The festive period brought sadness as well as joy. A gay US Assistant Professor of English was murdered in his home. Don Belton (pictured right) has been described as a 'literary path blazer and one of the important black gay writers to emerge in the 1980s'. Pink News reports that he was stabbed by a 25 year old male who admitted stabbing Belton following a sexual assault committed by Belton on the stabber a couple of days earlier. A tribute/info site has been set out called justicefordonbelton.com and the online reaction seems to be dealing with the case as a 'gay panic' murder. UK law students might rightly be slightly puzzled by this as it's not something that has been advanced in English law. In the US, the Matthew Shepard case is probably a good example of where people have applied this idea and the film-maker, Susan Potter explored the idea in a New Zealand context with her film 'An Ordinary Person'. Potter asked the question 'does the law make it impossible to murder a homosexual' and it will be interesting to see how that idea plays out in the case of Don Belton, if indeed it does at all.
Monday, 4 January 2010
Murder in the Academy
The festive period brought sadness as well as joy. A gay US Assistant Professor of English was murdered in his home. Don Belton (pictured right) has been described as a 'literary path blazer and one of the important black gay writers to emerge in the 1980s'. Pink News reports that he was stabbed by a 25 year old male who admitted stabbing Belton following a sexual assault committed by Belton on the stabber a couple of days earlier. A tribute/info site has been set out called justicefordonbelton.com and the online reaction seems to be dealing with the case as a 'gay panic' murder. UK law students might rightly be slightly puzzled by this as it's not something that has been advanced in English law. In the US, the Matthew Shepard case is probably a good example of where people have applied this idea and the film-maker, Susan Potter explored the idea in a New Zealand context with her film 'An Ordinary Person'. Potter asked the question 'does the law make it impossible to murder a homosexual' and it will be interesting to see how that idea plays out in the case of Don Belton, if indeed it does at all.
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