BOOK REVIEW

American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men, by David McConnell

The Oxford American Online  |  April 8, 2013

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This book started as a joke.

At a bar one night, novelist David McConnell told a friend he’d come up with a sure-fire idea for a true-crime bestseller. He even had a throwaway title--Gay Panic: Men Who Kill the Men Who Love Them.

A harsh joke, McConnell admits. But jokes like that often come from someplace gravely serious, some region within, where uncomfortable truth resides—in this instance, McConnell’s interest in the milieu of Western masculinity and how gay men like himself orient themselves within it. Many of us already know the outdated term “gay panic” (the temporary insanity some straight men experience as the object of another man’s desire). And with that subtitle--Men Who Kill the Men Who Love Them—there’s very little confusion as to what the book would be about: straight men killing gay men who make a pass at them. “Hate crimes,” as we’ve come to call them. And it’s our popular use (or misuse) of that term that McConnell confronts in his first book of literary nonfiction, eventually titled American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men.

McConnell details six murder cases, arranged chronologically from 1995 to 2008. You’ll remember a few from the evening news. We begin with Jonathan Schmitz, a murderer whose case, according to McConnell, more closely resembles an “authentic instance of gay panic” than any other case in the book. Schmitz was invited onto one of those “Surprise! You Have a Secret Admirer!” episodes of The Jenny Jones Show, a leading daytime talk show in the mid-’90s. But his secret admirer was not a woman, as the show’s producers led him to believe—it was Scott Amedure, a gay acquaintance he’d met through his neighbor. Three days after the show was taped, Schmitz knocked on Amedure’s front door, and, standing only feet away, fired his shotgun into Amedure’s chest.

Next is Matthew Williams, a seemingly well-intentioned, fiercely devout Christian, who murdered Gary Matson, a man he’d met at work. Williams knew that Matson lived with another man, Winfield Mowder, and that the two were gay. He understood this to be a sin against God, so he broke into Matson’s home at night, aimed his .22 at the sleeping couple, and emptied his clip. Matson and Mowder, who’d been together for fourteen years, were found lying side-by-side in the bed they shared.

Then we have Darrell Madden, a gay-hating ex-con with the words SKIN and HEAD tattooed on the skin beneath his eyebrows. Madden and another skinhead, a recruit he’d taken under his wing, posed as prostitutes one night at a well-known hustler hotspot and were picked up by Steven Domer. Police later found Domer’s car aflame, abandoned on a remote, rural bridge. Before setting the car on fire, Madden and his accomplice restrained Domer with duct tape, strangled him, then dumped his body into the creek bed below.

And so on, one ghastly killing after another, chapter after chapter—a relentless list.

“Lists,” McConnell writes, “by their very listness, actually do make a quiet argument . . . about their contents, an argument against the destruction or loss of a single detail.” In each chapter of Honor Killings, McConnell moves beyond quick descriptions of the murders—like the ones I’ve just given—to reveal more than what evening news sound bites provide us. His argument: These killings are too complex for a simple term like “hate crime.” “Gay panic” is nothing more than a legal ploy we’ve used well past its expiration date; our culture no longer sympathizes with the young man whose response to another man’s desire is rage. McConnell rechristens these crimes “honor killings,” which calls to mind tribal conflict, ancient impulses to defend one’s people, one’s way of life, one’s honor. Rage borne of less civilized desires—all that caveman stuff we left behind millennia ago.

But it’s still with us, says McConnell:

I settled on the exotic-sounding “honor killings” in the book title because, incredibly, that’s what these crimes resemble. America isn’t organized by clan or tribe or even family. It’s a nation of individuals and groups based on culture or identity. The seat of honor for men is personal, religious, racial. And among the worst affronts to that honor today are gay sexuality, “immodesty,” and “decadence.” These killers weren’t outraged because someone made a pass at them. They saw, or needed to see, themselves as believers, soldiers, avengers, purifiers, as exemplars of manhood.

After his embarrassment on The Jenny Jones Show in front of potentially thousands of TV viewers, Schmitz felt forced to defend his personal honor, to avenge his threatened masculinity. But if you take stock of his life leading up to the show, you’ll find a string of events showing that Schmitz had already been stripped of his dignity: he’d been hospitalized for depression, diagnosed as bipolar, and he’d attempted suicide twice. He saw The Jenny Jones Show as his chance to turn his life around, to become a solid man. He’d hoped his secret admirer might be his ex-girlfriend, whom he regretted breaking up with; he’d considered proposing marriage on air, even spent six hundred dollars on a new outfit. The sight of Amedure onstage that day was the last straw.

