"We Are Everywhere":
Condemning Homosexuality
Joan Howarth
Professor of Law
Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas
Death penalty law invites lethal judgments about the value of individual
lives. Some of the men and more of the women sentenced to death in the
U.S. were identified as gay, lesbian, transgendered, or bisexual in the
trials that condemned them. The open-ended death penalty decision invites
consideration of and literal condemnation of queer identities, whether
lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered, in combination with the class
and racial bias imbedded in the decisions. Professor Howarth's presentation
will address two topics: (1) the deadly sexual identities constructed
and imposed on these defendants in their capital cases, and (2) the meanings
of these cases within the organized movements for gay, lesbian, and transgendered
rights. The first part is chilling, but perhaps predictable. The second
part relates most directly to the conference themes of assimilation and
resistance. All people on death row have been convicted of murder, and
many have lived lives of poverty, desperation, and mental illness. Does
"we are everywhere" carry us that far? The efforts of gay rights
groups to present these defendants as victims of discrimination against
the glbt community challenges elitist and assimilationist tendencies,
and provokes important questions about identity, power, autonomy, and
the limits of solidarity.