I’ve always been obsessed with high heels but as a child I was not allowed to have them. Oftentimes I would sashay around on tip toes imagining that I had high heels on and I was constantly looking over my shoulders to make sure I didn’t get caught or that I wasn’t being judged. Let’s face it, when you’re a transchild you’ve got to watch your ass.
—Justin Vivian Bond, Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels
In 2008, Latisha King was shot to death at E. O. Green Junior High School by her classmate Brandon McInerney. It was the first class of the day, Dawn Boldrin’s English comp class. Latisha was seated at a computer, and Brandon was seated behind her. Twenty minutes into class, Brandon stood up, pulled a gun from the pocket of his sweatshirt, and fired one bullet into Latisha’s head. Latisha slumped down in her seat, bleeding profusely. Ms. Boldrin screamed: “What the fuck are you doing, Brandon?!” Brandon paused and made eye contact with Ms. Boldrin before firing a second shot into the back of Latisha’s head.
***
After the shooting, before the murder trial, the local newspaper, the Ventura County Star, ran scores of articles about the murder, its prosecution in the courts, and the family backgrounds of the victim and the shooter. The victim was referred to by male pronouns and the name “Larry King” exclusively. Scant mention was made of the name “Latisha.” And nearly every story written in the paper contained this sentence: King, an eighth-grader, dressed in a feminine manner and told friends that he was gay.1 What exactly is being conveyed to the readers of the Ventura County Star through the repeated refrain of this sentence? To claim that someone dresses “in a feminine manner” is not a nonsensical claim, although it is vague, demonstrating, or perhaps generating, a lack of clarity as to what precisely is being modified by that term “feminine.” That vagueness attends the reading of Latisha’s dress—just what is a “manner” of dressing, and what counts as a “feminine” manner, exactly? Is it the clothing that is feminine, or the way that King dons and carries that clothing? Assertions about the manner of her dressing figure us in a spectatorial relation to King, privy to the privacy of her room and the particularity of her body, even as the pronouncement about that manner of dressing—feminine—throws us back into the public realm, the social context in which such distinctions between masculine and feminine in clothing and behavior are parsed and judged.
In 2009 the Ventura County Star published almost the same sentence, with the phrase “dressed in a feminine manner” morphing to the less vague but still more odd “wore female clothing”: “King wore female clothing and told classmates he was gay.”2 This locution asserts the dressing as a matter of sex rather than gender, and offers the object of that sexing as the clothing itself, rather than its wearer. In this logic, instead of clothing conferring a gender on us, it is we who must match the sex of our clothing. Even if we understand “female” to refer to the proper wearer of the clothing, there is still some attributional sleight-of-hand in describing “Larry King’s” clothing as female; the clothing bears the sex of persons not wearing it. In 2010, the Ventura County Star appeared to settle on the phrase “feminine attire”: “King, 15, dressed in feminine attire and told friends he was gay.”3 Here swapping out “attire” for “clothing” seems to make the materiality of what is worn still less concrete, and also to shift, ever so slightly, the class signification of the outfit.
These are small differences, not without significance, though perhaps minor in media we know to be all-too-normative. Nonetheless, each of these statements understands itself to be asserting, fundamentally, the same claim—a claim, however, that is not entirely clear about either Larry King’s gender or his sexuality. When it is asserted that Larry wore female clothing and told friends he was gay, is that “and” inclusive or disjunctive? If the former, then in offering two modes of action—dressing and speaking—the sentence is describing two manifestations of the same phenomenon. Larry was queer, and queerness comes out in all sorts of ways, speaking and dressing among them. If that “and” is disjunctive, however, then the sentence does not offer Larry as a queer subject who lives his queerness in various modes but rather offers him as a queer subject through his telling (“told friends he was gay”) and a trans subject in his mode of bodily presentation (“dressed in feminine attire”). The telling and the dressing are two different modes of expression that announce two different kinds of identification, the first of gender and the second of sexuality. The assertion would be that there are two poles of transgression here, dressing in feminine attire on the one hand and gay self-disclosure on the other, and the Ventura County Star is offering each as separate but equally provocative. Gender is expressed by clothing, or in this case, an external perception of that clothing’s proper gender. Sexuality, in this case, is expressed not through behavior but through disclosure, or through disclosure as behavior.
In each case, Latisha’s dressing and her telling, her gender and her sexuality are almost entirely removed from the bodily realm. As an epistemological claim, “Larry told friends he was gay” asserts that Larry’s gayness both consists of and is revealed by his own utterance. That utterance then reenters the public realm of the Ventura County Star through circuitous travels through “friends,” which figures the proper domain of queer self-disclosure as the private realm, and by implication circulating more widely only though gossip, hearsay, or rumor. The framing of this disclosure places us already in the realms of the feminine and of that which is shameful. According to newspaper reports, the direct object of Larry’s self-disclosure shifts from 2008 to 2009. Whereas the earlier sentence has King telling friends he was gay, the sentence from 2009 asserts that he “told classmates he was gay.” The last seems to offer a hysterical subject, inappropriately disclosing all over the place, provocatively disseminating his sexuality throughout the classroom and the school. It appears, however, that Larry’s “gay behavior” consisted entirely of disclosing to a few people that he was gay; it is not clear that his “gay behavior” was anything other than the speech act of that disclosure. In other words, it may be that the declaration of gayness was itself the only queer behavior that he engaged in, as is sometimes true for queer youth. It is worth noting that Latisha had gone to another school before E. O. Green and that she changed schools because she had been harassed for being gay for well over a year at the prior school. It is a particular irony that the “gay lifestyle,” in this case, refers almost exclusively to being bullied and tormented by other students, chased from school to school, and rejected at home, rather than actually naming any variety of sexual expression.
The national media attention the story received in the weeks and months and years after the shooting for the most part followed the local press and read Larry King as a gay teenager rather than a trans teenager, but also retained attention to Larry’s transgressive gender expression. In this it would appear that the media wants to have its trans spectacle and its gay identity both, and in asserting them simultaneously in the same sentence these articles seem, in a rather transparent act of projection, to diagnose the confusion as Larry’s. It seems that the logic at work in this kind of reportage is an instance of trans erasure, that what we are seeing when “Larry” is described as “gay” is the all-too-familiar subsuming of a trans identity into a more easily assimilable gay identity—a distressingly common way of both denying and appropriating the trans community, which differentially bears violence that the more easily assimilated do not.
