…and not just for the ones in it.

My guilty pleasure during quarantine (or lockdown if you prefer) is watching re-runs of Forensic Files. It’s basically a procedural crime solving series that mixes documentary footage with sometimes disturbing reenactments. If I take anything away from it, besides the fact that the science is such now I don’t see how anything can think they’ll get away with murder, it’s how often women are killed by their husbands or boyfriends. It’s pretty sickening.

Occasionally, very occasionally, the victim is gay. Since their murder is being profiled on this series, you know in advance the killer will be caught and sent to prison. That relieves some of my stress watching one of these episodes. Once upon a time I and another user maintained a news section on our local gay BBS, and I saw a torrent of stories flash across the wire services about gay bashings and murders that happened here and there all across the country, nearly all of which never made the local newspapers or news broadcasts. We were the dirty secret best not talked about in family newspapers. Which was why we were so diligent about maintaining our BBS news section: back then there were very few ways of knowing what was happening to us. I’ve told the story before about how back in June 1977 I had to start up my shortwave radio and listen to the BBC to find out what the results were of Anita Bryant’s campaign to overturn gay equality laws in Dade County Florida, because none of the national or local news broadcasts even bothered to say one word about it.

So the other day I’m watching Forensic Files and see the episode Cop Out, about the murder of Jesse Valencia, a gay college student, by an older man, a police officer no less, who’d essentially been using him for sex. The cop met the kid after (I think) a traffic stop. Or maybe it was a loud party. The ticket he wrote for the kid was a piece of evidence used after the cop said he’d never met the kid and didn’t know him. It was a mutual thing until the boy found out the cop was married. He was young, proud, out, and he decided to break it off. And the cop killed him for it. The speculation, and that’s all it could have been, was he threatened to out the cop if he didn’t stop coming around, and that’s what provoked the murder. That’s the obvious motive…I can see why a lot of people might assume that was it…but I think seeing that self respecting pride in the kid telling him to go away because he didn’t want to be involved with a married man was what did it.

The forensic evidence against the cop was slight, but they nailed him. To this day he denies killing the kid, despite the fact of his body hair being found on the kid’s body, in the kid’s blood. 

Kids…don’t get involved with an older closeted gay person. Step by step they will try to drag you into their closet too. And if you refuse you may end up being a sacrifice to the empty mask the closet makes them wear every moment of their day.

Jesse Valencia