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http://salon.com
April 24, 1999

The rumor that won't go away
Jocks say Littleton killers were gay, but friends deny it.

By Dave Cullen

As the Columbine High School community -- and the rest of the country -- struggles to understand the reasons behind Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's Tuesday killing spree, more facts are emerging about the nature of the harassment they suffered at the hands of their classmates.

One rumor that refuses to go away is that the two were gay -- a story that led many to abuse them in life, and now, denounce them in death.

"They're freaks," said Ben Oakley, an angry sophomore from the soccer team, visiting the memorials in Clement Park for the first time Thursday. "They were in the Trench Coat Mafia, and that's something around our school that we consider freaks." He said students picked on the pair "all the time."

"Nobody really liked them, just cause they ..." He paused, then continued. "The majority of them were gay. So everyone would make fun of them."

Several self-described jocks volunteered similar rumors Wednesday and Thursday. "[A friend] used to tell me how they would take showers together," a member of the football team said. "He told me most of them were gay."

Other students reported sightings of the pair, and other Mafia members, "touching" one another, holding hands or groping in the hallways. But the stories were generally vague, secondhand and never from students who personally knew members of the group. Oakley's reply when asked to clarify what he knew was typical: "They would touch each other in school. People have seen them. One of them last year went up to a kid I know and did that," he said, demonstrating a crotch-grab on himself. When asked whether he was referring to Harris and Klebold specifically, he admitted, "I don't know," then added, "People in the group."

The media has mostly ignored the gay rumors, although on Tuesday the Drudge Report quoted from Internet postings claiming that the Trench Coat Mafia was a gay conspiracy to kill jocks at Columbine, a claim with no apparent basis in fact. A few newspapers have mentioned the gay rumors in passing. The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Mike Smith, a senior point guard on Columbine's state championship basketball team, saying jocks taunted the pair by calling them gay. "They were ones you'd make fun of," Smith admitted.

And according to Thursday's Drudge Report, which was still hyping the gay angle, the Grand Junction (Colo.) Daily Sentinel quoted another student saying the Trench Coat Mafia was widely viewed as gay. "Boys would hold hands in the halls sometimes," sophomore Jon Vandermark told the paper. "They were called freaks, homos and everything in between."

Not a single friend or acquaintance of Harris and Klebold confirmed the gay rumors. All either denied the story or said they had no idea about the sexual orientation of either student. "It's the stupidest thing I ever heard," said senior Melissa Snow, who had known Klebold since middle school, but only had limited contact with him this year, since he joined the Trench Coat Mafia.

Several students expressed anger at the jocks for spreading rumors to defame the two in death with the same slurs that dogged them through life. Dustin Gorton, a good friend of Harris and Klebold, was particularly outraged. "I think it'd be really funny if you tried to tell their girlfriends that they were gay," he said. Gorton, a brawny 6-foot senior dressed in camouflage pants, said prom pictures had been taken with Harris and Klebold and their girlfriends, but hadn't been developed. He promised that the media would never see the pictures, or find the two young women.

"You're never going to get those names. [The girlfriends] are so far hidden, and they are so screwed up right now," he said. Gorton described himself as a "nontraditional jock" who played Doom on the Internet with the two killers, as well as baseball with a team outside the school. He said he was not a member of the Trench Coat Mafia.

Whatever the truth about Harris and Klebold's sexual orientation, it's clear that "gay" is one of the worst epithets to use against a high school student in Littleton. Eddie, a sophomore who recently moved from Littleton to Denver, said he knew firsthand the kind of ostracism Klebold and Harris suffered due to rumors they were gay (Eddie's name has been changed because of his vulnerability to retaliation). He grew up in Littleton and came out as gay in eighth grade at Deer Creek Middle School, which feeds students to both Columbine and nearby Chatfield High School (where Columbine students will return to school, on a staggered afternoon session, when classes resume, likely sometime next week).

"One year everyone loved me," he said. "The next year I was the most hated kid in the whole school." Jocks were his worst tormentors, Eddie said, and he described one in particular who pelted him with rocks, wrote "faggot" and "we hate you" on his locker and confronted him in the hallway with taunts like: "I heard the faggot got butt-fucked last night."

"It gets to the point where you're crying in school because the people won't leave you alone," he said. "The teachers don't do anything about it." Eddie attempted suicide several times that year, and eventually spent time in a mental hospital. "People don't realize how mean kids are. It can drive you to the point of insanity. What they want to do is make you cry. They want to hurt you. It's horrible. I hope that the one thing people learn out of this whole thing is to stop teasing people."

Eddie doesn't condone what Harris and Klebold did, but said he understood what drove them to it. "I think that those two kids were tormented, and finally one day they just snapped. They couldn't take it anymore, and instead of taking it out on themselves, they took it out on other people. I took it out on myself. But it was a daily thought: 'Boy would I really like to hurt someone. Boy would I like to see them dead.' If you don't get help for it, you'll always think that."

Like gays, Goths in Littleton are finding themselves ostracized now, due to reports Klebold and Harris were into the Goth scene. On Thursday, Andrew Mitchell, a frail-looking young Goth from nearby Lakewood High School, showed up at the memorial site dressed head to foot in black. He was a striking sight, all alone, shivering in the foot of fresh snow: black on black on black, pale white skin, his black hair long on top, shaved skin-close on the sides; a silver and blue ribbon of support for the victims on his lapel. He received a chilly reception. The grieving crowd left an empty perimeter of at least 10 feet around him.