Sexual identity and gender identity are lived simultaneously, are mutually constituting, are wrapped thoroughly around one another. Why, then, belabor the parsing of gender and sexual identity in this instance, if the two always accompany one another and are so thoroughly imbricated? I want to suggest that homophobic and transphobic conflations of gender expression and sexual identity can have a very specific and real effect. Consider, for example, the characterization of Latisha’s gender expression offered by one of the administrators at E. O. Green Junior High, who stated that “we have a student expressing his sexuality through makeup.” At one level it is a simple muddle, a swapping out of gender for sexuality: what the administrator labels “sexual expression” should more accurately be described as “gender expression.” The implication of this simple swap, though, turns out to be not so simple. Conceiving of gender expression and sexual identity as fungible encourages people to look at gender expression as an act, and often as an aggressive act, akin to a sexual advance or even a sexual assault. This may be one way of understanding the otherwise mystifyingly disproportionate response to non-normative gender expression. Readings of Latisha’s gender presentation imply that her assertion of identity was a social event, asking something of others in asserting something about herself. Whereas normative gender identity, in this logic, asks nothing and demands nothing of others—it is, in effect, non-social—trans gender is understood as a provocation to the extent that is a shared social project. Some of the legal maneuvers related to the case would later reflect this logic: in suggesting that Latisha’s gender expression provoked Brandon McInerney to violence, they suggested in essence that by expressing her gender identity, Latisha authored her own murder.
The shooting took place after a long campaign of harassment targeting Latisha’s gender presentation and perceived sexual orientation, in which her classmates bullied her for dressing, sounding, and walking “like a fag” and “like a girl.” The defense in the murder trial attempted to rebut the accusations of bullying by suggesting that Latisha was the perpetrator, rather than the victim, of bullying and harassment. Brandon McInerney and his lawyers claimed that “Larry’s” dressing, sounding, and walking “like a girl” constituted harassment of those around him. Here we see one of the dangers of conflating gender identity and sexual identity; in this case, gender presentation becomes interpreted as a form of sexual behavior, and that “behavior” is marked and read as aggressive in order to legitimate the violence that is visited upon the gender-transgressive person, violence with disciplinary and normativizing aims. The legal defense proceeded by way of reversal, a turning back against the trans child, so that the one who was murdered became the one who was judged and found guilty of aggression.
Latisha’s femininity made her stand out. In the seventh grade, when Larry still seemed to his classmates and teachers to be a boy, though perhaps a feminine one, few people could recall who he was. Later, however, he was seen as overwhelmingly, distressingly feminine. The heightening of Latisha’s femininity was read and described throughout the murder trial as a “turning point” in her behavior. We might pause to consider that turning. Gender here is understood as behavior, and as a volitional behavior, a matter of choosing, willing, deciding. Indeed, Dr. Donald Hoagland, the psychologist called as an expert witness by the defense team during the trial, asserted that Larry’s behavior, by which he meant Latisha’s femininity, was difficult for the other children to deal with and made them uncomfortable. This discomfort, he explained, arose because at that point in adolescence the students are coming to a sense of their own sexuality. The heteronormative scope of the developmental narrative invoked by Dr. Hoagland was not understood to include Latisha; rather, it pertained only to the presumptively heterosexual boys and girls whom she might have “confused” through her “behavior.” In contrast, then, with the cisgendered boys and girls against whom she was compared, Latisha’s gender was seen as a choice, as a behavior over which she had control, and also construed as something over which she refused to exert control. Latisha’s gender was characterized simultaneously as the product of her will and as the result of her failure to exert that will. An additional difficulty with this characterization was its failure to recognize that Latisha was coming into a surer and firmer sense of her gender as she approached adolescence. Just as the rest of the boys were, just as the rest of the girls were.
One of the primary ways that Latisha’s gender was read was through her way of walking. Walk and gender are both real and materially expressed, though neither can be reduced to the materiality that does the expressing. Gender and walk are situated between material body and immaterial inhabitation of the body. The walk resides in the hinge between the volitional (where my feet take me) and the nonvolitional (my walk as unintentionally disclosing my gender or sexuality). The walk has a style that changes over time as it develops, even as its temporal dislocation points backward. Walking is an act that we perform with our habit-body. We build up this habit-body over time, slowly, starting with our first few toddling steps. The style that any walk will eventually develop is unavoidably inflected with gendered meanings, as well as racial and class markers, which strengthen and deepen and become more pronounced in adolescence, developing like other characteristics of gender. That Latisha’s walk was read as a manifestation of her gender, and as evidence of her improper inhabitation of gender, was demonstrated by Dawn Boldrin, the teacher in whose classroom the shooting occurred. When asked about Larry and what made him stand out from the other children, she suggests that it was something about gender. The queerness of Larry’s gender was visible yet not easy to describe, and Boldrin ends up locating gender in Larry’s gestures. She is asked during the trial about the first time that she met Larry, the year before the shooting. “In terms of masculinity or femininity,” asks prosecutor Maeve Fox, “where you would you put him on the scale?” “He was obviously feminine,” Boldrin responds. “How so?” asks Fox. “Um . . .”4
Boldrin pauses. At that time, when Larry was in seventh grade, she perceived him to be feminine in a way that was easy to see but difficult to locate. This was before the cross-gender accessories that Latisha donned in the ten days before her death—makeup, earrings, high-heeled boots—the “behavior” that would attract so much attention, and so much anger, in her eighth-grade year. Struggling to articulate this attribute of Larry’s that was at once so discernible and so diffuse, so bodily and so not-quite-material, she offers: “I guess his size, his petiteness, by the way, his mannerisms, the way he carried himself, he had more of the qualities of a girl than a boy. Especially at that age, it’s pretty distinct the boys versus the girls at that age.” There is a distinct difference between the comportment of the boys and the comportment of the girls, says Boldrin, and Larry falls on the girls’ side of that line. But the “versus” in that “boys vs girls” does more work than just indicating difference. “Boys vs girls” is a distinction that is oppositional and incompossible. Latisha’s girlishness is attributable to some things over which she has no control—“his size, his petiteness”—and other things that she is thought to be able to control, “his mannerisms, the way he carried himself.” Referring to this girlishness, Maeve Fox asks, “Did that seem apparent to the other students?” Boldrin responds: “Oh yes. I don’t think he was throwing it at people, but it was more his personality. You walk down the street and you see two men, I think you can distinguish which one is masculine and which one is feminine and that’s just the way it is.”
