though, the nightmare image of the predator, the animal, is irresistible. The appellate court said the prosecutor’s assessment was valid, and the judge should have deferred. The crowd jerked in unison, Get him! If knowing of a dark place qualifies as predatory, and drunkenly making a cell phone video of drunken penetration of an impaired individual and texting an admission of rape fits any definition of sophistication; if language, that is, can be so unmoored from reason, we’re all in trouble—or dishonest.
Both, actually. The Times story quickly metastasized. On Twitter a woman identified GMC by his full name as a student at Syracuse University. SU’s Daily Orange did a lengthy report on July 7, by which time the student had either withdrawn or been expelled. Tweets flew fast and giddy. His name, his face, a photograph of his family home, the family address, a GIF from the TV series Empire with André repeating, “I said I’m gonna kill him” and other cries from the crowd:
Know his name, know his face
Ruin his life let the world see this don’t employ him
Say his name! Say his name!
I don’t feel save [sic] returning to a school that has a KNOWN sexual predator
Damn, he even looks like a rapist too
He should go to prison for the rest of his life
Jail time
Let’s hope the inmates take video of his first time as well
It’s so scary to think … like how many other trash people are among me/us and we don’t know?
Boy need some years in prison and the judge need to lose his seat in the judicial system ASAP
There is no way this guy shouldent [sic] get 20 years
I believe castration should be on the table for punishments
That judge sounds like a rapist himself.
By mid-July the judge was out, forced to resign. GMC’s case was expected to move to a criminal grand jury. Under New Jersey’s juvenile waiver law, teenagers as young as fifteen may be tried as adults. Their identities are not protected, their court records are not sealed; if convicted they have a permanent criminal record, are subject to adult sentences and may eventually be locked up in adult prisons. If convicted of a sex offense, after serving their sentence they may spend the rest of their life on the public sex offender registry, which Laura Cohen, director of the Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic at Rutgers Law School, calls “a dangerous public policy” whose harms are “profound and numerous.” Unless acquainted with the registry’s strictures, most people in the US approve of this form of social death.
GMC is eighteen now, and hated. He is in that category of unpopular defendants whom Professor Sullivan calls “guilty, … vile or undesirable.” Neither the Times nor court papers identified him as white (he is), yet almost immediately blogs and tweets asserted he had “gotten off” because of his race and privilege. Good family is apparently code for white among some vocal segment of the righteous. This is disturbing on so many levels, most obviously its subtext that non-white families must be bad, imagined once again, tacitly this time, as inhabiting a world of “indifference and ignorance … a land with no fathers”—or Eagle Scouts, good test scores or college dreams. Once his name, face and address were plastered on the internet (the address supplied by a Democratic aspirant to Congress for 2020, Carol Hafner), the furies were unleashed over the benefits of his color and wealth, with the inversion that anger was directed not at the unconscionable number of black youths tried as adults but at the absence of equal injustice for all.
Youth advocates and criminal justice reformers have long opposed trying juveniles as adults, and argue for further reducing punitive measures, including confinement, in favor of rehabilitative ones. Juveniles treated as juveniles, research shows, are less likely to commit crime again. (Also less likely to be physically, sexually and emotionally brutalized, less likely to commit suicide.) In 2015, when sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds in New York were still automatically treated as adults, as in 1989 (the law would not change until 2017), Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, made the cogent point to CBS News: “Here is the problem, they’re not adults!”
Thirty years after a different set of good-family men and women of the media and other good-family liberals abetted the bad-family biases of police and prosecutors, the crowd’s essential reflex is the same. The facts are different, the degree of panic is different, the cases are distinctly different. Certainty about a teenager’s irredeemable life is unchanged. The criteria are different: white people can declare, The enemy is rich. The enemy is white in a new timbre, confident that no one will call them racist. For all its pretenses to social justice, this is poisoned solidarity. The enemy may be poor and black tomorrow, desperate and immigrant the next day—in fact both groups are, today. The validating enjoyment from demonizing “the right people” is as dangerous as ever, and unchanged. The situational view of rape is unchanged too: rape is a heinous crime, except when wished upon those accused of it.
All of which makes the crowd’s tearful praise, just a few weeks earlier, of DuVernay’s intimate portraits of the Central Park Five—their good or pretty-good families, their childhood hopes and silly banter, their humanity—appear to have been more a matter of sentiment than principle. If it be principle, the episode devoted to Korey Wise’s agony behind bars should have inspired a public revolt against ever trying teenagers as adults, and amplified the moral fight against Prison America. As it is, the tears seem to have been shed only because Wise was the wrong guy. Yet for years he and the others (who suffered in juvie lockup) were presumed to be the right guys, convicted and declared the right guys, guilty, vile, undesirable. Does our pity depend on something so wispy as innocence? Wise and the others were not angels, they were boys, who were hystericized into wolves; in welcoming them back into the human family as victims, we have missed a step. Complex humanity, the mess of life, demands principled humanity. The victim is one of us. The suspect is one of us, whether ultimately found guilty or not.
I didn’t start writing about sex to write about crime. Not all the pieces in this collection concern it, though many do. The first time I wrote on sex and culture, in an essay included here about Madonna, I was drawn to pleasure in the midst of danger, danger manifest physically in the AIDS epidemic and politically in persistent attacks on sexual freedom, sexual expression, homo-and other sexuality in the rule-breaking category. Desire is the subject there. The attacks (from Jesse Helms’ denunciations of gays on the Senate floor, to collaboration by anti-pornography feminists with the Reagan right, to official silence as tens of thousands of gay men died of AIDS) were part of the historical context, then understood, as was the ongoing fightback from ACT UP (whose rowdy affirmations of life over fear somehow disappeared in critics’ recent revisionism of New York in the late 1980s as a city in terror, paralyzed). Pleasure—the possibilities for it, the absolute necessity of attention to it as part of any radical politics, the meaning of and conditions for it, the substance of intimate life—continues to be my interest.
But sexual danger is at the fore in public discourse. Not since the height of the AIDS crisis has sex been so prominently welded to menace, except this period’s version of safe sex, rather than emerging from a community’s erotic sensibility, is a checklist of yes-or-no questions drafted to standardize consent and, primarily, to avoid legal action. (As the book’s first entry shows, the erotic linkage of sex and safety was perverted by the criminalization machine, which continues to distort the rational impulse for precaution into an irrational license to punish.) Scandal, the context for many of the pieces here, has become the background noise of life, a thrum that’s stripped the word
