On Being Haunted by King: An Elegy for Queer Youth

A photo has haunted me for more than a decade. It’s the photo of Lawrence King, murdered by a fellow middle school student, on February 12, 2008, at E. O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California.

It’s 2008…

In the photo, I see King, wearing a purple, white, black, and teal patterned sweater, hand raised showing off a caterpillar, hair neatly styled, a slight smile, perhaps a childish smirk, eyes looking maybe just past the camera. A snapshot of a middle schooler in the midst of living and learning.

This photo circulated widely in the media after King’s murder. There’s another that sometimes merges with this one in my memory—a school photo, most likely. But the haunting photo was the one that introduced me to the murdered eighth grader, days before Valentine’s Day in 2008. Ellen DeGeneres, in a tearful monologue on her daytime talk show, displayed the photo, holding back tears as she told her audience about King’s murder:

A boy has been killed and a number of lives ruined, and somewhere along the line the killer Brandon got the message that it is so threatening, and 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.

This was not a political message, DeGeneres noted. It was a personal message pulling on the so-called heart strings of a nation mourning, or perhaps just part of a nation mourning, arguably for the first time, a gay child, a gay child of colour now dead, in middle school. “Larry was not a second-class citizen,” DeGeneres said. “It is, she concluded, “okay to be gay.”

I remember watching this moment then, saddened by the emerging details of the case, but concerned with if and how the complexity would be taken up. I was then in the midst of my graduate education—studying queer issues in education, particularly teacher education, and the work of engaging the expanding ways youth encounter and express genders and sexualities. This was before the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in 2010, before Time magazine declared a transgender tipping point in 2014, before Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. King’s murder—an inflection point now visible—touched close to my work, bringing the statistics about violence against queer students, particularly queer students of colour, to the nation’s and my attention.¹ This, with the photo of a middle schooler, a slight smile, a childish smirk.

Yet the case cut too close, making visible the threats to and assaults on queer students in schools. I found myself unable…unwilling…unsure of how to write in and around the case. The details are too new, too sad, too real with King’s face and name, there on the screen. King felt sacred, a figure to be protected from the “objective” eyes of the academy, where a middle schooler would be quickly taken up and used for varied purposes—as became quickly visible in the immediate aftermath. But I couldn’t make an object of King then; something thwarted me, pushing me to just read and follow the case; to bear witness to a moment that made no sense while making all the sense in the world. Instead, I sought to allow King to grow alongside me as I worked to make sense, slowly reading, watching. A queer fantasy, for sure, of growing alongside a fallen queer child not born backward, but thwarted from becoming.

The case was in the national spotlight, and was easy to follow until it wasn’t. Attention shifted, time passed, and work continued as new murders, new suicides, new threats to queer existence littered the landscape. This happening as new potentials, new promises, and new policies attempted to alter that landscape as well. Years went by. A criminal case was made against King’s murderer, Brandon McInerney...