Gender is figured as a potential projectile, something that Latisha could be “throwing at people,” but did not, at least not in the seventh grade. Ms. Boldrin seems to suggest that gender-as-thrown describes gender as the province of the surface, of bodily appearance, of material aspects of the body that are more concrete than a walk or comportment. Those last are understood to be something more akin to “personality,” to a way that one inhabits the body, an individuated style. Throwing it at people, she intimates, is what happened later, with the makeup, the earrings, and the boots. Boldrin here offers a reformulation of Freud’s assertion that the first thing you notice about someone walking down the street is whether that person is a man or a woman. Freud conjures a solitary figure walking down the street, surrounded by people who discern and judge, singly and collectively forming an audience for his or her gender expression. In place of this solitary figure Boldrin offers a pair, a couple, walking down the street, but rather than a heterosexual pairing of a man and a woman in which we would immediately know which was which, Boldrin substitutes a feminine man for the woman. With that swap, the pairing of masculinity with femininity is retained, as is the insistence that we all know the difference. The insistence is that we can all spot the girly boy, and immediately, and from twenty paces. We can tell that the girly boy does not quite pass for a boy, even in passing. Latisha’s gender was read not only off of her body, but also from how her body expressed itself, how she carried that body through the school. Boldrin described Latisha’s gender in eighth grade as being “in full swing,” using a figure of speech that seems to refer to the femininity of the walk, that swing of the hip that constitutes a swish, as much as anything else.5
***
On the morning of the shooting, Dawn Boldrin pulled Latisha aside at the beginning of class to talk with her about her academic progress. The class had a paper due that day, and Latisha had chosen protest songs of the 1960s as her topic, but her paper was not finished, perhaps not even started. Latisha, never a good student, was doing quite poorly this term, failing several classes, and was in danger of failing the eighth grade. She told Latisha “that eighth-grade graduation was coming up and if he wanted to actually walk he would need to really start focusing on his academics.”6 Here, “walk” is a metonym for graduation, where the student’s walk under a proscenium and across a stage signifies and performs the completion of her passage through some portion of her schooling and her transition, in this case, to high school. The content of the conditional involves Latisha’s desire—“if he wanted to walk”—but its form intimates the likelihood of her failure. Boldrin suggests that the accomplishment of the walk is uncertain, and that Latisha’s relation to the possibility of successfully walking is one of desire rather than probability. If she wanted to walk properly, if she wanted her walk to count as a walk at all, certain conditions would have to be met, conditions that Latisha had failed to meet in the past, conditions that, Boldrin was concerned, she would continue to fail to meet. Since she kept failing, would continue to fail, at schoolwork, this other walk that signified in excess of itself was weighted more than other walks, was also something that she would fail, another walk that she would not be able to accomplish properly.
The defense attorneys argued that Latisha was harassing Brandon and that the shooting was thus a defensive rather than an aggressive act, an attempt to stop the harassment. This argument relied on the assumption that Latisha’s walk came not only to signify but actually to enact Latisha’s sexuality. The most surprising thing about the assertion of harassment is that the behavior characterized as harassment, in at least two instances, was exactly and only the walk itself. One incident the defense documented as an instance of Latisha harassing Brandon was Latisha’s walking past a group of boys sitting on a bench. It sounds laughably innocuous thus described: How could simply walking past a group of people constitute harassment? As the defense attorneys and their expert psychologist took pains to show, it was the way Latisha walked that was so provocative. Boys report that they are uncomfortable around Latisha, uncomfortable when she sits down at their lunch table, uncomfortable when she walks by. The defense explains that sexual harassment is behavior that makes other people feel uncomfortable. Ergo: Latisha was sexually harassing the boys in the school, because her sexual (read: gender) behavior made people uncomfortable. The conclusion is made possible by reading gender behavior as sexual behavior. When a “queer” style of walking becomes the target of aggression, that targeting legitimates itself by projecting aggression into the walk, and thus onto the person walking. The queer walk is treated as if it were aggression itself. One (uncorroborated) version of the story reported that Latisha walked past the boys sitting on the bench, then paused to apply lip gloss. In that moment, behavior that is transgressing gender—that boy is putting on lip gloss!—is understood as harassment, as targeting the boys who are looking on. In the absence of any understanding that there could be such a thing as a boy who wears lip gloss, or, indeed, that Latisha might have been more of a girl than a boy, she was read as a boy who was choosing deliberate actions to make other boys uncomfortable. They called her “faggot” and ran away from her, or called her “faggot” and flattened themselves against their lockers to give her a ten-foot berth when she walked down the hallway, or called her “faggot” and left the lunch table when she sat down. The epithet was so commonplace that it did not register to the teachers as harassment. It was not unusual, it was every hour of every day, that Latisha was called a “fag.” Ken Corbett has noted that as an epithet, “Faggot operates as a projectile,” one with injurious force.7 It is a word that expresses the “general boyhood quest to be big and winning, not small and losing,” as Corbett makes clear.8 The word was directed at Latisha with full awareness of its injurious capacity, at the same time as it was deployed with an almost casual contempt. It was not the word they were uncomfortable with, it was Latisha. Especially Brandon.
The homophobic hatred that was on display in descriptions of Latisha’s interactions at school is both noteworthy and mundane, distressing and all too common. On the one hand, it was dismissed as just one of the ways that adolescents treat each other in junior high; the hatred was marked as casual and dismissed with remarks like “boys will be boys,” in which that “will” is both descriptive and predictive, extrapolating from the ways in which boys treat each other in the present to advance an assertion about how they will no doubt treat each other, and treat otherly-gendered others, in the future. When the phrase is used to justify aggression, it points to contempt and hatred and aggression as the proper province of adolescent male behavior. In that phrase, “boys will be boys,” the word “boys” in its first deployment names a gendered subject position and in its second a behavioral disposition. Thus boys (young men) will be boys (aggressors), reflexively, with the subject position necessarily congruent to disposition. Boys being boys will insure that they not be girls. “Boys” also names a developmental stage. Brandon shot Latisha three weeks after his fourteenth birthday. The district attorney’s office held that the seriousness of the crime required charging Brandon McInerney as an adult. It is significant that in the discussions surrounding the murder, both adolescents, ages fourteen and fifteen, were transposed into adults because of behavior that children ostensibly don’t engage in: hatred culminating in murder in Brandon’s case and “cross-dressing” in Latisha’s case. In each instance, the behaviors themselves were understood to be evidence that neither child was, in fact, still a child.
