Paul and Scotty

...For nearly a decade, Nancy Rodriques has battled the demons that swirl around the murder of her son, Paul Broussard, her first of three children by two husbands. She asks herself whether she was accepting enough when Paul came out to her not long before his death. She regrets not being able to comfort him after the beating and stabbing, when he was talking incoherently at the hospital. Even today, she often wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.

Rodriques lives on the outskirts of Macon, Georgia, where she earns a living selling tires. She spends most of her time outside work tending to her two grown children, David and Michele, and her grandson, Jalen, 4. She hopes to take Jalen to a lesbian minister at the local Unitarian Universalist Church for a lesson on homophobia. "I want Jalen to know that it's okay for some boys to love other boys, and for girls to love other girls. I want him to be completely free of the ugliness surrounding Paul."

She has focused most of her still simmering anger on the ten boys and in combating their efforts to win early release. She has testified at parole hearings, lobbied state legislators, spoken at hate crimes rallies, and toured the prisons where her son's killers are locked up. Because the perpetrators were given sentences ranging from parole to seven years to 45, depending on their level of involvement in the actual assault, she has faced the possibility that one of her son's killers will be released nearly every year since they were incarcerated. In March, one such perpetrator was in fact released. "My goal in life is to live long enough to make sure that Buice serves his full term," says the fifty-six-year-old. "That would make me 87 - I think I can make it."

When it comes to gay bashers, she has reason to be suspicious about Texas justice. Just five years before Broussard's death, Dallas Judge Jack Hampton had gone easy on an eighteen-year-old who with a pal had shot to death two gay men on the grounds that "prostitutes and gays [are] at about the same level. I'd be hard put to give somebody life for killing a prostitute."

In Texas at least, it seemed kids could simply claim that perpetrators had made a pass at them and then get away with murder. At every parole hearing for one of her son's perpetrators, she remains vigilant of even the most subtle suggestion that her son was somehow less than fully human. She believes he is deserving of the same protection and justice as everyone else...

Excerpted from Anatomy Of A Gay Murder written by Chris Bull.

If you have not heard of Scotty Joe Weaver, you are not alone.

In July Weaver, 18, was robbed, beaten, strangled and slashed by his mobile home housemates, who then set his body ablaze. Weaver's scorched, decomposed body was found along a deserted dirt road four days later in smalltown Bay Minette, Ala. One of the alleged perpetrators, according to police, had bragged about assaulting homosexuals.

Yet Weaver's slaying received scant national media attention. In fact, in the six years since Matthew Shepard's murder, dozens of similar killings have been overlooked. With a few notable exceptions, journalists apparently decided, having established Shepard as a martyr, they could go back to pretending gay-bashing was no longer a national disgrace they had an obligation to expose.

That's why the decision by producers at ABC's "20/20" to take yet another look at the Shepard case is both predictable and mystifying. (The episode airs Friday, Nov. 26.) With the possible exception of the assassination of Harvey Milk, no gay-related murder has been more carefully dissected, investigated and dramatized. It is the one case guaranteed to attract a large national audience...

...I spent 2000 in Texas on a fellowship, examining a string of 28 anti-gay killings. These cases were, without exception, eerily similar to Shepard's. Young men, fueled by drugs and/or alcohol, believing it a harmless diversion, searched for gay men to harass and rob. Based on anti-gay stereotypes, they believed that gays carried lots of cash, were easy to overpower and unlikely to report attacks to police, who tended to look the other way.

Once apprehended, these young men invariably claimed they had been propositioned and were only defending themselves. They believed they were doing society a favor by ridding it of one more queer. One teenager said he "felt like an executioner" when he pulled the trigger that killed. They expressed shock when they learned that their crime might actually land them behind bars for the rest of their lives.

That it took a complicated mix of lethal motives to trigger murder in no way made these killings any less a product of savage bigotry. To minimize any part of this equation is to do a disservice both to the truth and to efforts to prevent this deadly cycle of violence and societal prejudice that took the lives of Scotty Joe Weaver, Matthew Shepard and hundreds of more anonymous victims...

Excerpted from When Hate Isn't Hate also written by Chris Bull.