A month ago, in a California town just north of L.A., a fifteen-year old boy was sitting in a school computer lab when a classmate shot him in the head. The boy, Lawrence King, died a few days later. The classmate who shot him did it because King was gay.

I hope you are disgusted. I hope you are wondering what you can do so it won’t happen again.

Ten years ago, I stood at a vigil for Matthew Shepard asking myself the same questions. The young men who murdered Matthew Shepard said that he had come on to them and that they had panicked. So they tortured him and left him tied to a Wyoming fencepost on a cold fall night three days after my eighteenth birthday.

Lawrence’s murderer, Brandon McInerney, or lawyers on the boy’s behalf, may argue a similar gay panic defense. Shepard’s murder brought national attention to hate crimes, and now Lawrence’s fourteen-year old murderer may be punished under the new law. I wonder if Brandon wasn’t wondering about being gay himself, and rather than coming out like Matthew and Brandon had, his coping mechanism was this violence.

How can a hate crimes conviction—or even hate crimes legislation—prevent murders like these? Sending men and boys who have brutally murdered classmates, acquaintances, and maybe even lovers or sex partners, through our prison system does not address the (self-)hate that drives these crimes in the first place.

Let's not forget: queers are murdered in Philadelphia, too.

Last year, Erica Keel, who was thrown from a car while she was engaging in sex work. The man who threw her out of the car then ran over her. Another transwoman, Nizah Morris, died from unexplained head wounds after accepting a ride with a police officer.

What's being done?

A few months ago, the homosexual spokesman to Corporate America, the Human Rights Campaign, happily ditched transgender people in order to pass an ENDA that our evangelical war criminal of our President wasn’t going to sign anyway. Almost every other organized group of queers (like the NLGTF) demanded an inclusive ENDA. Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank looked only to the HRC, saw their approval and the tiny dollar signs swirling in their eyes and passed the bill to protect gays and lesbians only. That’s the state of national mainstream “gay activism.”

Right now, in Pennsylvania, an antidiscrimination bill is moving through the state legislature that would make it illegal to fire a queer, deny a queer housing or employment because of their sexuality. Problems solved, right? At least a start.

Of course I want job protection, access to housing and maybe even the choice to get married. But I’d rather live in a society where our gender roles didn’t become literal life or death indicators.

Lawrence King is dead. But plenty of other queer kids aren’t. Do more to resist transphobia, homophobia and sexism IN ALL ITS FORMS than you do now. Here’s something you should do today:

A few weeks ago, a fire caused severe damage to the Gay-Straight Alliance’s Rainbow Room at Martin Luther King High School.

According to their advisor, Erika Garnett, they lost everything. It was a safe space for LGBT students and a resource library. They need office supplies, LGBT resources and decorations.

There are three ways you can help right away. Send donations of books or videos or supplies here:

Erika Garnett
Martin Luther King High School
6100 Stenton Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19138

Or, go to the Giovanni's Room website and click on the “Gift Certificate” icon halfway down the left side and send the club some a gift to help a start replenishing their collections.

You can also earmark funds for MLK High School Rainbow Room through the Delaware Valley Legacy Fund.

So what do you expect when you’re fifteen, your gender presentation is changing to reflect what feels natural to you, and you want somebody to be your Valentine? Would you ever expect a classmate to shoot you in the back of the head? What might have happened differently if Lawrence—or his murderer—had had a Safe Space like the Rainbow Room to go?

We can do better.