In February 2008, 15-year-old Larry King, an openly gay boy, was shot in the back of the head twice by Brandon McInerney, his 14-year-old classmate. They were in the computer lab of their junior high school in Oxnard, California when Brandon stood up from his chair and pulled the gun on Larry. Larry died two days later in the hospital.
Now the documentary "Valentine Road", a brutal and soulful kiss from American filmmaker Marta Cunningham, pays the crime due respect (the title refers to the location of Larry's grave). Through an impressive range of interviews with the parents, teachers, students, police, attorneys, and jurors tethered to Larry's premature death, the lucid movie looks at the stories of both Larry and Brandon. From it comes a warning: all eyes shouldn't be on Putin's Russia or Nigeria alone, Americans needn't look that far for disconcerting homophobia. Amid the progress of assimilative issues like gay marriage, vicious heterosexism and racism can be seen in our country right now, including in our schools, where too many of our students die.
It's the sad irony of "Valentine Road" that Larry is the least knowable person of the movie. Our impression of the foster child who was chronically bullied at school is drawn from others have to say or from a handful of recurring photographs that pan in on Larry's pretty brown eyes. But he's also magically illustrated by artists Charles T. Jones, Yoriko Murakami, and Dan Ridgers. Honoring the contentious fact that Larry wore women's clothing to school for the last two weeks of his life, they draw him strutting down the hall in his choice earrings, high-heels, and red-bow. These playful sequences turn "Valentine Road" into the pages of a children's book with a wonderfully unheard of hero: a biracial, skinny, and effeminate teenage boy, who is also confident.
If only these weren't the very characteristics that made Larry so threatening to Brandon. The portrait "Valentine Road" paints of Brandon, a white boy raised by a nose-breaking, gun-shooting, alcoholic stepfather, is as informative as it is chilling. Your hate for the now 20 year old can only go so far. It's far easier to be repelled by his victim-blaming sympathizers, which include a callous group of jurors and Brandon's inappropriately sentimental defense attorneys. (One of them brandishes a "Save Brandon" tattoo on her wrist and weeps for him, as if he had survived two gun shot wounds to the head). It's these unsettling people that make "Valentine Road" such a staggering and critical movie. Their disregard of Larry shows you how the understanding of his murder is sanded with virulent opinion.
None are more virulent than those of Shirley Brown, "Valentine Road's" soul-shriveling impetus. Of the many tearjerking and jaw-dropping revelations Cunningham captures, Brown is the reason I'd caution LGBT parents in particular against watching the movie and the reason they still should. A middle-aged teacher from Larry's school that he actually confided in, Brown is awful. Her implacable evaluation of Larry's murder is as terrifying as the fact that the elephant and zebra heads hanging on her walls are real. Yes, Brandon, not Brown, brought a gun to school and killed Larry and no matter what you think of the sentence, he's now serving 21 years in prison. But culprits remain on the loose: the hate and self-hate of adults like Brown, which pose a more subterranean, pervasive, and reverberative threat to fragile young people. These kinds of people shouldn't be near kids, let alone work as teachers. And yet, it was another teacher---a teacher who gave Larry a shiny green dress to wear before he died, who ran to his spasming body as blood poured out of his head---that the school fired. She ended up working at a Starbucks. As for the dress, I'm not sure. It's probably hanging on Brown's wall.
