It was something more like “Gay men are predatory swamp creatures… who are also extremely vulnerable to attack.” Alongside all the demonizing, there was a competing narrative of the gay person as victim, or the gay person as prey. The idea was that we were menaces who had to be vanquished. If a gay person was in the news, it was likely about how they’d been harassed, bullied, beaten up, or murdered. All the horror stories traumatized me, but I was especially affected when I learned about what happened to Matthew Shepard, the college student who was brutally murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, in
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