Valentine Road

HBO is showing a documentary  this month on the 2008 murder of Lawrence King, a gender-nonconforming* kid from Oxnard CA. Thanks to the wonder of HBO On-Demand, I was able to get an early preview of it.

As a former journalism student, I understand objectivity, and the need to show reality in all its unflinching ugliness, but Valentine Road was hard to watch without becoming viscerally angry. The bigotry of some of the school officials is laid bare. The most prescient scene is one where some of the former jurors in the murder trial move from talking about Trader Joe's wine to their sympathy (!) for Brandon McInerney, the fourteen-year-old who shot King at point-blank range. Listening to these three white, (presumably middle-class, cis-and-heterosexual) women, it's hard not to draw parallels to the Trayvon Martin case from earlier this year.

I've read so many positive things about this documentary, I feel as though I was watching an entirely different story -- there were so many things that could have been explored more deeply like the intersection of race (King was biracial) and sexuality, femmephobia, misogyny, cis supremacy, and a million other vocabulary words those outside the social justice world aren't privy to. And this documentary is for them, the mainstream audience who is unfortunately going to see a lot of victim blaming and rationalization of a hate crime.

*This is how the media referred to King.