When asked "Why are you here?" he replied, "To pay my respects to the people here." But he also had a plea for those dismissing the killers as aberrant psychos. "Picture these kids," he implored. "For years being thrown around, treated horribly. After a while you can't stand it anymore. That's not to say that they were right to do what they did. They were completely wrong. There's nothing right or proper about it. But there are reasons for why they did it."

At that, a reporter twice his size got in his face. He chastised Mitchell for his comments, which he said "would just devastate the family members of those killed."

"Picture a 17- or 18-year-old going through hell," Mitchell retorted. "The hell of their life for four straight years. I understand it. When you get to a point where you have no one in the world to turn to, and I guarantee that's how they felt, they felt there was nothing they could do."

From: SARATOGANY@aol.com
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 05:03:01 EDT
Subject: Littleton, CO: athletes at the school called him " faggot," bashed him

Msg fwd by: The Coalition for Safer Schools of NYS, PO Box 2345, Malta, NY 12020

This message has been distributed as a free informational service for the expressed interest of non-profit research and educational purposes only.

Detailed diary discloses plans, motives of gunmen in massacre

By John Hendren
Associated Press

LITTLETON, Colo. -- A detailed diary by one of the Columbine High School gunmen showed they were " going for the big kill" in a suicide attack that had been planned for a year before they struck on Adolf Hitler's birthday, the sheriff said Saturday.

" The bottom line of this thing is they wanted to do as much damage as they could possibly do, and destroy this school, and destroy as many children as they could and go out in flames," Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone told reporters.

It was the strongest official statement about the motive for Tuesday's murder-suicide rampage that killed 12 students, one teacher and two teen-aged gunmen.

The handwritten diary, discovered in one of the gunmen's homes, uses German phrases and goes back a year. Stone said the assailants reasoning was: " We want to be different, we want to be strange and we don't want jocks or other people putting (us) down. ... We're going to punish you."

Stone said he didn't know which of the gunmen kept the diary.

The sheriff also placed some blame on the parents of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. He noted that along with the diary, investigators found a shotgun barrel on a dresser and bomb-making materials.

" A lot of this stuff was clearly visible and the parents should have known," said Stone. " I think parents should be accountable for their kid's actions."

The parents have not commented beyond separate written statements released by their attorneys. The statements expressed sorrow and sympathy for the victims' families.

The diary shows that Klebold, 17, and Harris, 18, had been planning the attack for a year. The teens also had a school map that noted where the school was ill-lit and pointed out possible hiding places. The diary also revealed that they monitored the lunch room to find out when the greatest number of people would be there.

" They were going for a big kill," said Stone. " This had been on their minds and they've been planning this particular thing and they've been building bombs ... for a considerable period of time. They've been acquiring weaponry for a considerable period of time."

Asked why they picked April 20, the sheriff said, " It was Hitler's birthday."

He added: " It was a Nazi kind of thing."

Stone brief reporters as a weekend of funerals began. At the Trinity Christian Center, a mile south of Columbine High, students walked to the pulpit one by one to mourn Rachel Scott, 17.

Sobbing and hollow-eyed, they remembered a girl who loved life, adored acting and was nice to people she didn't know. " A truer friend you couldn't find," Nick Baumgart said.

Earlier friends and family wrote comments in black felt pen on the Miss Scott's casket. Friends said she was killed outside the school, one of the first to be shot.

Heidi Johnson, a friend of Miss Scott's since fourth grade, wiped tears as she kneeled and wrote on the casket, " Rachel, I'm so proud of you! I will miss you dearly. You were truly one of my true best friends and I love you from the bottom of my heart."

Other messages said, " See you in Heaven," " You are my hero," and " You always brought a smile to my face."

Her father wrote simply: " I love you. Dad. Forever."

Police have interviewed hundreds of witnesses and collected 2,000 pieces of evidence, down to the smallest scraps of metal at the school, in the search not only for a motive but to determine whether Harris and Klebold had accomplices, before or during the shootings.

Students and police had described one gunman wearing a white T-shirt, while witnesses also spoke of two gunmen in dark dusters. But the body of one of the gunmen did not have a trench coat on.

" It's very possible, we're thinking now, that maybe the trench coat was shed at some point," said sheriff's spokesman Steve Davis. " Now ... maybe we're back to two suspects instead of the white-shirt third suspect."

But later Davis said that " the chances are even increasing" of " further involvement" by others. He refused to give details, saying, " We have to be very, very careful at this point of what we release."

No arrests have been made and no other suspects beyond the dead gunmen have been identified.

One member of the same clique of trench coat-clad outsiders -- called the Trenchcoat Mafia -- in which the gunmen belonged -- described being taunted by other students.

The youth told The Denver Post that life for members of his group as " hell ... pure hell." He said that athletes at the school called him " faggot," bashed him into lockers and threw rocks at him as he rode his bike home.

" I can't describe how hard it was to get up in the morning and face that," the 18-year-old, demanding anonymity, told the paper.

But he said he did not know of his friends' violent plans.

" I'm not saying what they did was OK," he said. " But I know what it's like to be cornered, pushed day after day."

Meanwhile, police discounted a note purported to be from one of the assailants warning of more violence next week. Earlier, police had expressed fears about the threat and said they didn't think the note was a hoax. Hours later, they said they believed it didn't come from either of the gunmen.

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