An Update on John Lotter and Thomas Nissen
This week, we’ll take a little sabbatical from Forensic Files to observe the 25th anniversary of Brandon Teena’s murder — a true-crime case little known outside of Nebraska until Hollywood came knocking.
Brandon died at the hands of two lowlifes named John Lotter and Marvin “Thomas” Nissen just before New Year’s Day of 1994.
Dissolute youths. The underachieving trio met while they were couch-surfing and partying in the town of Falls City and other spots in Richardson County.
Lotter and Nissen, both 22, were ex-convicts with insurmountable pasts. As writer John Gregory Dunne described them in The New Yorker:
“Their sociopathic curricula vitae were so similar as to be almost interchangeable. Psychiatric instability, tumultuous family lives, absentee parents, trigger tempers, suicidal tendencies, foster homes, a fascination with lethal objects, juvenile detention, sexual promiscuity, substance abuse, crime (theft and attempted burglary for Lotter, arson for Nissen), prison.”
Although Brandon was born to a teenaged widowed mother, he grew up in a relatively stable home.
Name switch. His main problem was having a gender identity crisis in an era when people didn’t talk about that kind of thing openly. He was born a girl but cut his hair short and styled himself as a boy.
While friends would later describe him as sweet, clean cut, and respectable, Brandon did acquire some legal troubles of his own. He used stolen checks and credit cards to pay for flowers and stuffed animals for the women he dated; he was a romantic.
At traffic stops, he tried to skirt the law by giving the pseudonym “Charles Brayman” to police.
Turned to savages. When Lotter and Nissen found out that their recently acquired drinking buddy — who was dating Lotter’s former flame Lana Tisdel — was actually a woman whose real name was Teena Brandon, they became enraged.
They beat up and raped Brandon one night in December 1993.
After Brandon, 21, filed sexual assault charges, Lotter and Nissen decided to kill him in a case that became the subject of the 1998 documentary The Brandon Teena Story and the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry starring Hilary Swank.
Dramatization on big screen. The latter film, a surprise hit, helped raise awareness of the intolerance faced by people in the LGBT community.
Lotter and Nissen, portrayed by actors Peter Sarsgaard and Brendan Sexton III, were already in prison for murder by the time the movies came out.
In addition to stabbing and shooting Brandon, whom they found hiding beneath a blanket in a farmhouse in Humboldt, the duo murdered witnesses Lisa Lambert, 24, and Phillip Devine, 22.
The killers spared the life of Lambert’s baby son, Tanner. They deposited him in his crib before they fled.
Nissen later admitted that their original plan was to dismember Brandon, but they didn’t have a chance to go through with it, according to court papers.
Ice going, guys. The murderers attempted some precautions. They took a circuitous trip back to Falls City, so no one would see them returning from Humboldt’s direction.
Lotter and Nissen disposed of the murder weapons, a stolen .380-caliber handgun and a knife with “Lotter” written on its case, by throwing them into the Nemaha River. But the water was frozen, and police found the items the next day.
So where are Lotter and Nissen today?
Lotter, whose criminal record traces back to a 1987 theft and escape conviction at age 16, occupies a cell on death row in the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution.
He has kept busy with appeals, all rejected, over the years and recently came up with a new defense tack — that the state can’t execute him because he’s intellectually disabled.
Point person. As a boy, Lotter scored 76 on a school IQ test, but he got only 67 on the one he took while incarcerated.
The latter would land him below Nebraska’s cutoff of 70 points for death chamber eligibility.
But it’s hard to imagine that the justice system would give more credence to an intelligence test taken in prison than one given during childhood — when the taker had no reason to deliberately appear compromised.
Judges unsympathetic. Plus, it’s possible that Lotter is just bad at taking written tests. He’s no Neil deGrasse Tyson, but he speaks distinctly, enunciating “evidentiary hearing” perfectly well, for example.
Whatever the case, in 2018, Nebraska Supreme Court, turned down Lotter’s appeal. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take Lotter’s death penalty appeal.
His ex-pal Thomas Nissen is serving his sentence of life without parole plus 24 years at Lincoln Correctional Center.
Interestingly, although Nissen reportedly has an IQ score in the 80s, Dunne, who corresponded with him in prison, said that Nissen read and understood books written by Dunne’s wife, the literary journalist Joan Didion.
New development. In 2007, Nissen made a surprise announcement that he, and not Lotter, actually fired the bullets that killed Brandon Teena, Phillip Devine, and Lisa Lambert.
Lotter demanded a new trial on that basis, but he never got one. Regardless of who pulled the trigger, Lotter helped plan the murders, which makes him legally accountable just the same.
Brandon’s mother, JoAnn, won $80,000 in a civil suit against the county for failing to arrest Lotter and Nissen immediately after the rape charges were filed.
No visible means of support. But a court later reduced Richardson County’s liability. JoAnn received only $17,000, according to an account from writer Charles Laurence that ran in the (Ottawa) Citizen’s Weekly on April 2, 2000.
The killers, who reportedly had a total of $5 between them at the time of their arrests, would have to pay the balance, the court decided.
It’s unclear whether Lotter and Nissen were ever employed or what they did otherwise to obtain beer and gas money before their arrests for murder.
Their reduced circumstances, however, haven’t stopped the pair from snagging love interests while behind bars.
Not in the social register. Nissen became engaged to a pen pal from Chicago in 2006, according to the Omaha World Herald.
Lotter applied for a license to marry Jeanne Bissonnette, 50, of Lakewood, Washington, in 2013, according to the Omaha World Herald.
The newspaper story mentioned that Nebraska state prisons don’t keep records of inmate weddings, so there’s no way to find out whether the men followed through and actually got married.
But Lotter and Nissan don’t have a whole lot at stake in that regard. Nebraska isn’t one of the six states that allow conjugal visits.
You can watch the documentary about the case on YouTube.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
P.S. Read an update on Lana Tisdel and her mother.
Thanks, Rebecca: What an appalling case! The notion that retardedness – being intellectually below average – equates to failure to know the difference between right and wrong, seems to me pretty dubious. Retardedness is not necessarily illness such that the perp could not reasonably discern right from wrong. You point to another problem: the vested interest in poor performance in IQ testing post-conviction. Of itself, I’d say that IQ test result is much too crude a basis to determine criminal culpability (and is not used here in UK). Being ‘slow,’ ‘stupid’ or whatever is in principle different from moral indifference. Put another way, plenty of ‘bright’ perps, with above average IQs (this site’s full of homicidal drs…), also apparently exhibit moral indifference/failure – so is IQ, of itself, relevant to culpability?
I oppose the death penalty – but if these two DO know right from wrong they surely are indeed fitting candidates…
I s’pose this was, or would now, be termed a hate-crime: a category I think is nonsense. Crime is crime regardless of any so-called prejudice involved. It’s an example of the distortion created by PC…
Good point — low intelligence is not an excuse for cruel behavior. I read somewhere that John Lotter is on the intellectual level of an 8-year-old, which is old enough to know right from wrong.
R: Fourteen states have no minimum age at which children can be prosecuted as adults, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. In some cases children younger than 10 have been prosecuted as adults. Even if we accept that Lotter’s to all intents and purposes an 8-y-o (I don’t, necessarily), he is clearly very dangerous and likely needs incarceration for life. Particular care in this case would need to be made that he had capacity to know his actions were wrong before imposing death, and if in any doubt, that would indicate life without parole (as necessarily there’s no potential for rehabilitation).
It’s difficulties such as these considerations that inform my opposition of the death penalty. It’s too possible to apply it unequally and therefore unfairly – assuming it COULD be justified.
A final thought: I’d be interested to know why they ‘saved ‘ the baby. Was it because they thought it the right thing to do…?
The baby was around 8 months old, so it couldn’t incriminate them.
Thanks. That, then, reflects a capacity to reason, to ‘scheme’ – and to that degree militates against the notion that they should not be considered culpable. Fry ’em!
