In December 1993, Brandon Teena, a young transgender man, was raped and murdered in Humboldt, Neb. Two decades later, Brandon’s story still resonates with discussions about rape culture, LGBT youth homelessness, and misgendering trans people.
Katrina Markel
On the 20th anniversary of his murder, Brandon Teena's headstone in Lincoln Memorial Park was unadorned save for a slightly faded artificial blue rose between his headstone and his father's. The marker — almost surely against Brandon's wishes — still displays his birth name, "Teena Brandon," with the epitaph "Daughter, Sister, Friend." Nothing to honor Brandon's identity as a transgender man, and certainly nothing to indicate that this is the final resting place of a tragic LGBT icon. Two decades after Brandon Teena was murdered near Falls City, Neb., his ghost is in danger of being forgotten. More people remember that Hilary Swank won an Oscar for a film called Boys Don't Cry than they remember Brandon's name or where he was from.
Brandon — along with Lisa Lambert and Phillip Devine, two witnesses to his murder — was killed on New Year's Eve 1993. In Nebraska, the anniversary passed with little commemoration. There were a few feature articles reflecting on the murders in Brandon's hometown paper, the Lincoln Journal-Star , but little else.
Much has changed in the two decades since Brandon's death. While members of the Nebraska transgender community express concern that Brandon has been somewhat forgotten, they are also upbeat about the progress that was wrought, at least in part, from Brandon's death. LGBT activism in Nebraska, much like in the rest of the nation, has increased exponentially in the last 20 years. Parent groups, liberal churches, local government leaders, and transgender individuals of prominence are creating a culture of acceptance and support that would have been unimaginable outside of the very largest American cities in 1993.
Katrina Markel
Meredith Bacon, a political science professor at University of Nebraska, Omaha, argues, "The murder of Brandon Teena did to the transgender community a lot what the murder of Matthew Shepard did to the gay community. It created anger." She credits Brandon's death with the formation of The Transsexual Menace, an activist group that demonstrated in Falls City during the murder trials and continues today as an advocacy group for the transgender community.
Bacon isn't the only Nebraskan to believe that Brandon's death ignited outrage that, in some ways, translated into local LGBT activism. Transgender man Ryan Sallans grew up in Aurora — a town with around 4,400 people and about the same size as Falls City. In his autobiography, Second Son, Sallans explains, "After Brandon's murder, in 1993, people in the transgender community decided they didn't want to be in hiding anymore."
In 2005, Dr. Bacon decided that she didn't want to hide anymore either. After decades teaching political science, including a course on LGBT politics, the 67-year-old professor announced that she was transitioning to a life as a woman. She and her spouse Lynne stayed married, and the Bacons have enjoyed a level of acceptance that outsiders might be surprised to find in a "red state" like Nebraska.
"Most people were cool from the beginning," said Dr. Bacon. After transitioning, she was elected to a third term as president of the faculty senate at UNO, and the Bacons remain active at All Saints Episcopal church in Omaha.
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