PERSPECTIVE ON HOMOPHOBIA : Hate, Not Humiliation, Is at Fault : A gay man confesses his interest in a straight acquaintance on TV and everyone ‘understands’ what followed. Why?

Last Thursday, a 32-year-old gay man, Scott Amedure, was shot to death while he stood unarmed in the doorway of his home in central Michigan. Two days earlier, he had appeared on “The Jenny Jones Show” to confess that he had a crush on a straight acquaintance, Jonathan Schmitz, now accused of the murder.

The sheriff’s department, the county prosecutor and the media are all pointing to the “surprise,” “embarrassment” and “humiliation” of Schmitz, who says he went on the show expecting to meet a female secret admirer. A sheriff’s lieutenant said that the public revelation of a gay man’s crush had “eaten away” at Schmitz. The prosecutor aimed most of his vitriol at the producers of the show, not the accused murderer. Media reports and commentaries faulted TV talk shows for inflicting psychological trauma on guests.

But “The Jenny Jones Show” did not lead to Amedure’s murder; the rampant homophobia of this country’s culture did.

Why is it that the police, the prosecutor and the media seem to fully understand Schmitz’s confessed feelings of humiliation but not the cause of those feelings? Is it because Schmitz was not interested in the person who expressed having a crush on him? Certainly not. Every woman in this country has at some time experienced unwanted interest from a group of men on a street corner. Is it, then, because the person who expressed interest in Schmitz was of a different sexual orientation? No, not really. As a lesbian, I navigate my way through the world without buying a shotgun and using it on straight men who express attraction to me.

The sole reason that everyone is discussing Schmitz’s “humiliation” with such ease is that homophobia is so common in this country as to be considered normal. It does not need to be directly stated; it is just a given that Schmitz would feel humiliated.

One man was embarrassed, another man was shot twice in the chest with a shotgun. While the media focus their attention on the excesses of talk shows and the discomfort their guests feel, very little is being said about how Scott Amedure felt as he lay dying. Since when is embarrassment an excuse for murder?

This tragedy highlights the deadly nature of homophobia in our society. That anyone should be killed simply for being gay is deplorable. Sadly, the murder of Amedure is not an isolated incident. Last year, 59 gay and lesbian people are known to have lost their lives in bias-motivated attacks. None of these killings followed a taping of a talk show, but these 59 men and women are equally dead because of homophobia.

Rather than wringing their hands over so-called humiliation, elected officials, the police and the media should be using the occasion of Scott Amedure’s murder to aggressively condemn and confront anti-gay bigotry and violence. Maybe then, this country will really understand homophobia.