In this context I want to return to the press coverage in order to think a bit more about another inversion or erasure that is at the heart of this story. How might race complicate these reports? During the criminal trial, race was deemed to have played no part in the shooting and therefore the narratives emerging from both prosecution and defense were strangely denuded of race, although some of the press coverage did allude to it. Consider this statement from the Ventura County Star: “Prosecutors allege it was a hate crime because King wore female clothing and told classmates he was gay. Authorities allege McInerney held white supremacist views.”9 To follow a statement about Larry’s queerness with a statement about Brandon’s racial hatred creates a strange non sequitur. Despite the parallel deployment of these signifiers, no part of this article, or any other that the press has written about the case insofar as I can tell, does the work of connecting these two facts, or attempts to explain how, precisely, Brandon’s racial hatred is inflamed by Larry’s queerness. We are left to infer that the two are related by association or analogy, that Brandon’s white supremacist views would be understood to expand beyond racial hatred to many other kinds or categories of hatred. Or still more specifically that the two are related by the transitive property: if the two facts are understood to be comprehensible in relation to one another, it is because sexual orientation is understood to be like racial identity in some way, or that they similarly mark a subject as a target of discrimination and violence. At issue here are the ways in which asserting sexual identity and racial identity as analogous or transitive is a way of demonstrating a logical equivalence, leading readers to conclude that sexual and racial identity are not the same but are similarly targeted by hatred. The fallacy is that the logical equivalence forces a false choice, and a binary one, in identifying the factors that led to the murder. That is, the assertion appears to be that homophobic violence is working like racial violence, but that comparison requires racial violence to be invoked in a purely instrumental way, and then immediately dropped out of the discourse.
One demonstration of this equivalencing comes from a statement made in one of the pretrial hearings in anticipation of the murder trial itself. As described in the Star: “A gang expert testified that McInerney was deeply entrenched in white supremacist ideology, which became the driving force behind the shooting, he said. King was gay and was perceived by McInerney as an enemy of the white race because of his gay lifestyle, according to police Detective Dan Swanson.”10 So: McInerney is charged with a hate crime, and a gang expert testifies that McInerney is part of a white supremacist group. The turn in the above sentence is jarringly strange, where “gay” comes to occupy the place in the sentence where we would expect “not white” to be and where a hatred of gays is implicitly rendered analogous to a hatred of nonwhites. But the very strangest thing about this is that Latisha King was herself biracial and identified as black, a fact that was rarely mentioned in the press coverage, or in the murder trial. In the representation of this murder in which a white supremacist junior high school student kills a black classmate, race is literally unmentionable and is erased from the story in order to make the narrative about gayness more legible, a legibility that is in turn dependent on the simultaneous analogy with and erasure of trans identity. Race and gender are then bound in a particularly tight paradox, simultaneously offered, on the one hand, as an undifferentiated conglomeration of difference whose relation to each other and to external forces are entirely transitive and, on the other, as a zero-sum game in which the assertion of one threatens to undo the legibility or coherence of the other.
How might it be possible to see the conditions under which a narrative of homophobic or transphobic violence becomes coherent, at what places it fails to cohere, and what different guises aggression can take in such narratives? I want to suggest that an understanding of bodily movement is paramount to understanding how, in the transphobic logic on display in this trial, gender expression becomes transformed into sexual aggression.
One unlikely ally in this inquiry into social meaning as given through bodily movement is Erwin Straus, a phenomenologist and neurologist who is probably most frequently encountered today in Iris Marion Young’s path breaking “Throwing like a Girl.” As a work of feminist phenomenology, this essay gets its title and fodder for its trenchant critique of phenomenology’s treatment of women and the feminine from Straus’s 1952 piece “The Upright Posture,” originally published in his volume Phenomenological Psychology. I will not take up Young’s critique here, not because I don’t think it is right or compelling: it is certainly both. What I would like to do instead is to read Straus’s essay “The Upright Posture” as offering an exemplary descriptive phenomenology that is particularly useful for describing bodily movement in the performance of gender.
I would to like to consider how phenomenology of this kind, which, following Husserl, we might call a “descriptive and non-idealizing discipline,” might help us to apprehend bodies in times, places, and contexts other than Straus’s own.11 That is to say, leaving aside the question of whether Straus’s account is sexist—or even tabling the certainty that it is—I want to suggest we might read past that gender bias to ask what tools such a phenomenological method might offer to all sorts of situations, even a situation in which gender is fundamentally at issue.
