This day in history: Jesse Dirkhising was killed on this day in 1999. You never heard of Jesse Dirkhising, but you have heard about Matthew Shepard. Matthew Shepard was a gay man who was killed by two heterosexual men and it made national and international news. Jesse Dirkhising was a 13-year-old boy that was bound drugged, tortured, raped and killed by two gay men, at about the same time, and only the Washington Times picked it up initially on a national level with a headline that read, "Media tune out torture death of Arkansas boy."
NewsMax reported:
“McGowan did a Nexus search and learned that the Shepard case generated a massive 3,007 stories. "And when the case finally went to trial ... it was all over the broadcast news, received front-page coverage in all major newspapers, and was featured on the cover of Time magazine. (In all, the New York Times ran 195 stories about the case.)
"In the month after the Dirkhising murder, however, Nexus recorded only 46 stories...
He sums up by quoting the surprisingly candid Andrew Sullivan - an openly gay columnist for the liberal New Republic.
Wrote Sullivan: "The Shepard case was hyped for political reasons: to build support for inclusion of homosexuals in a federal hate crimes law. The Dirkhising case was ignored for political reasons: squeamishness about reporting a story that could feed anti-gay prejudice and the lack of any pending legislation to hang a story on ... Some deaths - if they affect a politically protected class - are worth more than others. Other deaths, those that do not fit a politically correct profile, are left to oblivion."
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