At first, Matthew Williams was merely a soldier of Christ, a purifier raised by fundamentalist Christian parents who prevented him from engaging in extracurricular activities outside of the church and discouraged him from befriending children at school. He thrived on intensity of belief, felt most alive when operating in the extreme. Institutions constantly let him down—the military, the cleansing diets he followed in search of nutritional perfection, and the handful of fundamentalist church groups he was quick to join in college (and then quit just as quickly, finding them too relaxed). Williams eventually gravitated toward apocalyptic “prepper” types, and before long, white supremacists. He looked out over a nation falling short of its full potential, its favored race held back by people of color. Before he shot and killed Matson and Mowder in their sleep, he and his younger brother, whom he’d enlisted in his personal holy war, set fire to synagogues with Molotov cocktails. He’d hoped to continue his war using Matson’s credit card to order high-powered weapons, but he and his brother were arrested after police traced the purchase. Williams planned to represent himself in court by reading from the Scriptures, his only truth.

Madden, who posed as a gay prostitute to lure his victim, is perhaps the easiest to write off as a monster, his body covered in Aryan Nation tattoos. But in a former life, he was known as Billy Houston, a struggling gay porn actor in Texas; and before that was a traumatic childhood any reader would cringe at. It’s here, in Madden’s chapter, that McConnell is most present, as a character himself: the gay writer investigating Madden’s tricky past. Both men understand the role of the American male outsider struggling to find his place. When being himself—a gay man—felt impossible, Madden turned into a performer, trying on different personas. He opens up to McConnell about his old life, his constant search for a new family—or tribe, if you will—who would accept him. “Like most gangs,” McConnell writes, “skinhead culture thrives on naive passions and loyalties. The solidarity the group engenders is, basically, love.” A love Madden wanted so badly he’d do anything—even become another person, even kill one of his own.

This isn’t as simple as men killing the men who love them. No two killers here possess the same motives; each brandishes a very specific form of hate—yet they’re all unmistakable by-products of American masculinity and its patriarchal institutions. McConnell’s research is impressive, his thorough approach itself an “argument against the destruction or loss of a single detail.” Older, well-documented cases are reenergized with new information, and the stories of the more recent murders are told, for the first time, with the layers of complexity they deserve.

Something must be said of this book’s timeliness, the experience of reading it after a memorably violent year in America. The unimaginable massacres in Newtown, Connecticut, and Aurora, Colorado. The growing number of homicides in Chicago. And, just last month, the murder of Mississippi’s first openly gay mayoral candidate. Reports suggest the killer’s motives had little to do with politics. (The “gay panic” defense has been mentioned.) Right now, as we consider how to react to these tragedies—discussing them over dinner tables and through social media, drafting legislation to prevent similar acts of senseless violence—a book like this is helpful, even downright necessary. It advises against lumping each atrocity into the same pile, reminding us to examine the cases separately—the only way we can begin to understand the roots of this violence and how me might squelch it.

McConnell’s approach is effective because it’s literary, not academic: through extensive research, he’s crafted engaging narratives, each populated by characters that demand our attention. We owe each killer the same care and consideration we afford the characters in our favorite novels, remembering that they are nothing if not reflections of ourselves, our culture. “I’ve written about young men,” McConnell writes, “and pretense, pride, tension, fear, arrogance, ignorance, anger, foolishness.” Another list—this one similar to Faulkner’s famous list of verities with which every writer should be concerned (love, honor, pity, pride, etc.). Readers come away understanding each killer’s rage, his desires and motivations, and how the America we’ve all helped create shaped them.

Schmitz’s episode of The Jenny Jones Show never aired, but a clip from the taping is easy to find online. Before the two men appear onstage together, Jenny Jones asks the audience, “Which of these ways would you choose to reveal your secret crush on someone?” She gives them the first two options: Write him a letter? Tell him in private in case he rejects you? The audience is silent. “Or,” Jenny says, “would you tell that person that you’re gay and that you hope he is, on national television?” At this, the audience erupts, men and women cheering, throwing their heads back in laughter. The camera zooms in on a man in the front row. He’s clapping his hands and rocking back and forth in his seat excitedly--Yes!—while simultaneously shaking his head and mouthing the words No, No, No. Behind him, the audience hoots and hollers. They want conflict. Pause the clip there, and you’ll see it, the complicity McConnell’s getting at, the dark conflict buried in all of our bones.

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American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men. By David McConnell. Akashic Books, 2013.