Straus is worth reconsidering in this case because he gives us perhaps the most thorough phenomenological account we have of the act of walking. Here is how he describes it:
Human bipedal gait is a rhythmical movement whereby, in a sequence of steps, the whole weight of the body rests for a short time on one leg only. The center of gravity has to be swung forward. . . . Human gait is, in fact, a continually arrested falling. Therefore an unforeseen obstacle or a little unevenness of the ground may precipitate a fall. Human gait is an expansive motion, performed in the expectation that the leg brought forward will ultimately find solid ground. It is motion on credit. Confidence and timidity, elation and depression, and stability and insecurity are all expressed in gait. Bipedal gait is, in fact, a balance alternating from one leg to the other, it permits variations in length, tempo, direction and accent.12
The emphasis here is on variation. The movement of walking is generated by a body creating an imbalance in itself that it then corrects over and over again. More crucially still, Straus is naming the wide range of mental and emotional states such variation and repetition can express. But Straus does not begin the essay with walking, just as the human walker does not. “The Upright Posture” begins with a description of a body that is not even able to keep itself upright. “A breakdown of physical well-being is alarming; it turns our attention to functions that, on good days, we take for granted. A healthy person does not ponder about breathing, seeing, walking. Infirmities of breath, sight or gait startle us.”13 He is not trying to describe illness here as much as he is endeavoring to show how illness can disrupt our seamless enmeshment with the world, “a breaking with the typicality of the world,” which we will explore in the next chapter. This disruption, he says, causes us to “ponder” what normally we simply, or not so simply, live. On a good day, neither our breath nor our sight nor our gait—and he deliberately lists them in that order—none of those things is present to us; we do not engage them through thinking, and they are not features of our consciousness. That ordering of days in terms of the quality of their embodiment, some good and some bad, is his acknowledgement that infirmity, the “breakdown of physical well-being,” as he puts it, is a nearly universal experience. The “we” that he invokes take those functions for granted, but only on good days. What Straus opens with, however, is not a sense of continuity and community with similarly vulnerable bodily others, but rather of strangeness, of being startled, of feeling wary of and put off by that infirmity. Note the equivocation in the referent of that “us,” which shifts suddenly. The “us” seemed to be continuous with the “we” who have bodies, but by the second sentence, it is designating a different group. “Among the patients consulting a psychiatrist, there are some who can no longer master the seemingly banal arts of standing and walking.”14
The “us” who are startled are transported to a scene of patient and psychiatrist, and the assessment of the condition of that patient—who is not paralyzed—aligns the startled “us” with the observing psychiatrist. And it is that observational point of view that characterizes both the doctor and the philosopher in this moment, whose own bodies recede from view as they take up their function as those who attend to other bodies. He continues: “They are not paralyzed, but, under certain conditions, they cannot or feel as if they cannot keep themselves upright.”15 We see here Straus’s interest in the psychology of the disorder. This is confirmed by a difference Straus asserts between not being able to keep oneself upright, and feeling that one cannot keep oneself upright. But contrary to the parsing that Straus attempts here, I would insist that a felt sense of incapacity is indistinguishable from incapacity itself. The distinction cannot be a phenomenological one. If I feel that I cannot keep myself upright, as opposed to merely fearing or anticipating that I cannot, then I cannot, in fact, keep myself upright. That distinction—the patient has the capacity to walk but feels he cannot—can be made only from an observational rather than an embodied point of view, since the feeling of the body and its capacity converge in and as the body schema. He goes on to tell us that the significance of the upright posture is psychological and not merely physiological, and describes postural being as the site at which the relation between psychology and physiology can be clearly seen. “Obviously, upright posture is not confined to the technical problems of locomotion. It contains a psychological element. It is pregnant with meaning not exhausted by the physiological tasks of meeting the forces of gravity and maintaining equilibrium.”16 The upright posture is not just about the physical body, but about its interaction with that “psychological element” that renders the posture pregnant with meaning. It is a meaning not exhausted by the physiological tasks of action, and thus not coextensive with the physiology through which it is experienced.
But before the body has even arisen into uprightness, language has already taken up that meaning. “To be upright has two connotations. First to rise, to get up and to stand on one’s own feet and second the moral implication, not to stoop to anything, to be honest and just, to be true to friends in danger. To stand by one’s convictions and to act accordingly, even at the risk of one’s life.”17 For Straus the meanings and indeed the moral valuations that we attach to uprightness spread into language. Straus insists on the psychological as an interpenetration of the physiological and the meaningful, and offers that “the term ‘upright’ in its moral connotation is more than a mere allegory.” Here, that “more” is hard to figure unless we understand it to be referring also to something physical, something inescapably joined with the physicality on which the meaning is modeled.18 And, importantly, it is only once we get to language and have left the realm of strict physiology, or at least augmented it with language, that the stakes are heightened to the level of life itself.
There are, of course, some troubling moments in the description. When he writes, “There is no doubt that the shape and function of the human body are determined in almost every detail by, and for, the upright posture,”19 it is hard to read his assertion of the seamlessness of the meshing of the form and function of the body, how little daylight there appears to be between “determined by” and “determined for” in that sentence, without hearing Iris Marion Young in our ears. But true to the task of descriptive phenomenology, he is interested less in asking how did we get this way and more in asking what is this way that we are? In a moment both phenomenological and anti-genealogical, he writes: “This writer’s interest is in what man is and not in how he supposedly became what he is.”20
Straus articulates what he calls a “biologically oriented psychology,” which, according to him, demonstrates that our experience of the world is necessarily tied to our physical orientation in space and our comportment as we move through it. We “must not forget that upright posture is an indispensable condition of man’s self-preservation. Upright we are, and we experience ourselves in this specific relation to the world. Men and mice do not have the same environment.”21 The stakes of uprightness are self-preservation, are life itself, as he insists more than once. “Upright we are” posits uprightness as a fundamental to our human-ness. This suggestion that uprightness is not able to be dispensed with exists in rather remarkable tension with his clear articulation of standing, and walking, as achievements, even as biologically improbable ones, in the case of walking. Straus describes that tension this way: “Upright posture characterizes the human species. Nevertheless each individual has to struggle to make it truly his own.”22 If standing and walking are fundamental features of the human animal and also those banal arts that might be failed, then the stakes of this artistry, and the consequences of its failure, could not be any higher.23
That specter of failure ensures that an individual’s relation to uprightness is necessarily a struggle. “Upright posture keeps us waiting. . . . He has to learn it, to conquer it. The acquisition will pass through several phases which, although not completely separate, are sufficiently distinct. Progress is slow. It takes a number of years. This development will be followed here from the getting up, to standing, and finally to walking.”24 The progress toward the upright posture is species-wide, and it is teleological, inevitably aiming ever upward, at the same time that its species-specific characteristic is a certain amount of effort, of labor. So occupied is Straus with the inescapable significance of work in the banal arts of getting up, standing, walking that he muses that the significance of sex for the human species is the fact that it lets us stop resisting gravity and lay our bodies down: “Sex remains a form of lying down,” he states categorically, comically.25
All this, however, takes as its perspective the man who has gotten up, achieved upright posture, and begun walking. The perspective of a child who has not yet quite done so is a different matter. Straus writes:
In getting up, man gains his standing in the world. The parents are not the only ones who greet the child’s progress with joy. The child enjoys no less the triumph of his achievements. The child certainly does not strive for security. Failure does not discourage him. He enjoys the freedom gained by the upright posture—the freedom to stand on his own feet and the freedom to walk upright. The upright posture, which we learn in and through falling, remains threatened by falls throughout our lives.26
The child is untroubled by the prospect of falling. The exuberance of childhood that propels one toward walking, the drive to master it through repeated failures, means that the child must not be deterred by the fear of falling if he is ever to walk. Acquisition of the skill of walking is made possible only in the face of this falling that is not feared, even when it happens, and happens again. As he learns to walk, stumbles, and falls, tries again, falls again, the child must comport himself with an unreasonable and unearned hopefulness about the success of his future efforts. He does so, at least in part, because walking brings the world to him, brings him things in the guise of his bringing himself to them. He does not fear that his reach for mastery will exceed his grasp, even when he should. But the child does experience a fear of and fascination with the objects that walking brings into his path. The man who walks feels confronted by those objects by virtue of his placing himself before them; “he finds himself always ‘confronted’ with things” in Straus’s words.27 The primary intentionality of our motor orientation toward the world means that we attribute a kind of agency, or a looking back, into the objects we survey.
