Finalist, Best LGBTQ Nonfiction Book, Lambda Literary Awards 2020
On October 14, 1998, five thousand people gathered on the steps of
the U.S. Capitol to mourn the death of Matthew Shepard, a gay
college student who had been murdered in Wyoming eight days
earlier. Politicians and celebrities addressed the crowd and the
televised national audience to share their grief with the country.
Never before had a gay citizen's murder elicited such widespread
outrage or concern from straight Americans. In Dying to Be Normal,
Brett Krutzsch argues that gay activists memorialized people like
Shepard as part of a political strategy to present gays as similar
to the country's dominant class of white, straight Christians.
Through an examination of publicly mourned gay deaths, Krutzsch
counters the common perception that LGBT politics and religion have
been oppositional and reveals how gay activists used religion to
bolster the argument that gays are essentially the same as
straights, and therefore deserving of equal rights. Krutzsch's
analysis turns to the memorialization of Shepard, Harvey Milk,
Tyler Clementi, Brandon Teena, and F. C. Martinez, to campaigns
like the It Gets Better Project, and national tragedies like the
Pulse nightclub shooting to illustrate how activists used prominent
deaths to win acceptance, influence political debates over LGBT
rights, and encourage assimilation. Throughout, Krutzsch shows how,
in the fight for greater social inclusion, activists relied on
Christian values and rhetoric to portray gays as upstanding
Americans. As Krutzsch demonstrates, gay activists regularly
reinforced a white Protestant vision of acceptable American
citizenship that often excluded people of color, gender-variant
individuals, non-Christians, and those who did not adhere to
Protestant Christianity's sexual standards. The first book to
detail how martyrdom has influenced national debates over LGBT
rights, Dying to Be Normal establishes how religion has shaped gay
assimilation in the United States and the mainstreaming of
particular gays as "normal" Americans.
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