You oppose the death sentence? These men killed 3 people. For what? One was trying to be happy in his own body and the other two supported him. They deserve the death sentence, regardless.
I think it’s possible to deserve the death penalty without it being right to administer it… but this is a debate for another time. I certainly agree that they’re appalling.
Lots of people oppose the death penalty both in moral and practical terms. Killing others in retribution might make you personally feel good, but I see it as the state undermining the sanctity of human life. Undermining that premise makes it hard to take the moral highground.
Dave: That’s certainly one consideration – that administering death drags us down to the perps’ level (albeit that the administration is perhaps more civilised than theirs was…) If the US must have it I favour it being done with brutal candour (not brutality): hanging, shooting, and the chair are all quick and painless when done competently and look like what they are: capital punishment. The quasi-medical ‘needle’ is a dishonest compromise to render death more palatable to the public (and is not necessarily quick and painless – the practical justification.) Nor as a pharmaceutical manufacturer would I want my products, used to heal and save, used to kill, so I agree with refusal to supply.
That whole town is sick. The sheriff acted as if she deserved it agh. If that town was burned to the ground it would be an improvment. Talk about back water to down trash. Them low life murders will have to answer to god and he awaits.
I have to agree. The sheriff’s lines when interviewing Brandon after the rape(s) are appalling. Is everybody’s IQ low in that town?
He surely does…
A hate crime is “a crime… that is motivated by prejudice on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, or other grounds.”
So, all hate crime is crime, but not all crime is a hate crime.
It is a hate crime. Let them burn.
Stranger than fiction.
“Nebraska isn’t one of the six states that allow conjugal visits.”
The ladies obviously had intellectual rather than carnal gratification in mind when they married them.
“Intellectual” is a bit kind: more probably prisoner/murderer fetishism (hybristophilia – a paraphilia (ie, sexual arousal to atypical objects, situations, fantasies, behaviours, or individuals) in which sexual arousal/facilitation/attainment of orgasm are responsive to/contingent upon being with a partner known to have committed an outrage such as rape or murder.) You infer this from the ‘groupies’ around the likes of Richard Ramirez, whose attractiveness to women persisted after his appalling crimes were known, and quite a few other ‘sickos’ who attract women post-conviction. We all wonder what on earth they’re doing – the answer being fetishising the murderous/rapist/criminal object.
That these women (usually) would themselves likely be victims of the person if free eludes them…
When a inmate is sentenced he has no rights. Their rights are completely taken away. So I don’t get why states allows a inmate to marry. It allows the individuals that commit violent crimes to be glamorized, to feel gratitude for the crimes they committed. Marriage while incarcerated should be abolished and prohibited.
I disagree: unless s/he’s a whole-lifer or capital case, so may be released, having ‘something to live for’ is a positive influence in inmates’ lives, giving the incentive to behave and receive earlier parole, and as being positive for their mental health in a psychologically damaging environment. It’s absolutely in the public/taxpayers’/prison’s/other prisoners’ interests to foster as ‘functioning’ an inmate as possible, which is why much effort is made to enable inmates to communicate with families. Ditto, to a lesser extent to whole-lifers. This overrides punitive consideration.
Intellectual? An interesting thought with someone who has an IQ of 67? Guessing your wife is with you for carnal gratification… definitely not intellectually based upon your “intelligent statement.”
It was clearly sarcasm. Rather, it was clear to *most* of us.
FYI… the pic of the woman is not Brandon before he transitioned. It’s one of the women he dated – source the original Village voice article.
Thank you for the heads-up — I’ll do some more research on the pic! (It’s down for now.)
Great post. I enjoyed the update, especially knowing that these two low lives are still behind bars. One correction: Dominick Dunne is Joan Didian’s brother-in-law, not husband. Also, Joan Didian is still alive, but sadly Dominick Dunne passed away in 2005.
Thanks much for the correction on Joan Didion — I have edited accordingly! (Her husband was John Gregory Dunne and like, Dominick Dunne, he left us too soon, unfortunately.)
WHERE ARE THE VICTIMS’ APPEALS TO THEIR HORRIFIC DEATHS?? WHERE ARE THEIR SECOND CHANCES AT LIFE???
These two hideous scumbags killed because of their lack of self esteem and self worth and most importantly they TOTALLY COMPREHENDED their PREMEDITATED MURDERS! Very tired of hearing this low IQ score crap!! Quit wasting tax payers’ money on these disgusting bags of dung. They are undeniably, extremely guilty. WAY, WAY , WAY BEYOND REHABILITATION!! This was not their first offense and I am positive it would not have been their last.
OFF WITH THEIR EVIL HEADS!! BE GONE!
Meg:
Rehabilitation’s not in issue for these two, just permanent removal from society.
One good argument against capital punishment is it’s very expensive because of the years of costly litigation (typically over $1m by execution day) – years and cost that are probably justified to ensure thorough fairness when life is at stake (defendants have been exonerated years after death row occupancy…) It’s absurd to take typically 15 years and $1m+ to execute the offender rather than award life without parole: crazy for taxpayers and maddening for victims’ loved ones experiencing a very protracted deferral of sentence. Life without parole is done with, while enabling opportunity to reverse a terrible wrong, regardless of the morality of the death penalty.
By the reasoning that the death penalty is “too expensive” because of litigation, than all prisoners are too expensive because they all have the right to appeal, not just death row inmates.
Not so. 10 years ago, in Ca, it cost c $4.2 m each to exhaust appeals of DP offenders, over an average 20 years – as appeals are multi-layered for capital offenders but less so for lifers. Indeed, CA estimated then that is cost 10 times more than lifers’ cost. CA is unusual in taking quite so long – Tx takes c 14 – and even when appeals are exhausted they haven’t executed anyone for years, so there it’s pointless. Also, DP trials are more expensive for several reasons: they often require extra lawyers; there are strict experience requirements for attorneys, leading to lengthy appellate waits while capable counsel is sought for the accused; security costs are higher.
After sentencing, prices continue to rise. It costs more to house death row inmates, who are held in segregated sections, in individual cells, with guards delivering everything from daily meals to loo paper. In Ca 10 years ago, it cost an extra $90,000 per inmate to imprison someone sentenced to death.
Cost is now certainly an issue in DP debate – as it should be. It’s shameful, in my view, to spend such a huge amount of money to keep people imprisoned – more expensively – only for the purpose of killing them, when there are people living in poverty on the streets… Even if it only cost twice as much as for lifers, that would be a good reason on the abolishment side.
Taxpayers in DP states need to ask themselves if there could be a WORSE way of spending their money than this!
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Rest in peace, Brandon.
I’ve seen john lotter’s interviews and there is no way he doesn’t know right from wrong. Not to mention, Brandon’s murder was in retaliation for his reporting the rape. They told him they would “silence him permanently” if he reported it. 100% They knew it was wrong – the murder was a PUNISHMENT — & it was completely premeditated.
However, i do think it’s silly that one is on death row and the other has life. Nissen has admitted to pulling the trigger at various points and has changed his story to saying lotter did…when it has suited him to do so…ie to get a plea deal and avoid the death penalty. Lotter has admitted to stabbing Brandon because he thought he wasn’t dead (and even if he didn’t pull the trigger it’s not like he helped with the murders because Nissen was forcing him)…so this is all moot. But I do think it’s a waste of time and resources to cut a plea deal with one to get a death penalty for the other…because Lotter would obviously want to appeal on that basis.
Full disclosure I don’t believe in the death penalty either. The only way I would is if it’s proven to be a deterrent …but I’m not sure it has.
Great piece. Rest in peace, Brandon, Lisa, and Philip. If you could only see what the world is like now, and how brandon specifically would have had a name and support for what he was going through – transgender.