In his delineation of childhood acquisition of motility Straus articulates a teleology to an ever-straighter uprightness, but the goal is attained only if the walk is of a certain kind, has a certain character. A walk that is not sufficiently “dignified,” to use one of his terms, or perhaps one that is not sufficiently upright, sufficiently straight, means that the body is not making good on the species progress toward ever-greater uprightness. The walk and the upright posture are expressive in many ways, and one of those ways, Straus tells us, is sexual. The example that Straus gives describing the sexual expressiveness of the body is worth close attention. We are given a tableau consisting of a man and a woman and a moment of sexual meaning conveyed through the body:
There is only one vertical but many deviations from it, each one carrying a specific, expressive meaning. The sailor pulls his cap askew, and his girl understands well the cocky expression and his “leanings.”28
This scene of sexual communication between a man and a woman, a sailor and a girl, hinges around his bodily movement, the sailor pulling his cap askew. Straus will insist that we do not ever have to be instructed in how to read such a situation, that “without ever being taught, we understand the rules governing this and other areas of expression. We understand them not conceptually but, it seems, by intuition.”29 Straus offers the example to explain the eloquence of gesture, to show how meaning inheres in the sailor’s movements, that his meaning is instantly readable from his posture, that the girl understands both the “expression” of his cap askew, his gesture, and also his “leanings.” Bodily materiality is central to the communication of meaning, yet is not in itself sufficient to the meaning aimed at in this example. That is, this aspires to be an explanation of bodily posture, but the expressiveness of the body in this moment is achieved only through the bodily auxiliary of the cap.
Perhaps the most startling thing about this particular example, as we read and understand it today, is that although the sailor’s girl may be perfectly clear on the meaning of that cap pulled askew, we as readers may not be. I myself am not clear at all; to my eye that cocked hat is more likely to conjure Tom of Finland than it is to telegraph a heterosexual sailor with his girl or on the make, and the connotative dimension of that word “leanings” does nothing to lean my interpretation toward the latter image rather than the former. The divergence between my reading and Straus’s may only demonstrate the danger of understanding the object to be singularly possessing its own meaning, and thus emphasize the necessity of understanding that meaning as always relationally constituted. It shows, too, that the meaning of a gesture might multiply if we understand it in differently gendered or sexualized or racialized contexts. “Thinking about gestures,” Juana María Rodríguez writes, “compels us to think about how our racialized, sexualized bodies propel themselves in the world.”30
If the tilt of the sailor’s cap is a kind of persuasive discourse, then it will succeed in persuading only if the girl knows what it is suggesting. The tilt of the cap will not signify in the same way to every onlooker. Indeed, the girl may be perfectly clear on what the sailor means with the skew of that cap, and she may be perfectly wrong. We might imagine a scene in which the girl misrecognizes the tilt of the cap as her sailor soliciting her, rather than, say, another male sailor, cap also askew, standing right behind her.
With that context in place, we might return to Straus’s contention that men and mice do not have the same environment, because their postures are different. They do not inhabit space in the same way; therefore they cannot inhabit the same space. If we could extend this already extended metaphor, or perhaps more properly contract it, might it help us consider what happens when members of the same species have postural variations that make them take up space in fundamentally different ways? If a man and a mouse cannot be said to have the same environment, what about a man and a woman? That last was, of course, Iris Marion Young’s challenge to Straus. My query here is similarly oriented but slightly askew: What about a man and a gay man? Or a white not-quite-adult and a mixed-race not-really-boy? Or a boy and a transgirl? What happens when we consider the postulate of a different environment for the differently comported conjugated through queer movement or trans gender? Or to use Straus’s own words, how might we think through the notion of “inclination, which just like leaning, means ‘bending out’ from the austere vertical” in a contemporary context where “inclination” names the direction or course of one’s sexual desire?31 Into what service is a walk or an upright posture pressed when examining the behaviors of those who might also bend in other ways?
As we have seen, the walk is an elaborate and complex expression of embodied life, a rhythmic destabilization and reassertion of the vertical that propels us through the world, toward other people or away from them. But embodied life also offers less elaborated deviations from the vertical, styles of bodily presentation that might function as a signal to others, to bring them into proximity or to keep them at a distance. Let’s return to Straus’s sailor. Straus explains that the sailor’s inclinations are communicated by his cap—that the expression of a gendered style can only be read, and can be universally read, as expressing a sexual advance. His “leaning” does not inhere in the cap itself, but is communicated by how he wears it, the style of its wearing, the angle at which he sets it across his brow. This angle, the physical tilt that indicates an immaterial lean, is understood to be a sign of homosexuality; it is a code evincing a surprising cultural breadth and tenacity, Straus’s unfamiliarity with it notwithstanding. The convention—that a cap or a scarf worn precisely askew, cocked or tied on the slant—is apparently longstanding enough in American gay culture to have been referenced in the first mainstream magazine article to document “homosexual life” in 1964, and persistent enough that forty-five years later Larry’s teachers could communicate their reading of his sexuality by describing his scarf as “jauntily tied,” where once again the angle of the tie is more crucial in determining how the scarf and its wearing are read than any physical attribute of the scarf itself.
Two years before the publication of Straus’s “The Upright Posture,” Life magazine published that essay, “Homosexuality in America.” This piece, illustrated with photographs, documents the homosexual underground for the consumption of a heterosexual public assumed to be unaware of such a world. One of the venues described is a bar in the “warehouse district” of San Francisco in 1964. The patrons are leathermen, and the scene is described as conveying a certain amount of menace. One of the most noticeable things about the men described are the caps that they wear. Those caps, or covers, are prominent in the images of the men in the bar, and also figure in magazine’s descriptions of their masculinity. The leathermen in the unnamed bar are described this way: “The effort of these homosexuals to appear manly is obsessive—in the rakish angle of the caps, in the thumbs boldly hooked in belts.”32 As described, the accessorizing marks and enhances a certain kind of masculinity, but also detracts from it in implying that excessive attention to dress and presentation necessarily slants that presentation toward the feminine. An over-concern with physical appearance, it is implied, queers even the most hyperbolically masculine gender, turns the unselfawareness that is the hallmark of masculinity into preening or dandyishness.
