i guess. i wanted to describe killing, accounts of several murders and cases where game and have been killed by straight men or people who think they are straight or ostensibly straight or identifying as straight at the time. the reason i called it honor killings is because i want to focus on the criminals in this and i wanted to examine the psychology that goes behind all of this. after looking at it very carefully, i decided that was what was at play, the sense of honor young men feel and that was -- it was more the cause of this violence coming from within these guys much more than it was about the victim. number ofly large these cases, much larger than i realized at first. i chose cases from different environments all over the country, different geographical baltimore,fornia, there was one in michigan. south,explored down alabama, oklahoma, obviously. let's take a look at this problem within the united states, but in its various geographical incarnations. had thisan in oklahoma fantasy life of being in a gang and decided with a friend of his to kill a man and it turned out only after his arrest and during the trial that this incredibly complex past came out where he was gay himself and he had moviesed in pornographic in los angeles for a long time and after getting into drugs, he drifted back to oklahoma. there was this very troubled and disturbed individual behind this and they all did not turn out to be secretly gay. a lot of people want to believe that is true, but he was one who did and it was a shocking case. it was fascinating and upsetting to get to know him. correspondence back and forth for years, actually, and i am still in touch with him. it is hard to call it a friendship, but it is a sense of identity with him. just a broad-based concern about is -- who is, in many ways, a bad guy. he is really disturbed, a background of horrific abuse. prosecutors opted not to pursue the death penalty even though on the surface, it was a horrible killing, it could have easily been a death penalty case. not winided they would the case if they went after the death penalty conviction. after he drifted back to gang,ma, he created this this idea of a gang and he had spent time in prison already so he was on the slope downward anyway. became a little bit of a svengali figure, i guess. he attracted another young man into his orbit and with the promise of making him a member of the gang, they murdered someone. it, he they set about went back to his old -- he had been into prostitution and he went back to his old prostitution and they picked up an older guy interested in having sex and they took him out and ended up killing him. initiation, and it turned out that the other young man he was initiating, almost certainly straight, they had a very interesting conflict afterwards and darrell ended up murdering his accomplice. wasas -- the initial murder of an older gay man who had been entrapped and the next one was a falling out between these two members.gang just ame is so horrible, savage and torturous beating of , it was unforgivable. no question about that. and yet, that should not prevent us from trying to understand. in every other case, there is this sense of manhood and behavior and this rigid belief that you must be this way, he must behave this way and if it is challenged some way and you have no control over yourself, violence can result. that is not to blame the victim, but i am looking at the psychology of the perpetrators and i think it is important to do that. these are evil, people. let's leave it at that. to me, that is a simplistic way out of it. i want to look at them as real people and we will see, how did it come about? in almost every case, every case i know on death row, these people are people who are as kids.abused that makes me sound like a bleeding heart. it is not true at all. serve toases, they do die, probably, but i don't think that we as a people have the right to do that. as is the case with almost every murderer, you find horrible abuse in the background and that was the case here. he discovered his father's body after suicide. he was sexually abused as a kid. , it endsy of horrors up being comical. hisis case, i think after dissent into pornography and prostitution, even though he thought he was doing all the cases are almost all the same. the close and accents change. fundamentally it is this human interaction between men who desire men, and men who have twisted senseming of their own masculinity. same.pens everywhere the here there will be a religious obsession thrown in. here there will be racism. criminality ofel another kind. sadly is a very universal. i don't know really what brought me to this subject. i'd always written fiction. i wasn't a really engaged journalists. i'm not the most political guy in the world. was this taxation on terms like that. like as a coulter we are focused on these very brief labels. we think of society in terms of labels like hate crimes or gay panic. any number of other ones. and itbecome limiting makes this kabuki out of public discourse where all i have to do is make the gesture of saying this is a hate crime, end of discussion, or this is a case of gay panic, end of discussion. i think you can question those reactionary. i can get ition -- myself and i fall down on the liberal side of things but we can examine our political , gaynct critically and say panic is not a sufficient description of these crimes, even hate crimes is not a sufficient description. there is more than hate going on. of the titleorigin and the reason i decided not to call it gave panic stories or hate crimes and call it something as disturbing or offputting as honor killings, with this ambiguity. what you do through honor is considered good. in this case it is not. tour of key west with david sloan. david: the title of my book is quit your job and moved to key west. the title is self-explanatory. when i came down here i left the corporate world. i used to

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