Lotter, you claim to be innocent? Your last name Lotter was on the knife. You stole the gun. Nissen drove your car — you was passenger to hwy 105 Humboldt, Ne. Lisa Lambert’s house. Nissen, Lotter, both broke in. No matter who pulled the trigger? No matter who stabbed? You both was there so you both participated in it. Sounds a lot like premeditated to me. Nissen signed statements & testifies against you, Lotter. That’s why he’s doing life & not death row. I think both you guys should be sitting on death row myself.
What about that so called sheriff. I can’t believe he wasn’t tried and convicted also. Had he done his job they would have been in jail waiting to be bailed out. Instead they were on the street and Brandon was the bad person. They should have run that man out of town. How sad that there are so many shallow minded people.
Janice, I couldn’t agree with you more. Listening to that sheriff interview Brandon makes me so angry. He’s too ignorant to be ashamed of his actions (or inaction) and I don’t think he was held accountable.
I thought he was absolutely vile.
The way he spoke to Brandon and the terminology he used was disgraceful.
Truth be told he just wanted to humiliate Brandon. Poor kid.
God rest their souls. Teena is a female, so refer to her as she. Thanks.
TB: God rest their souls indeed. While I’m mindful that biological sex is fixed and significant (in the face of PC dross denying), I presume BT would wish to be referred to as male, and it seems churlish not to do so. S/he was indeed female, and no fiddling with genitalia nor pharmacological therapy could change that. I’m happy to refer to people as they wish – so long as I’m not asked to deny biological sex. Gender is a social construct, hence fluid; sex is an empirical fact, hence fixed It’s a shame there’s rampant confusion about this (not by you, of course).
Brandon** is a male.
No: biological female = female. Biological sex is assigned at birth. Gender identity is the gender a person ‘identifies’ with or feels themselves to be, and is their own or a social construction. Identity politics or whatever cannot alter scientific fact. There is male and female sex – period.
That’s what Lotter and Nissen believed as well.
I agree with Jude. Brandon was saving money for gender reassignment surgery before he was slaughtered, it seems like the least we could do is refer to him as he wanted to be.
Well as Jude, whom you aver agreement with, asserts Brandon was male, and you imply he WASN’T male ’til the coming surgery (why mention it otherwise?), you contradict yourself.
I didn’t imply that Brandon wasn’t a male at all because that’s not what I think or wrote. Brandon identified as male and wanted surgery for whatever reason – maybe even so that more ignorant people would see him as a male. You inferred that I don’t think Brandon was a male because that’s your stance. Just pointed out that you agree with Lotter and Nissen. Cheers.
No, I inferred nothing. Logic: you say you agree with Jude; Jude says Brandon is male; ergo you say Brandon is male. But you then added that Brandon was saving for surgery. Having already asserted by dint of logic that he was male, you effectively contradicted that by adding that he was, in effect, ‘becoming male’ in due course (therefore not yet).
Whatever you meant, or meant to state, this is actual meaning of your words. Having agreed that ‘Brandon is male’ your subsequent assertion either had to contradict that or was otiose. It can’t logically be both. As you presented it, she was becoming, not was, to be achieved only per operation. But Jude was stating she was male prior to operation… in which case you DIDN’T agree!
Sorry if this seems pedantic, but care over words is important on a matter such as this, which is both controversial (biology v social construct / sex v gender) and generates much nonsense.
Give it a rest Marcus. I’m going to practice social distancing because it seems that you might have an infected heart.
Nothing I stated ‘agrees’ with Lotter and Nissen (are you privy to their mindset, motivation, opinion, and argument – as if they had a brain cell between them?) Your perspective illustrates why intelligent discussion of this issue can’t be had with some people, who instead of addressing the argument criticise the person whose argument they don’t like or don’t understand. An ‘infected heart’ doesn’t imply an ‘infected mind’ or defective argument. And argument from emotion isn’t argument…
I’ll consider myself ‘non-platformed’ for ‘unacceptable opinion’ by you…
9/3/20
I AM PRESENTLY
BEING TARGETED,FOR BEING A TRANS MAN!
JUST TO NAME A FEW OF THE ATTACKS FROM OTHERS UPON ME,
I HAVE BEEN SHOT AT,
STALKED,
FOLLOWED AROUND CONSTANTLY,
TERRORIZED,
VERBALLY/
PHYSICALLY
THREATENED,
SUFFERED
ATTACK DOG PUT UPON ME,
I HAVE BEEN POISONED, RAN OVER BY A LARGE TRUCK, WHICH I SUFFERED A BROKEN NECK, TRAUMATIC
BRAIN INJURY,AS WELL AS OTHER INJURIES! I’VE RELOCATE, 3
DIFFERENT TIMES, & THE ATTACKS KEEP COMMING! I WAS TOLD,
BY AT LEAST
6 OTHERS, THAT
THERE IS A CONTRACT OUT ON MY LIFE!
“CONCERNED
CITIZENS!”
NEED RELIABLE HELP! PRESENTLY. I
AM LOOKING FOR CLEAN, SAFE,
AFFORDABLE,
PERMANENT
HOUSING! I CAN’T TRUST THE LAW ENFORECEMENT COMMUNITY/
THE COPS!!
THEY TRIED TO KILL ME
ON MORE THAN SEVERAL
OCCASIONS,
IN MY HOME TOWN! BEING
HIT BY THAT
LARGE TRUCK,
RETIRED ME
FROM THE
WORK FORCE!
I AM A FORMER PUBLIC SAFETY OFFICER, WHO
TRANSITIONED ON THE JOB!
THAT MADE A
LOT OF ENEMIES FOR ME! I AM UNDER CONSTANT
SURVEILIANCE, WHAT SEEMS TO BE
AT ALL TIMES!
OTHER THAN PRAYER,ARE
THERE ANY USEFUL SUGGESTIONSOUT THERE,PLEASE?
Thank you, Marcus. You are correct in that the need for meaningful conversation is now, more than ever, necessary but unable to happen. This was apparently with all of the censorship of social media on only one side of the conversation. It would be nice if people would voice their opinions, using some facts and logic as to how that opinion was reached, then listen to the opposition and the facts and logic from that side. That quid pro quo is what is truly missing in every aspect of our lives right now. Who knows? Maybe someone’s mind could be enlightened if they opened it instead of walking away.
It costs you nothing to be respectful of something you claim to be imagined anyway. Refer to people as they prefer, not as you insist they be. Being kind isn’t “PC,” it’s simply decent.
How can one be ‘respectful’ of what is ‘claimed [by one] to be imagined’?
Please attend to what I stated above: ” I’m happy to refer to people as they wish – so long as I’m not asked to deny biological sex.”
This digressive exchange certainly illustrates that some need to consider the clarity of their writing… and the sex/gender topic is precisely one that both illustrates the need for precision and those it eludes…
that’s literally transphobic. brandon is a he. it does not matter what his agab (assigned gender at birth) is, he identified as a man and used he/him pronouns and you need to respect that.
rosetta: I’d be happy to refer to Brandon as ‘he’ (where he alive) if that’s what he preferred (and as I said I would do right at the start of this topic as a kindness/avoiding offence), but that doesn’t make him male, nor do I believe he’s male, nor is he male. And if that’s ‘transphobic’, so what?
I’m also happy to call Brandon whatever his preference was, too. I’m pro trans-rights. It just gets a little confusing sometimes because you see a picture of him as a little girl and then as a teenage boy.
The problem lies in *demand* of the use of the likes of pronouns by or for those who’ve had a ‘sex change’, and the further stance that this is authentic change of sex (rather than gender). I don’t consider it possible to change sex, and those who do must acknowledge that the matter is at least controversial.
But I don’t wish to be needlessly ‘offensive’ in not acknowledging assumed gender and am content to do so.
There are those who shrilly demand conformity as though this is a settled matter. It isn’t. And while argument’s good, those incapable of engaging with argument resort to assertion and moral coercion: ‘If you disagree with me you’re mean/nasty/inhumane…’ That’s dross.