Each aspect of this dressing and accessorizing is freighted with meaning, in ways that are not always entirely apparent to a casual observer, even as it is implied that the language of gesture that governs the donning of those accessories is universal. An angle is always “rakish,” or in Latisha’s case, “jaunty,” rather than crooked or sloppy. Thumbs are hooked in belts “boldly,” though it is unclear what exactly it is that is bold about the gesture of a thumb crooked around a belt loop. These leathermen are portrayed as having an obsessive relation to their own manliness, but the article also introduces us to homosexuals who do not, who are described as “swishy” and “effeminate.” These two groups of homosexuals are differentiated in terms of gender, the obsessively manly leathermen versus the effeminate softness of the boys in Chelsea and the Village, the opposed textures of California SM culture (leather) and Chelsea boys (fluffy). While some of the photographic illustrations purport to show the shadowy world of homosexuals that the world of heterosexuals could not possibly fathom, other photographs portray homosexuals as they move through the straight world, and are encountered by heterosexuals. Indeed, the crux of the article is about those encounters between the heterosexual and homosexual worlds, where the index of the visibility homosexual world is a measure of its visibility to straights, and its increasing visibility is seen as fundamentally about heterosexuality, an aggressive movement out toward it.
The article also offers two photographs depicting the world of more effeminate gays. The first shows the torso of mannequin displayed in a storefront window. He is dressed in a jacket and a long plaid scarf, one arm is crossed protectively over his midsection, and the other arm reaches up across the chest, one finger of the masculine hand resting on the collarbone in a delicately feminine pose. On his head is an outrageously oversized hat. The caption reads: “The window of this New York Greenwich village store which caters to homosexuals is filled with the colorful, offbeat attention-calling clothes that the ‘gay’ world likes.”33 The store window solicits our attention, and it does so, by implication, in the same way that homosexuals solicit our attention, with color, exaggeration, outrageousness. As in the description of Latisha King’s feminine attire, so here the agency is given to the clothing itself; it is the clothing itself that procures the attention that the homosexual is understood to crave.
This characterization of homosexuals as craving and demanding attention is another remarkably persistent stereotype, and it played a central role in the trial. One of Latisha’s teachers, Anne Sinclair, gave testimony about the ways in which she understood Latisha to have been engaging in “negative attention seeking.” She explained that this seeking of attention was something that could be felt the moment Latisha entered a room. Merely the entrance itself, in Sinclair’s view, was a demand for attention, because of the way in which Latisha entered that room. And since the attention she received in school was almost invariably negative attention, Latisha was necessarily demanding bad attention. That demand for attention was described as bodily but nonverbal. She “announces” through her manner of entering a room and her style of dress, both of which are described by Defense Attorney Robyn Bramson as “flamboyant,” a word Bramson offers to the teacher, who affirms it in a string of assent. “Flamboyant,” here and elsewhere, functions as a cipher for “homosexual” when the latter cannot be uttered.
Bramson: And you’ve described him as dramatic?
Sinclair: Yes.
Bramson: Coming into a room?
Sinclair: Yes.
Bramson: Announcing his presence?
Sinclair: Yes.
Bramson: And that he became a bit more flamboyant as well?
Sinclair: Yes.
Bramson: Would that be a good word?
Sinclair: Yes.
Bramson: In his style of dress?
Sinclair: Yes. 34
Latisha, by all accounts, was a large presence. She knew how to enter a room. She liked to be noticed. She knew how to work it. If we read this form of embodied movement as a demand, the question then becomes: What is this a demand for? And what is being extracted from whom? Sinclair understands it to be a demand that others give Latisha negative attention; Latisha is demanding an unhappy engagement with the other. In this view, if others then react with unhappiness, negativity, or aggression, they are only acceding to what Latisha herself has demanded.
Bramson: Why you would say that he engaged in negative attention-seeking behavior?
Sinclair: Well, I was going to say I was always aware when he came into the classroom. I mean, it’s not like—if I wasn’t looking at the door, I mean, I would know that he had entered the room. I mean, some kids can quietly come into the room, and other kids kind of bring more attention to themselves when they come into the room.
Bramson: And you felt that Larry brought more attention to himself?
Sinclair: Right.35
What was occluded in this exchange between the defense attorney and the teacher was the teacher’s own look, her own desire to look. We can read a hint of it in that breaking off, her saying “I mean, it’s not like—” and not finishing the sentence. What follows is her contention that she was not looking at the door when Latisha came in. The words that are swallowed prior to that demurral cannot be read, as we are left with only the negative imprint of the thing about to be conjured (“it’s not like”) followed by the impossibility of its formulation. It’s not like she was looking at the door before Latisha came in. It’s not like she wanted to look. Latisha made her do it.
With this we see another troubling consequence of understanding the performance of non-normative gender as a demand for attention, but also some of the dangers of reading the performance of gender as a demonstration of agency. If it is Latisha’s own demand that draws Sinclair’s looks toward the door, then Latisha’s demand provides cover for Sinclair’s own desire to look and to see. Sinclair is not responsible for acknowledging or attending to her own desire. The attribution of “negative attention seeking” to Latisha means that the scene is a story of Latisha’s agency, rather than a story of Sinclair’s own desire to look, which is both satisfied and occluded by her turn toward Latisha.
The Life magazine piece also tells a story, or several, about the complex circuits of desire and disgust, recognition and retraction, that are at play when straight people look at queer people. One of the photographs shows two couples passing each other as they walk through what looks to be Washington Square Park. The first couple appears to be two young men, and the camera captures them from the back in the left of the frame as they walk away from us. Walking toward them and toward the viewer is a second couple, a middle-aged woman and a balding man. The first couple is looking straight ahead. The second couple is looking at the first, the man with a hard, sizing-up stare, and the woman with a not-quite-legible gaze. There is a shadow between her brows, and a hint of flare and raise in her nostrils. Her look may be unkind; it may be curious. It may be compassionate, it may be fearful. The most readable aspect of her embodiment is not her face but her hands. One white-gloved hand clutches her pocketbook and the other clutches her husband, curling around his elbow. His hands are unreadable, pushed into the pockets of his pants, but his face is anything but inscrutable. His brow is furrowed, his eyes are narrowed, his stare is hard, and his tongue is pushed into his lower lip. It is a look of judgment, of disapproval, of contempt.
