... Larry, being Larry, pushed his rights as far as he could. During lunch, he'd sidle up to the popular boys' table and say in a high-pitched voice, "Mind if I sit here?"

In the locker room, where he was often ridiculed, he got even by telling the boys, "You look hot," while they were changing, according to the mother of a student.

Among other stories, Setoodeh gives greater detail to the story that most see as the proximate cause of the rage that prompted Brandon McInerney to shoot King:

And then there was Valentine's Day. A day or two before the shooting, the school was buzzing with the story about a game Larry was playing with a group of his girlfriends in the outdoor quad.

The idea was, you had to go up to your crush and ask them to be your Valentine. Several girls named boys they liked, then marched off to complete the mission.

When it was Larry's turn, he named Brandon, who happened to be playing basketball nearby. Larry walked right on to the court in the middle of the game and asked Brandon to be his Valentine.

Brandon's friends were there and started joking that he and Larry were going to make "gay babies" together. At the end of lunch, Brandon passed by one of Larry's friends in the hall. She says he told her to say goodbye to Larry, because she would never see him again.

This is the story that prompted Ellen Degeneres to issue an emotional plea on her program in May.

Her comment added an element missing from Setoodeh's story:

And, somewhere along the line the killer, Brandon, got the message that it's so threatening, so awful, and so horrific that Larry would want to be his Valentine -- that killing Larry seemed to be the right thing to do. And when the message out there is so horrible that to be gay, you can get killed for it, we need to change the message.

Ellen's brief comment made obvious what many of those that Setoodeh talked to -- inlcuding Larry King's father -- still don't understand: that the expression of an adolescent crush doesn't constitute harassment, and certainly can't come anywhere close to justifying murder.

If a school boy had shot a girl that he didn't like who'd approached him to be her Valentine, locals would probably have been far more outraged than they were in this case.

"Brandon was being terrorized," the killer's father, Bill McInerney, told Setoodeh. "He was being stalked almost, to the degree of the school should have never let this happen."

Setoodeh's finally makes explicit something that's been obvious for months in the Ventura County Star coverage of the murder -- the discomfort of Larry's adoptive father, Greg King, with the stories that his son might be gay. The Star was slow to report that fellow students thought Larry had been shot because he was gay, and did so only after the LA Times had reported that significant aspect of the story.

The local paper also printed an early profile of the young victim that said nothing about his self-professed identity.

"Greg King doesn't feel sympathy for Brandon," Setoodeh reports, "but he does believe his son sexually harassed him."

He's resentful that the gay community has appropriated his son's murder as part of a larger cause. "I think the gay-rights people want it to be a gay-rights issue, because it makes a poster child out of my son," King says. "That bothered me. I'm not anti-gay. I have a lot of co-workers and friends who are gay."

It's an issue that's likely to be raised again during McInerney's trial later this summer.

"William Quest, Brandon's public defender, hasn't disclosed his defense strategy, but he has accused the school of failing to intercede as the tension rose between Larry and Brandon," Setoodeh reports.

Joy Epstein, a lesbian vice-principal who counseled Larry, has been criticized by fellow teachers and by Quest for having "a political agenda."

"One teacher complains that by being openly gay and discussing her girlfriend (presumably, no one would have complained if she had talked about a husband), Epstein brought the subject of sex into school," Setoodeh reports.

Larry's father also blames Epstein, according to Setoodeh. He's hired an attorney and told the Newsweek reporter that he is seriously contemplating a wrongful-death lawsuit.

"I think that she was asserting her beliefs for gay rights," Greg King told Setoodeh, suggesting, without saying it, that there's something wrong with that.

"For tweens, talking about being gay isn't really about sex," Setoodeh writes -- apparently assuming that talking about being gay is usually about sex for adults.

His report elaborates:

They may be aware of their own sexual attraction by the time they're 10, according to Caitlin Ryan, a researcher at San Francisco State University, but those feelings are too vague and unfamiliar to be their primary motivation. (In fact, Larry told a teacher that he'd never kissed anyone, male or female.)

These kids are actually concerned with exploring their identity. "When you're a baby, you cry when you're hungry because you don't know the word for it," says Allan Acevedo, 19, of San Diego, who came out when he was in eighth grade. "Part of the reason why people are coming out earlier is they have the word 'gay,' and they know it explains the feeling."

Like older teenagers, tweens tend to tell their friends first, because they think they'll be more accepting. But kids that age often aren't equipped to deal with highly personal information, and middle-school staffs are almost never trained in handling kids who question their sexuality.

Apparently, reflecting comments from those he interviewed, Setoodeh's report generally treats King's flamboyant self-expression as a problem. That was apparently the attitude of some, but not all, at his school:

The staff at E. O. Green tried to help as Larry experimented with his identity, but he liked to talk in a roar. One teacher asked him why he taunted the boys in the halls, and Larry replied, "It's fun to watch them squirm."

... "He was like Britney Spears," says one teacher who knew Larry. "Everyone wanted to know what's the next thing he's going to do."

Girls would take photos of him on their camera phones and discuss him with their friends. "My class was in a frenzy every day with Larry stories," says a humanities teacher who didn't have Larry as one of her students.

Setoodeh recounts a tragic story of the results of homophobia without ever identifying the real problem.

Full article: Cover: Young, Gay and Murdered in Junior High | Newsweek