I think this probably places me somewhat at odds with trans rights – but such disagreement makes the world a more interesting and stimulating, if less superficially harmonious, place (though human nature might demand that disagreement’s in our genes and we’d simply find other issues over which to disagree for those that cease to be per consensus…) Nor do I think the concept of hate crime is coherent, so that probably places me at some distance from ‘minority rights’.
I may wish to be known as female, and take the female form (more or less convincingly), but I remain in essence (ie, biologically) male and cannot change that (if I may use this word) ‘ontologically’. This implies nothing about how people should treat me, which I hope is decently and kindly, while I should be reasonable enough to accept that people cannot be *obliged* to accept and treat me as a woman in the contexts which impinge on their reasonable rights, such as to enjoy private space from males in using the lavatory or bathing (not that by any means all or even most women would be concerned, but some are, thus the clash of competing ‘rights’). Apart from these ‘pinch points’ my gender change doesn’t need to have much practical issue.
I agree Marc, but this is one of those cases where the 95% won’t let facts et in the way of “feelings” so to speak.
Feelings do not make a round planet flat or anything essentially untrue, ie: a lie, true, but it won’t stop them blurring the line; and I do feel for the victim. Victims, and there are plenty.
the fact she/he was abused sexually as a child has a lot to do with this and many other cases. I have seen it occur before. Pattern recognition and timing is the key to everything.
Normal sexual relations are damaged by the selfish misanthrope pedophiles, and consequently the victims biological sexual identity becomes affiliated with unpleasant experience and the powerlessness of their actual sexual biology as children which becomes dangerously inverted. now people can “say” or “feel” it was not a dangerous inversion of sexual identity but the consequences of any choice determine its nature, and she/he had a lot problems because of it including being murdered by a couple of monsters.
Its a disgrace on many levels. the poor kid didn’t seem to have a chance and I do not think tainting the truth with more feelings is going to help things. It just gets murkier and murkier until its a free for all like those two Australian pedophiles that were pimping out a 6 year old boy and seemed to think there was nothing wrong with it. I got news for em.
Let grown adults be free to do as they see fit within the constrains of mutual consent, but for the love of all that is firm enough to be solid ground don’t make an untrue true because someone feels like it; already confused identities won’t get any benefit from even more distortion of what actually is, and many trans people are quite happy as just that once its obvious its not a flash in the pan or knee jerk reaction to trauma, and no balanced soul should have to much to do with what is not any their business if no one is unhappy about the arrangement unless someone actually is or has been asked. I never heard Christ go around pointing fingers at people, did any of you?
The time to care for Brandon was while he/she was still breathing, and in this it seems there just wasn’t enough healthily adjusted people what ever their sexual proclivities.
I’ve watched the entire world’s moral compass go south and its by design. A war on drugs but they just never disappear and no one see a flaw in that? and its from within the power structure (ie: the 2 boys in Arkansas murdered then put on the train tracks. etc.
What you tolerate, you had better be prepared to suffer. Crooks are never going to say ‘Yes,We blew them up for the gold reserve in 1 & 2 and did a little dance. They’ll make some statement to make you not scrutinize what happened like “don’t suffer any crazy conspiracy theories” when their explanation is absolutely bonkers nuts. Once the lie has a toe in the door, your in for a huge amount of trouble and it will just get worse the more hogwash you entertain.
The world needs a hero, but everyone is waiting for some guy to come out of the sky and fix what is your responsibility and where it is highly likely the corrupt power structure invented or tainted that scenario just enough to make it suit their global aspirations.
Remove the big lies and pressures on the human condition, as the modern scenario is fiscal slavery to the Central banks and their agencies and all the rest, not already a mortal or moral anathema, will fall into place. But boy oh boy you guys have been sold a pup, that is really a vicious carnivore from the day the Central banks in the Temple killed nailed the Table tipper.
Be true to your heart and true to the truth, and it will never fail you if you have the courage.
Don’t you all find it strange, how the punitive legal franchise inherited from England that bullies and mishandles us all and stands beside the same Cabals Central banking scam is still called the “Crown Temple Franchise” and how it was forever passed through the ages Intact?
You may say what does this have to do with Brandon Teena, but isn’t that name just another reversal of the truth her being born as Tina Brandon and isn’t the entire world backwards by design, and by a minute fraction of the population enslaving us all? There’s no points for dumb. The freedom loving nations :/ I don’t see any real freedom anywhere. Evil men have made everyone secondary to mathematical artifice that is a compound interest scam and that aint freedom, that’s slavery worse than any fuedal system before the Magna Carta and they’ve made it so Lawyers swear an oath not to tell you the truth of of a totally corrupt system, so you in fact pay for their freedom and theft of an entire planet, and poor old Brandon is just another symptom of the intentional pressure they’ve put on everyone from a once proud and basically Christian Democracy that if it got its crap in order could drill em a new one (a Christian democracy which incidentally banned compound interest usury on pains of death so of course they are going to try and distort the truth of that scenario) and was murdered in 63 and most likely by those you helped but think they own you. How much bad luck are you going to have until you realize it aint luck at all?
Cru: There’s certainly a perception, which I share, that the liberal left is trying to impose their ideology of inversion, where black equals white, etc; a phenomenon which has infected the West.
Rather than rant, I’ll simply state that I’m perfectly content to use whatever pronoun a person would prefer, as the likely kind thing to do; and Brandon would seemingly have wished to be known as he. What I would object to, per the above observation, is demand/enforcement/coercion of something that I should be free to offer as a kindness because it is, in fact, counter-factual for the reason you state. I may wish my old nag were a racehorse, and call him a racehorse, but calling him one no more makes him one than does calling a biological female a male or darkness light. Nor does surgery or chemicals change one’s essence. The form may change; the substance doesn’t.
Sensible, sane people should refuse to collude with the ideological demand for effective linguistic abuse for the purpose of shaping the world in the form that others would have it.
I will choose, I will determine, how I express myself as I understand it relates to the world and its people. We all should. But there’s a movement attempting to intimidate us into annexing language, and therefore thought, to its ideology (anticipated by Orwell in 1984). It may look liberal, but is in fact deeply intolerant of naysayers because its origin is in the Left, which lectures, harries, then bullies us on how and what to think (it has to, as sensible people couldn’t agree with its nonsense). It should be mocked and rejected as deeply dangerous. And although I write as a Brit, ironically (as it has much traction in liberal America) it’s deeply un-American, not least because it’s anti-democratic. It’s not interested in what the average American thinks, because it patronisingly regards him/her as too stupid: a person who NEEDS to be told what to think.
Don’t let it! It’s corrosive dross.
Please explain to me your interpretation of hermaphroditism and other conditions where the child is of ambiguous “male/female” categorization.
Right on! Teena was an awesome girl! Too bad, Lotter got more help from the well meaning morons trying to get him off the death row than Teena got from highly paid professionals whose job it was to help her.
brandon’s agab may be female but his gender identity was male. his pronouns are he/him and you need to respect that, as well as his name.
Teena Brandon was biologically female and she responded emotionally like a woman. I know Teena better than you do. After the Christmas night one of Lisa Lambert’s friends called her Brandon. She corrected him and told him that she was Teena. This was the last person who saw the three people alive. You have no idea that this happened, not why Teena said that.
r: I need do nothing of the sort – thankfully ‘cos I live in a democracy which allows (just!) me to determine this issue for myself rather than having ‘the correct’ view imposed on me by the likes of the pc brigade. I take it you like to think for yourself, too…?
Brandon was a male so stfu please.