The photograph’s caption reads: “Two fluffy-sweatered young men stroll in New York City, ignoring the stare of a ‘straight’ couple. Flagrant homosexuals are unabashed by reactions of shock, perplexity, disgust.”36 The caption indicates that the photograph captures homosexuals’ desire and their flagrancy, even as the only physical evidence of desire captured by the photograph is the desire of the straight couple to look at the gay one. The young men are looking ahead, not returning the openly hostile stare that is directed at them. They walk through the park, side by side but not touching. Their sweaters are soft, as are the stances; the young man closest to the center of the frame is slightly contrapposto, caught mid-stride in the play of balance that is human bipedal gait. Each has his arms closed protectively around his own torso, contained, containing. They are not soliciting attention in their comportment; their bodies evidencing rather the opposite, a kind of proprioceptive retraction. Nor their gazes: straight ahead, slightly down, non-challenging. Yet is the homosexual couple who are characterized as seeking attention, soliciting stares, flagrantly and brazenly courting the attention of the straight couple in a characterization that can free the slack-jawed onlookers from having to face their own desire to look. With the insistence that homosexuals are “unabashed” by the “shock, perplexity, disgust” of the onlooker, the chief complaint against these homosexuals is advanced: not that they are violating norms of gender or sexual behavior, but that they are doing so without a sufficient sense of shame, a charge whose workings in this case I have explored elsewhere.37
The period of time between classes allotted to the students to walk from one classroom to another is called the “passing period.” The day before the shooting, there was an incident during the passing period that was, according to Dr. Hoagland, the defense psychologist, “the trigger incident” in the case. Brandon recounted that he was walking along the hallway with his friend Keith L. and saw Latisha approaching, walking down the hallway. Brandon then bent the arc of his path wide, veering away from Latisha. In Brandon’s telling, he was trying to steer clear of Latisha. Dr. Hoagland said: “He was not wanting any trouble. He tried to avoid him. They passed each other and then the defendant turned around and looked at him and the victim said something.” The victim said something but no one was certain what it was. Brandon did not hear the words. His friend Keith did not hear the words. Brandon heard only the word at the end: “baby.” After the shooting, he said that Latisha might have said: “What’s up, baby?” Or that she might have said: “What’s wrong, baby?” Brandon was not sure. He could not remember exactly what was said. This incident was, according to the defense, the defining moment in the case. Latisha called Brandon “baby,” and according to Brandon, this was disgusting, the worst thing anyone had ever said to him. “I have never been disrespected like that,” he said.
Dr. Hoagland is asked why such a seemingly innocuous comment would be reacted to in such a violent manner: “Was it the comment, what was it about this incident that upset Brandon?” Dr. Hoagland responds: “There are multiple things. One was that this boy who was dressing as a woman and secondarily who was gay that was coming up and saying these kinds of provocative things to him in front of many other people. I think Brandon said that was the straw that popped the balloon.” Which was indeed how Brandon described his feelings after the incident, “the final straw that popped the balloon,” mixing the metaphor in order that he not be the camel with a broken back, but rather the balloon popping, a noise that several of the children thought they heard that morning in the classroom, and only realized, once they smelled gunpowder and saw Brandon standing over Latisha body aiming to fire a second shot into her head, that it was not a balloon at all.
Brandon agreed with Dr. Hoagland’s assessment that it was Latisha’s gender transgression, rather than her sexual orientation, that provoked him toward violence. The gender transgression was primary, and Latisha’s sexual orientation was only “secondary.” “I knew he was gay,” Brandon said “but he took it to a whole other level. What the hell, high heels and makeup and hairdo? It was surprising and disgusting.” Brandon, in fact, was quite precise in articulating that his hatred of Latisha stemmed from the fact that she was violating gender roles. When Prosecutor Fox asked the psychologist, “Did you talk to him about why he found it so disgusting?” Hoagland responded: “Yes. He said that it was such a disruption of what was expected from a male that simply seeing that was upsetting and disturbing.”
The events of the “trigger incident,” however, deserve a second look. Brandon and Latisha pass each other in the hall, apparently without incident. No words are exchanged, nothing is reported. After they have passed one another, Brandon reports that he turns to look at Latisha. Brandon turns to look. He does not say why. We do not know what motivated that look. It was not words between them. It was not physical contact. It was not, so far as anyone can tell, anything that Latisha did. For some reason after they have walked past one another, Brandon turns around to look at Latisha. And what he reports about that moment is that Latisha is looking at him. Latisha’s look is one that Brandon would not have perceived had he not turned around and looked himself, so it is only his own act of turning and looking that allows Latisha’s look to emerge, and offers him as receptive to Latisha’s look. The “triggering incident” begins with some desire of Brandon’s, a desire that oriented his body back and behind, as he turned himself toward Latisha. He is hailed in the moment after he has turned to look, with an unheard utterance and the word “baby.” If we are to understand the disgust, the revulsion, the blinding rage that Brandon reports feeling at this moment, we must realize that it is not just a reaction to Latisha’s half-heard utterance, but also a reaction to Brandon’s own turn, his own solicitation of that utterance with his body and his look.
***
During the murder trial, the court is half-full of people: the lawyers, the jury, the gallery, the accused—all eyes to the judge. The entrance is in the back of the courtroom. As I am sitting in the gallery and listening to the proceedings, transcribing the testimony into my laptop as quickly as I am able, I hear the squeak of the hinge of the double door behind me open as someone enters the courtroom. And Brandon turns around. I keep listening, it keeps squeaking, he keeps turning. When court is in session and that door opens with a squeak, and a bailiff or a witness or a family member enters the courtroom, Brandon turns around in his chair. Every time. He swivels his head around with his face to the gallery to see who has entered, then quickly turns back around to face front. It is as if the sound and the feeling of someone coming in and standing behind him is unbearable. That feeling of being the object of someone’s gaze, a someone whom he cannot see, shifts him and turns him around in his chair. When he turns around to face the door, he rearranges his body with the turn, insuring that he is not in the same position relative to whoever is entering the room that Latisha was when Brandon shot her: seated, blind from behind, her back and the back of her head offering themselves as one target.