please see the report (pasted below) in today's (4/21/99) NewsPlanet. i confess to being biased, but i think NP writers Cindy and Lucia did a terrific job summarizing what is known (and not known), and placing the issue in greater perspective.
-greg gordon
"This Way Out" and "NewsPlanet" staff

SUMMARY: Gay-baiting rumors about the Colorado high school shootings are afloat, but while chances are there's not much to them, the link between homophobia and teen harassment shouldn't be forgotten.

It's going to take some time before the facts are known about the April 20 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. However, as broadcast and electronic media applied a full-court press to the story as it broke -- grabbing the nearest informant with credentials unchecked -- a student or two referred to the trenchcoated gunmen as "homosexuals." A posting on an Internet Usenet group picked up on that, applauding the shooters for avenging themselves against homophobic abuse. No less (or more) than Matt Drudge considerably amplified both these purported factoids, even as he questioned them, by citing them in his on-line Drudge Report. Similarly, there were bits about the young men wearing fingernail polish and/or makeup, although apparently in the context of Goth style rather than drag. From what NewsPlanet has seen thus far, no print media -- which have a little more lead time -- have repeated the "gay" remarks.

Given that the truth has not yet been brought in from out there, it's still an interesting phenomenon to consider. It seems to be generally agreed that the group of friends known as the "Trenchcoat Mafia" were outcasts from the mainstream of the Columbine student body. As such, those outside the group were not likely to know them well. They weren't liked outside their own circle, and they were apparently taunted. In almost any U.S. high school, homophobic taunts will almost inevitably be among the verbal abuse thrown at almost any outsider. Almost anywhere, a male wearing fingernail polish will be assumed by some to be gay, style or no. The odds are that the shooters were punished as gays whether in fact they were or not.

...

It's not at all unreasonable to link homophobic abuse with a school shooting -- and it might not be reported in the press. Michael Carneal was convicted of the December 1997 shooting at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky that left three students dead and five wounded. Carneal said he was not gay, but he told both a prosecution psychiatrist and a defense psychologist that beginning in 1996, he was almost daily called "gay, faggot, nerd, geek" and other epithets, and that because of the perception that he was gay, he was also "spat upon, hit, put in headlocks and threatened with violence." He also said that while he originally intended only to threaten his peers with the gun, he decided to go further when he started "thinking about all the things done to me ... all the names they called me."

Yet these telling findings went almost entirely unreported (Kentucky's gay and lesbian newspaper "The Letter" helped us find them), and they were not a part of mainstream reports of the Carneal verdict. It's still a risky thing to call someone gay in print.

--NewsPlanet Staff

[Incidentally, according to yesterday's Drudge Report (I know, not a particularly reliable source) some items on the anti-gay harassment angle are beginning to appear in the print media - specifically, today's editions of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Grand Junction (CO) Daily Sentinel.]

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