You are too ready to believe bad reporting and poor journalism. Everyone exploited Teena Brandon’s murder in the most disgusting way possible. Aphrodite Jones’ account is a stripped and streamlined screenplay version to a point that court testimony shows a totally different version of the event. Teena Brandon was a girl, she was not saving money for sex reassignment surgery, she had none. She had the use of Lisa Lambert’s car. She wanted to leave Humboldt since Dec 28 and cops were okay with it. Teena and Phil were trapped in Humboldt by poverty and homelessness. Teena was displacing other people staying with Lambert. Everyone wanted her to move and she had no place to go, also, for many reasons, she was not the easiest person to get along with. A lot of street, lot of bluster and anger. Real Teena was an awesome individual who was tarred and feathered in the Falls City. Boys Don’t Cry is a fantasy has nothing in common with real events. John Lotter shot and murdered the three people, how can you people be so gullible as to accept the word of a convicted felon who contradicted himself under oath? Have you read any forensics work on the crime scene? Dunne is a great writer, but his article about Teena Brandon sucks. It is a temper tantrum because he could not find a screen play in Teena Brandon’s tragedy. Not just that, he based his writing on certain assumptions, did not follow through with research and fact checking, missing certain key events revealed in court testimony and police reports. Teena Brandon both, had flaws, and was severely emotionally traumatized, that everyone wrongly chucked to child sexual abuse, she needed a lot of love, that the girls she chased after were not a able to give her. Also, certain things she was closer with Nissen that she was with Tisdel. Kinda goes against the public myth, I know. Also, the only person who seems to have gotten through to Teena Brandon emotionally was Michelle Lotter, as a stronger gay woman, who had the position in the wolf pack that Teena wished she had.
This is the problem with identity politics. Where tragedy applies there are parties wishing to exploit it for their own ends – whether it be LBGT groups, so-called Christian ‘conversion’ groups, race agitators, white supremacists, etc. Brandon’s ‘identity’ was irrelevant: all we need to know is some vicious thugs murdered him. The ‘why’ matters far less than the ‘that.’ Whether someone’s murdered ‘cos they’re ‘trans’ or the ‘wrong’ colour the end result’s exactly the same regardless of the expressed or putative reason for the crime – death and suffering. The concept of ‘hate crime’ makes no sense whatsoever – it’s just crime; and to suggest that some crimes are worse because of the (usually supposed) motive is as unintelligent as it is offensive to those suffering grief in consequence of supposed ‘lesser’ murders.
I would give identity politics more credence had Teena not been a psychiatric patient with severe symptoms other than gender dysphoria. Teena suffered from OCD, Alcohol Abuse, an eating disorder. Shrink that gave her the gender transition checklist did her no favors. He failed to treat her underlying problems (and then a reasonably stabilized person could make a determination what they want). Teena’s real problem was that she witnessed her mother and sister getting hit at around 3 to 5 years of age, and spend the rest of her life running from domestic violence and mysogeny. They could have taught her to handle domestic violence while she was at the psychiatric hospital, but the professionals were sub standard. That is why you see no academic papers about how they treated and attempted to heal Teena. Because Teena was traumatized, she invited domestic abuse against her in the Falls City. The best way to see Teena’s tragedy is as the crime of domestic violence and of violence against women committed against a psychiatric patient who could not deal with what was happening to her the way an average woman her age would. In addition, it wasn’t sex abuse trauma that aggravated her condition. Most likely, Teena re-traumatized herself. Her gay cousins did her no favors. To begin, certain segments of the gay male culture are mysogenist in themselves, and someone like Teena did not belong there. Second, read the account of Teena and her gay cousins in the Village Voice article, then see her gay cousins testimony in the Brandon Teena story – how Teena would disappear for a couple of hours and come back with food, $200 – $300, and it would be his. The guy is anxious and uncomfortable twirling a beer glass when he is telling this. Gay cousins had a car, an Oldsmobile. According to his own admission, Teena helped them to get on their feet financially and economically, when they got to Omaha, where were they, when Teena was desperately calling from Falls City to get out of there? In the context of the above does it make sense that Teena starts showering seven times a day with a complete change of clothing? And what do we make of the report in the German academic article that gay cousins kicked Teena out because “she brought violence to their home.” Is it any wonder that came out of that time with a huge fear of being rejected and ended up on a downward spiral of drinking and chasing girls that let to get suicide attempt, and then ended up desperate to belong with the Falls City biker and burglary set? Really, read up on the outlaw biker violence against women and how Nissen beat Teena by kicking and punching her in the belly every time he beat her. When LGBT appropriated Teena into a simplified gay bashing legend, how much of the real story did they ignore as opposed to basic arrogance, self centeredness and ignorance?
BB: I’m sure you’re right. Teena’s circumstances shout ‘psychosocial mess.’ What I specifically reject is the notion she was somehow MORE victim or SPECIAL victim ‘cos identity politics says she is via claiming it was a hate crime (hate crime attracting greater censure and punishment than the equivalent non-hate crime). Teena was a victim of appalling men. It’s a side issue that she happened to be presenting as male at the time – as if those scum needed that excuse to do what they did. Their motive could’ve been for multiple reasons – multiple reasons why she angered them. But the PC brigade decide that it’s THIS reason then starts sounding-off.
Fundamentally it matters not why they killed her; it’s THAT they did that’s appalling, not WHY.
Although a slightly irrelevant issue, there is concern here in UK that ‘gender dysphoria’ is too readily assigned, particularly to children, who are (unbelievably) almost encouraged to consider whether they should be the other sex on slim grounds. This isn’t to deny a genuine pathology exists (I don’t know enough to comment) but is to suggest that there’s some irresponsible propagation of ‘sexual confusion’ driven by PC delusion. Some of that same nonsense is applied to Teena’a case by liberal commentators who can’t see the wood for the trees…
Marcus, I agree with you one hundred percent. The biggest problem with the PC Brigade appropriating Teena Brandon as a transgender icon is that they overlook the real person who lived and died. To begin with, Teena had a different name for her male self, not the one you see on the internet. She called herself Tenna Ray Brandon. Ray was to honor her sister whom she loved, middle name Rae. Tenna is an old American West name, a girl’s name. If you really want to honor someone, you should use their correct name
When I say that Teena Brandon was awesome, I mean it. Teena Brandon was great, because she had a personal strength ethic of heroic proportions. She got a job at a lumber yard loading trucks and developed her physical strength. She refused pain killers when getting medical treatment. She was a talented actress, she could make people laugh and had leadership potential. She was tapped to be a manager at a restaurant where she once worked. At one point in my life I saw about 1100 female cadets go through a police academy, only maybe 1 or 2 women had the positive personal qualities similar to Teena Brandon’s. Violence against any woman is a terrible tragedy, but against her was especially tragic, given both, who she was and the circumstances under which it happened. BTW, I believe that part of the brutality and humiliation of what was done to her was done because she was successfully competing with Lotter and Nissen for dominance, and both liked her as a woman, and emotionally, Teena was really a traumatized girl.
John Lotter is an insect, a non-entity, nothing resembling a human being. Lotter told Teena that he liked her and hoped to be with her, after she was released from jail and everyone found out that she was female. Teena blew him off. However, if you look on the internet, you will see a photo of Teena Brandon grinning maniacally, one hand holding her crotch, another arm wrapped around none other than Lotter, her hand is tightly grabbing Lotter’s shirt. He is not getting away from her! Try hard as you might, you will not find any other photo of Teena touching a male.
Lotter said that he first met Teena when she walked up to him at the Oasis Bar and they talked and walked out to her car, got inside and shared a fifth of vodka. Lotter also describes Teena was staring at him while Nissen was pulling her pants off at the party and was groping her. Lotter described an unusual look in Teena’s eyes. People traumatized by torture suffer in a certain way when they realize that they are going to be tortured again, and Lotter noticed and attempted to describe it, without knowing what it is. The real question is, why was Teena locking eyes with Lotter, ad not with Lana, her girlfriend, or anybody else, why Lotter? Later on, Lotter held Teena, while Nissen punched her. Lotter is tall, 6’2″, bigger than either Teena or Nissen. Nissen raped Teena first, Lotter was in the front seat and the way he was cheering on is beyond words.
The real question is, why Teena liked Lotter. John Lotter is a very violent criminal. He once bolted from a courtroom trying to escape in shackles and got as far as the steps outside the Courthouse. Lotter used to beat up strangers at the convenience store where Lana Tisdel worked, for any perceived slight against her; Lotter took police on a multi state car chase, once went for a police officer’s gun once and almost got killed. Court documents indicate that people were afraid of Lotter, that he terrorized his local community. Teena Brandon used to dress up as a 1930’s gangster, and when she dressed as a cowboy for the State Fair, the idea of being an outlaw appealed to her. Maybe Teena Brandon saw John Lotter as a real world outlaw and looked up to him.
Facts from the case put a large dent in a popular nation that Teena Brandon was attacked by the two jealous boyfriend once they discovered that Brandon is a girl. Both Lana Tisdel and Ton Nissen knew Teena’s biological gender, because Teena told them. Lana found out on December 12, when Teena drove her to Lincoln and introduced her to her sister. At some point, Teena also introduced Tom Nissen to her sister. Teena’s sister spoke on the phone to Tom Nissen and told him that Teena Brandon had a sex change surgery scheduled in several months and that Teena would be fully male after that. Sister testified that she lied to Tom Nissen, because Teena asked her to. Teena Brandon and Nissen drove to Lincoln, NE together on more than one occasion, once for Teena’s Court appearance, and another time to see Teena’s sister to get some money. Sister didn’t have the kind of money the two were asking and she offered to feed them, but the two declined saying that they already ate at a different restaurant. There is also indication that Teena took Tom Nissen to her mother’s trailer home. Lana Tisdel testified in Court that she saw both, Teena Brandon and Tom Nissen, for the first time at the Oasis Bar, and it appears that the two were there together. It seems that both, Tom Nissen and Teena Brandon were outsiders to the Falls City scene and that Teena may have known Nissen from someplace else, since they both appeared at the Oasis together, when Lana saw them for the first time.
Another takeaway from this is that just like Lana, Nissen knew that Teena was a girl before everyone else. This is important because Tom Nissen is a repeat rapist. Several things point to this. If I recall correctly, Nissen has two sex assault type charges on his rap sheet. In addition, according to a State Police report, Teena’s sister was trying to get her into a program that helps survivors of rape and domestic violence, and intake staff told her that Tom Nissen had raped other local girls and that the Shriff’s Office had failed to prosecute Nissen and that at least two were in their program, so the program staff were aware of Nissen. The relevant question here is whether justice failed due to Sheriff’s incompetence or because Nissen was able to intimidate his victims successfully.
With regards to Teena, Nissen made several statements to authorities about what he did to her and about his intentions for her, always using highly sexualized language, even when situation did not call for it, such as when he showed up at the police station trying to get Teena’s bail revoked. “Can I tie her up and keep her in my bedroom (until the Court opens after Christmas holidays, so that she can be surrendered there and bail be revoked)?” He asked. No, they told him. Statements like that, and the fact that Nissen let her stay at his house after she got thrown out of Lana’s, indicate that Nissen was grooming Teena for rape for some time, contrary to a notion of a hate crime against a trans person, whose gender was suddenly revealed, especially given the fact that Teena was not the first, nor the only person, whom Nissen raped.
When taken in this context, Sheriff Laux’s infamous interview of Teena is not as preposterous as it seems, though it does not absolve Laux, since he behave horribly towards Teena and towards her sister after she came in to take Teena’s things after she was murdered. Teena says that Nissen pulled her pants off but did not grope her. Laux tells her that he knows Nissen, and that if Nissen pulled her pants off, he would have groped her. If Nissen had raped other local girls before Teena and if pulling the pants off and groping was part of Nissen’s rape ritual, then Laux would have known this from his interviews of the previous rape victims. And if the other victims fail to step forward and if Teena is very scared, what is it they are afraid of, is it Nissen’s personal capacity of violence or is it a larger gang that he may belong to? After they raped Teena, they told her that they would murder her if she told anyone, and Teena believed them. When she got to the hospital, they automatically brought up the rape exam as a matter of standard practice with battered women brought to emergency rooms. Thereafter Teena actively cooperated, helping the police find the location of the rape, which was ten miles away and out in the dark. She then became a reluctant witness, not willing to implicate Nissen and get him arrested. She also failed to show up for the follow up interview, claiming she was scared and that people were watching the Court building looking for her. Confrontation with Laux did not help, or it may have been people and pressure put on her by the criminals.
BB: Thanks for your most engaging response. “The biggest problem with the PC Brigade appropriating Teena Brandon as a transgender icon is that they overlook the real person who lived and died.” Yes, she became an ‘Issue’, much as Matthew Shephard did when he was murdered by two scumbags, after which far more silliness issued. How offensive to the family of a ‘straight’ man murdered in identical circumstances that because of his majority orientation the perps can be punished less! It’s incoherent nonsense – but it’s everywhere; and right- (with a small ‘r’) thinking people feel too cowed by vicious liberal intolerance to call a spade a spade and say ‘wait a minute… aren’t you getting a bit carried away?
Was she taking steroids for transition? If so they could’ve affected her behaviour with the likes of Lotter.
You seem to know much about the case. It was a terrible crime, and while I oppose the death penalty one does encounter perps on FF who would and should be ahead in the queue for the chair (and if we have capital punishment it should’t be the half-hearted quasi-medical procedure of injection, disgracefully administered by healthcare staff trained to save life) if we have to have it (I see ‘we’ – I’m a Brit; the DP was abolished here in the 60s, but I know something of dangerous criminals having worked in a prison).
Teena was not taking steroids, as far as I know. This is interesting, because she loudly bemoaned lack of facial hair, and her monthly periods. This could have been easily fixed with steroid injections you can get on the street. She had access to money during her time in Omaha, but never pursued it. In addition, Teena was mysogynistic in her abhorrence of womanhood. None of it is extremely unusual. When I started my research back in 1994, wanting to meed another girl like her, I discovered certain excellent research forgotten today. There was a 1954 article measuring tomboyishness in girls and sissiness in boys – growing up, 33% of boys have girlish traits and a whopping 66% of girls have boyish traits. Later on, kids go through a period of adjustment, but most people remain true to themselves on some level. There was a study that showed black ad brown kids having an inner image of themselves as blond and blue-eyed, like their favorite actors in the movies. By same token, any number of women refer to themselves in the masculine in their internal stream of consciousness – “He” being a default for anything not being directly associated with the Female and Feminine. Another interesting thought going back to that 1954 research for the definition of homosexuality. Homosexuality was not measured in terms of who one sleeps with, but rather in terms of a person associating exclusively with people of their own gender. There was a homosexuality scale of between 1 and 6, and the person at 6 only spent time and socialized with people of their own biological sex.
There is a widely reported notion that Teena hated lesbians. That is because Teena needed a company of wolves to run with. She needed men as an audience for which she would get in bed with any girl, either to show off for her male pack of to get their approval, a feminine trait, but not reserved for women only. Teena loved authority in the way of any good soldier who will fall in line and gladly stand at attention if the occasion calls for it. Look at her mugshot. Teena is standing at attention. Had this been in the military, it would have been seen as great military bearing, instead we have a defiant mug shot. Incidentally, Boys Don’t Cry and the documentary got it all wrong. Sheriff’s deputies who interacted with her in jail liked her, and later testified that she upbeat and optimistic, talking with them about life in general, and that after the rape, Teena was different – she seemed downtrodden and her voice was “dead”. Teena played a different tune for Lana Tisdel – during their visit Teena is upset, listless, asking Lana to get her out of jail. Apparently there is Teena’s prison letter to Lana, where Teena is morosely doing time, pacing the cell and doing push ups and chin ups. Apparently an act Teena put on for Lana. Another indicator that Teena needed a company of men is that photo of Teena and Lana doing homework with Nissen sitting on the couch in the background. Except, what homework? Nobody is in school at that point, Lana having graduated the previous spring. If you look closely, you will see some high school level lit about the medieval knights and Christmas, a photocopied notebook, and another notebook, into which Teena is writing. I believe that this is Teena’s own research into her Celtic identity. Interesting that Lana speaks nothing of it for the cameras, but Tom Nissen mentions it. Nissen uses Teena’s proper name (Tenna) and claims to now be a Celtic “Pagan” prison priest. Unfortunately, this is mixed up with some lies that Nissen utters, claiming that he had no clue that Teena was a girl until she went to prison. In fact, Teena’s disguise was not as impenetrable as is now believed.
If you are interested in the Matthew Sheppard’s case there was some interesting controversy surrounding the Steve Jimenez book written about him, The Book Of Matt. It took 13 years of biographic research and the PC Brigade strongly objected to some unpalatable facts in it, which went against the popular narrative. So, much so, that the critics were accusing Jimenez of “Truthism” and called to have the author stripped of the award that he received for it.
John Lotter is most definitely at the head of the class on the Nebraska death row. Both him and Nissen deserve a bullet to the back of the head, and it would be a kindness. Teena died much harder and I believe that Lotter was the shooter. Right now there is a clamoring afoot to get Lotter off the death row. That would be a terrible injustice. The man never showed remorse and would do it again because he judged Teena as deserving of what they did to her. In that Lotter sounds like dedicated Taliban fanatics, who readily accept skinning infidels alive or some other such violence. The only difference is that Taliban are true believers not afraid to die, and Lotter is a coward. His fear of being executed has broken him. Lotter is capable of self-pity. He gets visibly upset and his voice goes up a couple of notches, like somebody grabbed him by the balls, when he starts talking about his death sentence.
Nissen is scared as well, though I am not sure of what. Maybe he is afraid of going to hell. In his own mind he has forgiven Teena all her transgressions, and they were always the best of friends engaging in meaningful conversations. His story of how they murdered Teena also evolves with his demented ego. In the first version, Teena was attempting to hide under the blanket, literally tongue tied and paralyzed with terror. He feet wouldn’t hold her weight. They had to physically lift her off the ground and sit her on the edge of the bed. In his current version, they found Teena hiding under the blanket, she got up and sat on the edge of the bed, the “three of them” argued loudly, and then they murdered her. A bunch of quarreling friends, a teen-age tragedy of too much booze and a drunken misunderstanding. In addition to that, Nissen has come to see the light in that woman making love to a woman is beautiful, while two guys making love is sick and revolting.
For the love of god, call him a he. Stop calling him a she or a her. HE was transgender. You people love to ignore using his correct prounons — like one way to respect him is use HE AND HIM. You shouldn’t call him a girl or use she/her. Just because he was born a female does not mean you can’t call him by the correct prounons. You people need to have some respect.
Well, after all these years since Hilary won the Oscar, I have finally watched this movie…
I really didn’t know any true details about it. My impression was that this was about a girl posing as a boy as an experiment..! Honestly – that’s what I had thought all these years.
They are monsters!!!! It’s 27 years later. I don’t care if they’ve “found God” or are remorseful. Are they? I don’t know the answer because I haven’t checked articles etc.
They will spend the rest of their lives being known as heartless, cold blooded sociopaths who committed a TRIPLE HOMICIDE… They are unlovable and unwanted as far as I’m concerned..
Thank God for the FFWD button…
RIP #BrandonTeena ❤️
Movie is a stylized and heavily fictionalized account of who Teena Brandon’s life and death. Her kidnapping, rape, and murder was a lot more brutal in real life, because the two were a lot closer to her than the film portrays. Teena was actually staying at Tom Nissen’s house. Lotter is not at all remorseful and is incapable of any empathy towards Teena. His loved ones and a lot of idiots, LGBT types included, are trying to get him off the death row. Tom Nissen has a great mask of sanity, and all of the journalists talk to him to get information. Nobody knows he is a repeat rapist who has raped other women before he got busted for triple murder. He offered some sort of an apology that is written in a totally contrived language. Instead of saying – I am sorry I raped and murdered your daughter – he writes – “I am sorry I took your daughter’s love away from you”. What kind of an apology is that? You be the judge.
There are several great articles written about Teena Brandon, and there is 99% internet drivel. The truly informative articles are as follows: Eric Konigsberg’s “Death Of A Deceiver.” This was actually an investigation, where multiple journalists interviewed many people, and Konigsberg is a Lincoln, NE native. He does not mix up Teena Brandon with identity politics and offers the most information. Donna Minkowitz’s “Love Hurts” celebrates Teena Brandon as a cross-dresser, but if you read carefully, it gives good ringside detail of Teena’s street-corner thuggishness and her involvement with the gay male cruising scene. Among other things, Teena’s gay male cousins claimed that Teena showed them the part of Lincoln, known as The Loop, where men go cruising for younger men. Now, how would a teen-age girl know this? This kind of reporting is what makes good journalism. The next article you should look at is Carolyn Gage’s The Inconvenient Truth About Teena Brandon, which gives a good account of Teena’s psychiatric symptoms and why she was hospitalized, and has a great reveal in the end. Finally, there is John Gregory Dunne’s The Humboldt Murders. This article gets some things wrong, but it is great for background information. His descriptions are great. I was able to find a trailer park in Lincoln, NE based on a description in his article. Too bad it wasn’t the trailer park where Teena grew up (Brandon Teena story documentary films the wrong trailer park as well). Dune did a lot of research and was able to track how Teena moved from Lincoln to Falls City. He also provides additional details of Teena’s time with her gay cousins in Omaha. The biggest problem with the Aphordite Jones book about Teena Brandon, All that S/He Wanted is a screen-play treatment of Teena Brandon’s tragedy. Jones leaves stuff out. She rearranges the order of the events for dramatic effect. She changes facts to make Teena more likable. For instance, according to Court testimony, Teena comes up to Lana Tisdel’s house, knocks on her door, and says something to the effect – I spent a long time trying to find you, and Lana Tisdel lets Brandon inside and gives him a beer. According to Jones’ book – Lana Tisdel is sitting in the car, when Teena walks up to her. See the difference? What about the context? How about I knock on your door and tell you that I been looking for a long time for you. What conditions have to exist for you to let me inside your house and give me a beer? Another example of Aphrodite Jones changing facts is as follows: Lisa Lambert throws a birthday party for Teena. Teena stands her up, takes Lisa’s car, picks up Lana, and drives her up to Lincoln to go drinking at bars. In Jones’ version – Teena attends her birthday party, and only then goes to pick up Lana.
She COULD’VE been posing as male as an experiment – perhaps to help her make a final decision on surgery. Who knows for sure? But it (‘identity’) doesn’t matter, as some commentators would have it. She was person – unique – not an ‘identity’ or set of characteristics to be appropriated for socio-political discourse, who was appallingly murdered. That’s all that matters. That’s the moral heart of the case. It’s the person who REALLY matters, not the accidental characteristics that overtake and make abstract the person in the chattering (or twittering) of liberals.
Had there been another victim, with no ‘special characteristic’, equally egregiously murdered, would that be any less worthy of concern? For this is the flip side of identity fixation…
To say that Teena was experimenting is like saying that a person starving to death in a famine is dieting. Teena was running, both literally and figuratively. From many things. Eric Koenigsberg writes in his article that Teena had “such a fear of rejection,” but what most fail to understand is that this rejection was not a rejection in intimacy, but a social rejection. Both Teena and her sister were/are running from the stigma of being economically poor, or being a part of the social underclass. It is also noteworthy that Teena Brandon came from a FAMILY, meaning from a large extended family with ties that bind. Notice how no account of Teena Brandon’s life examines Teena’s family to any extent. Part of it is that her family clammed up. But investigative reporters dig, except not in this case. There is a noteworthy moment. There are widely circulating and well documented accounts of how Teena Brandon was blowing off her probation officers, John Dunne recounts one such story where Teena made an excuse saying that she had to go help with a certain aunt. Well, among the Brandon clan’s tombstones where Teena is buried is the tombstone for that aunt, who died in 2000’s. When Teena’s teen-age father was killed in his car accident, his parents took Teena’s pregnant mom in. Who were they? One last point, there is a Teena Brandon’s funeral photo just before her coffin goes into the ground. The coffin is pink and gray marble color, and it is noticeably short. Behind the coffin is Teena’s gay cousin and two other cousins who look like him. It is a gray and overcast day, and the three of them are either smiling for the photographer or they are grinning. I can’t decide which.
