Introduction: Memorialization, Gay Assimilation, and American Religion

The introduction addresses how gay activists memorialized select people as martyrs in order to influence national debates over LGBT rights. In particular, the chapter lays out how religion shaped both the process of gay political memorialization as well as gay assimilation in the United States more broadly. The introduction additionally covers the history of American gay activism, the rise of assimilatory tactics following the American AIDS crisis, and the promotion of gays as “normal” citizens. As became common at the turn of the twenty-first century, many gay activists argued that gays were just like straights and, therefore, deserving of equal rights. The chapter also details how Protestant sexual standards shaped the nation’s ideas about acceptable sexual citizens and, in turn, how gay activists promoted Protestant values as necessary for the rights of full American citizenship.

“The Place Where Two Discriminations Meet”: Race, Gender, and the Threat of Violence

Chapter 4 highlights how transgender women and queer people of color have been more frequent victims of violence than white gay men even though their murders have received less attention. The chapter turns to three films that address what most news outlets overlooked. In particular, Chapter 4 explores the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry about the murder of transgender man Brandon Teena, the 2009 film Two Spirits about the murder of gender-variant Native American F. C. Martinez, and the 2014 film Out in the Night about an attack on seven African American lesbians in 2006. The chapter further demonstrates how much of the activism surrounding Harvey Milk, Matthew Shepard, and Tyler Clementi, as well as the It Gets Better Project, ignored issues of race, class, gender presentation, and religion that many LGBT people have endured despite proclamations that acceptance comes with the march of time.

The “Epidemic of Bullying and Gay Teen Suicide”: Tyler Clementi and It Gets Better

Chapter 3 examines the first gay death that incited national outrage after Matthew Shepard’s murder: Tyler Clementi’s suicide in 2010. Twelve years after Shepard’s murder, another white, Protestant, gay college student became a national name. The chapter explores why many elected officials and heterosexual citizens viewed Clementi’s suicide as an atrocity that the country needed to address. The chapter also investigates how several anti-gay Christian groups reframed their rhetoric about homosexuality as a direct response to Clementi’s suicide. The chapter’s other focus is the It Gets Better Project. It Gets Better became a cultural phenomenon soon after news broke of Clementi’s death. The chapter considers why It Gets Better achieved remarkable popularity, what messages the campaign has promoted as necessary for a “better” life, and how those largely Protestant messages are based on the assimilationist trends of white, middle-class, gender-typical, gay Americans.

The “Crucifixion” of “Anyone’s Gay Son”: Matthew Shepard

Chapter 2 investigates why Matthew Shepard’s death evoked outrage throughout the United States, especially from heterosexuals who had been unmoved by the vast number of gay and bisexual AIDS deaths. In particular, chapter 2 illuminates several ways that secular gay activists used Christian rhetoric to promote social acceptance. Gay activists commonly presented Shepard as a practicing Protestant who lived, suffered, and died in ways analogous to Jesus. In so doing, gay activists exalted Shepard as a more legitimate Christian than those in the Christian right. Ultimately, the chapter makes evident how Christian ideals shaped secular gay activists’ strategies for assimilation at the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries.

“The Gay M.L.K.”: Harvey Milk

Chapter 1 compares Harvey Milk’s archival materials—his personal letters, speeches, and writings—to how gay activists posthumously constructed him into a national emblem for gay rights. The chapter highlights how the AIDS epidemic and the movement for same-sex marriage shaped Milk’s reconstructed image. Chapter 1 also considers how gay activists configured Milk, a Jew who, at times, promoted multi-partner sexual and romantic relationships, to fit within the standards of the Protestant Christian mainstream. In effect, the chapter explores how Milk, a local politician who served only eleven months in a city council position, became, over time, “The Gay M.L.K.”

Epilogue: The Pulse Nightclub Massacre and the Queer Potential of Memorialization

The epilogue moves past the period of 1995 to 2015 to consider responses to the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida that left forty-nine people, predominantly LGBT people of color, dead. In the wake of the massacre, legislators at each end of the political spectrum used the shooting to advance their own political agendas, from advocating for stricter gun laws, to lobbying for policies that would restrict Muslims from entering the United States, to creating awareness of the unique vulnerabilities of LGBT people of color. As the largest mass killing of LGBT Americans in U.S. history, the shooting, and the myriad political responses to the tragedy, revealed the precarious position of many LGBT people even after the purported victory of “marriage equality” one year earlier. The epilogue also offers possibilities for how to engage in memorialization in ways that promote greater awareness of, and space for, gender, racial, religious, and sexual diversity.