On September 26, 1998, police in Rogers, Arkansas, discovered the body of Jesse Dirkhising, a thirteen-year-old boy who had been tied up, raped, and murdered, in the apartment of two homosexual men, Joshua Brown and Davis Carpenter, who are now awaiting trial for the crime.

The boy's murder, which received virtually no national media coverage, occurred approximately one month prior to the brutal murder, in Wyoming, of Matthew Shepard, a young homosexual man, at the hands of three parolees who thought he was making a pass at them. That crime received massive attention, and much criticism was leveled at the religious right, who were said to bear moral responsibility for the crime. Denver Post editorialist Sue O'Brien explained the disparate coverage thus: "Jesse Dirkhising... wasn't being punished because he was young, or male, or straight or gay. He was simply there." Indeed.

One of Shepard's killers, Aaron McKinney, said that a combination of "gay panic" syndrome and the drug methamphetamine made him kill Shepard, and that he was thus not responsible. But as prosecutor Cal Rerucha pointed out, gay panic apparently had no role in the numerous other violent offenses against heterosexuals perpetrated by him and his cohorts.

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