![]() ![]() “I think there will be people in the audience who initially will be quite strongly sympathetic to Josh and will then be forced to confront during the film some of the ramifications of initially being sympathetic to him,” he explained, adding that this structure “ the audience, through the story, to examine their own prejudices.” Those are risky filmmaking choices in a society already disinclined to believe transgender people and all too ready to sympathize with their abusers.īut if some viewers find themselves initially swayed by Vallum’s account-and in a deeply transphobic culture, the “trans panic” defense has indeed proven persuasive in the past-then Steele says that’s by design. Williamson’s transgender status is only revealed partway through the documentary. ![]() Shepard is now one of the namesakes of the legislation under which Vallum was prosecuted.īut rather than debunk the killer’s story through overt narration, or challenge his story at every turn, Steele frames the story through Vallum’s perspective and then allows contextualizing information about the murder to emerge slowly through secondary interviews with a police officer, with Williamson’s friend Destiny Allen, and with a local journalist who investigated the case. As The Daily Beast’s Jay Michaelson recently observed, it is only illegal in two states: California and Illinois.Īs the National LGBT Bar Association notes on its website, the killers of gay college student Matthew Shepard tried to cite the common homophobic equivalent of the “trans panic” defense: the “gay panic” defense. The rationalization that Vallum deploys in the film-that he only killed Williamson because he unexpectedly found out she was transgender during the course of their relationship-is known as the “trans panic” defense, and it is used to try to excuse or mitigate the seriousness of murdering a transgender person. “And it’s up to the audience, it’s up to the viewer, to come to the conclusion whether or not he’s fully understood and come to terms with himself or not.” “What we see in the character, and not just the character but the reality of Josh is someone who is wrestling with diverse notions of himself,” Steele told The Daily Beast of his approach to his unreliable subject. The Vallum of the plea hearing, however, apparently said that he knew Williamson was transgender all along-and that the murder was pre-planned. “I don’t know why I didn’t stop,” he claims. The Vallum of the documentary claims that he didn’t know Williamson was transgender until the day he killed her, and that after discovering she had a penis, he “snapped” and began to stab her. ![]() ![]() Vallum then “lure Williamson into his car” and drove her to his father’s house in Mississippi where he “used a stun gun to electrically shock Williamson in the chest, repeatedly stabbed, and struck with a hammer until she died.”īut that is not the story Vallum tells viewers in the haunting hour of Love and Hate Crime, which was filmed before the young man would go on to plead guilty to a hate crime in December 2016. “Vallum believed he would be in danger if other Latin Kings members found out that he had engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with a transgender woman.” “Vallum admitted, as part of his guilty plea, that on May 28, 2015, he decided to kill Williamson after learning that a friend had discovered Williamson was transgender,” the press release notes. Justice Department announcing Vallum’s sentencing, are as follows: Vallum and Williamson had a “consensual sexual relationship” and Vallum, of his own admission, “knew Williamson was transgender”-a fact that he tried to hide from almost everyone he knew, including fellow members of the Latin Kings gang to which he belonged. The facts of the case, according to a May 2017 press release from the U.S. Last year, Vallum’s brutal 2015 killing of Williamson in Mississippi became the first ever murder of a transgender person to be successfully prosecuted under the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. “We were trying to go inside his head and understand his motivations-to understand the dilemma that, ultimately, he kills Mercedes because he loves her but he hates her and he hates himself for loving her,” Steele told The Daily Beast. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |