Gayle Salamon - The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia

SEXUAL CULTURES

General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Titles in the series include:

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Samuel R. Delany

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malav and Martin F. Manalansan IV

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

Frances Ngron-Muntaner

Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

Marlon Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

J. Jack Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality

Dwight A. McBride

God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

Michael Cobb

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

Robert Reid-Pharr

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Lzaro Lima

Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Dana Luciano

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Jos Esteban Muoz

Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Darieck Scott

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

Karen Tongson

Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

Martin Joseph Ponce

Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

Michael Cobb

Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

Eng-Beng Lim

Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

Isaac West

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Amber Jamilla Musser

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Rachel C. Lee

Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

Jane Ward

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

Uri McMillan

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Prez

Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

Katherine Franke

Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

Malik Gaines

The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia

Gayle Salamon

For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org

Gayle Salamon

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2018 by New York University

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Salamon, Gayle, author.

Title: The life and death of Latisha King : a critical phenomenology of transphobia / Gayle Salamon.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2018] | Series: Sexual cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN | ISBN 9781479849215 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479892525 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: King, Larry, 19932008. | Transgender peopleUnited StatesCase studies. | MurderUnited StatesCase studies. | Gender identityUnited States. | Sexual orientationUnited States. | TransphobiaUnited States. | HomophobiaUnited States.

Classification: LCC HQ77.8.K56 S25 2018 | DDC 306.76/8dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034134

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For Latisha

Except perhaps in the case of some wretched souls who think only of winning or of being right, all action and all love are haunted by the hope for an account which will transform them into their truththe coming of the day it will finally be known just what the situation was.

Merleau-Ponty, Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence

On February 12, 2008, Larry King was shot by Brandon McInerney, a fellow student at E. O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California. Brandon shot Larry twice in the back of the head at point-blank range with a handgun, one of several kept in the family home. Larry died in the hospital the next day.

Assistant District Attorney Maeve Fox: [Brandons] father drove him to school the morning of [the shooting]?

Dr. Hoagland, expert witness for the defense: Yes.

Fox: And didnt he, was it was hard to get the gun with his father in the house and he was waiting for an opportunity to get the weapon?

Hoagland: Yes.

Fox: And they were hurrying and he almost forgot it and he had to go back into the house and get the gun?

Hoagland: Correct.

Fox: It was already loaded with six bullets?

Hoagland: Yes.

Fox: Did he recognize that the bullets were hollowpoints?

Hoagland: Well he just ran in quickly and grabbed it.

Fox: He almost forgot it?

Hoagland: Yes.

Fox: And had to run back in and get it?

Hoagland: Yes.

Fox: Because he was going to shoot Larry King?

Hoagland: Yes. That was his consuming thought.

Fox: When he got to school, Anton G. asked if he had brought it and the defendant lied and said he had not?

Hoagland: Yes.

Fox: And he said English had started in another classroom?

Hoagland: Correct.

Fox: During that time he took that gun he had wrapped in a towel and moved it into the front pocket of his sweatshirt?

Hoagland: Yes.

Fox: He said his action was unseen because he sat near the back and because the gun was the size of his hand and he had it wrapped in a towel?

Hoagland: Correct.

Fox: And these were all things he did to prevent anyone else from seeing the gun?

Hoagland: Yes.

Fox: Wrapped it in a towel put in his backpack so his father [could not see]. He did not just walk out waving a gun and say Im going to shoot someone. He wrapped it in a towel and secreted it. In fact he told you that he thought of shooting Larry King in classroom 22 but I could not bring myself to do it. I was never able to get to the point where I was.