Regarding your other point, about common people with nothing special about them egregiously murdered. I got three, and two got none of the notoriety because it did not involve any ‘identity” issues. Well, maybe they did. Decide for yourselves. All involved young men and twenty somethings. First, A Teen. He was a rich kid. He got into drunken trouble again and his parents did not bail him out of jail. Tough love. That night, adult inmates beat him to a bloody pulp, and tortured him by burning him with cigarettes and lit matches between his toes. He was dead when the Morning Shift came to the overnight cell to do the roll call. After that murder, American jailers were no longer allowed to lock up under age prisoners with grown ups. Second, A male environmental activist grad school type decided to live among the Hobos, 2010’s, he had a made a mistake of pitching his tent near a mentally ill person. That man got out of his tent and told the grad student – This is the last thing you ever did in your sorry life. The mentally ill man then picked up something heavy and beat the grad student to death with it. A large number of hobos watched and testified, but none stopped this murder. Third case (I am a railfan, partial to freight trains going far, far away). A bunch of not really Hoboes were having a Barbeque alongside the railway tracks. A middle aged middle class man joined them and drank their beer and whiskey and ate the grilled steak with them. After dinner, the others jumped him and beat him to a bloody pulp, and they robbed him. What pissed off the Wannabe Hoboes was that this Outsider had a rolled wad of cash, and when everyone was chipping in, he squinted his eyes, flipped past the $20 Dollar Bills and gave them a five and some single dollar bills. That cost him a brutal beating, at least that’s what they claimed. Fourth Case – A well to do IT professional who rode Harley on weekends decided to join a biker gang, well, a suburban Harley riders club, no real felons among them. They accepted him, except they didn’t. During the night when he was being hazed in, the entire club turned on him, and spent the night drinking, beating on and berating the newcomer. In the morning, the newcomer was dead. The Harley riders then started sobering up and making their way over to police to surrender and hoping to cut a deal with prosecutor and get some leniency, none of them were real criminals. So, you got four without special characteristics, that drew no public or media interest.
I would love to know someone relative or friend of Brandon teena to have a vision of him as a person, what he liked, his dreams ….. but I can’t contact anyone even after 25 years it seems a taboo topic. I tried Facebook to look for someone on both sides but they don’t want to talk about it anymore!
People do not talk about it, because they have something to hide. Everyone. Something that might expose them or another person to civil or criminal liability. On top of that, there are serious efforts to get John Lotter off the death row, where he belongs. Lotter is from a prominent local family with many relatives and they are invested in saving him. To say anything untoward about him will ruin friendships that took many years to develop. On top of that, Teena Brandon’s tragedy was shamelessly exploited to make money and everyone is waiting to be paid by the next Steven Spielberg.
Having said that, Teena Brandon talked about going to Nashville and becoming the manager of Lana Tisdel’s KARAOKE singing career. Teena Brandon dreamed about becoming an Outlaw. Cowboys with six guns, Gangsters with Tommy guns, gang members with their Colors on the backs of their jackets. Teena Brandon really wanted to be a soldier. She wanted to be a commercial artist. She took more religion electives in school than she did art. Teena Brandon was a much better actress, a vaudevillian, than she was an pencil and paper artist. Teena was trying to join the U.S. Army as a radio communications technician, and she would have done well in the military, she had leadership potential. She spent two years working at a Mc Donald’s restaurant, and they wanted her, a high school drop out to go on the management track. She worked physical labor at a lumber yard. She could not get in the Army because she did not have a high school diploma. Between the time she got kicked out of her prep school and the time the military finally rejected her, she could have gotten a GED (Graduation Equivalency Diploma). Every judge every probation officer was practically begging her and giving her breaks to get her GED done. She blew them off. She wasn’t just dreaming of being an outlaw, she was turning into a delinquent. Teena was devastated by the final rejection from the military. Shortly thereafter she tried suicide and was put in a psychiatric hospital. Teena Brandon liked to make people laugh and could work an audience. Teena Brandon liked Sprite soda and the old Whatchmacallit candy bars, the old ones came with real peanuts, cookie crisp and liquidy gooey caramel.
I hate people talking about Teena as Brandon. It was a girl, not a boy. After everything she had experienced before her death, she made it clear that her name was Teena. She said Brandon doesn’t exist anymore. The media, the transsexual people, the director of this hopeless movie in which she was pathetically played Hilary Swank, all twisted everything. They did it for their own benefit. I believe Teena Brandon has fallen victim to all these lies. This story is so mendacious that it is not known if even 10% of it all is true. The documentary is also mendacious and hopeless.
You are absolutely correct. In simplifying and celebrating the cross-dressing aspects of the story, the film makers never found out the real Teena Brandon, how awesome she was, despite her problems and her bad deeds, and what a tragedy her murder really was.
How self-serving and ignorant can you get? Were you there? You can try to twist your own transphobic narrative on this subject all you want, but Brandon exemplified in every way the accepted psycbosocial identity of a trans person—he lived and loved as a man at a time when transgender identities were dismissed and vilified as some sort of carnival sideshow or transgressive pervert, and ultimately that is why he was killed—by ignorance arguably no different than your own.
As a physician who provides gender-affirming care for trans persons, as well as primary care for all members of the LGBTQIA+ communities, I’ve been humbled and blessed for the privilege of being inspired by their individual journeys. And as a gay man myself, I can say that we’ve had enough of having our stories heteronormalized to make people like you feel more comfortable. There are millions of tragic stories of cisgender women who have been victims of violent crimes, and we’ve offered our full measure of empathy towards them for our entire lives—at the exclusion of seeing our own tragic stories offered any reciprocal respect. It’s time for you to share a little humanity—you can handle it.
I was there. I know more about Teena Brandon and what happened to her than you. You know little to claim that it was a crime of ignorance. They knew each other. Lotter, Nissen and Brandon. There was a lot going on between them and it tied them to other individuals. Certain things ptecipitated violence that had nothing to do with transphobia. Your narrative is wrong, but it won’t be the first time in history. Nissen served five years as a juvenile previously and he worked as the prison psychologists aide, helping with the classification of inmates. A job you should never give an inmate, but here we are. Nissen was not so ignorant.
I’ve read everything you posted here and suspect you are led by the arrogance of being or pretending to be some sort of expert or intimate of Brandon or her family and posting it here to feel important or special. You like to minimize the fact that Brandon identified as a boy by trying to label it as some inherent “tomboyishness” that most girls identify with at some part of their childhood. You also try to use her mental illness history as another reason the crime didn’t happen due to her trans status but because she tried to ingratiate herself with these thugs. The bottom line is these men knew she identified as a man. She dressed, talked, walked and got into much trouble by identifying that way. If all they did was kill her, you could have made the argument they did it only because she ratted on them. But they raped her, the one thing men do to assert dominance and humiliation. They could have raped Lisa or another woman but they chose Brandon, specifically to humiliate her because she was trans. Neither of the men had been convicted of rape before. Nissen I believe had two sexual raps but not rape. All the psychological issues you bring up are very common with transgender people. You actually made a case for her identifying as a man with her attempted suicide, desire to be in the military, trying to be one of the “gang”, etc. I suggest you leave the diagnosing to the real medical professionals like the doctor who commented here. Your opinions and logic are flawed and you make more of a case that she truly identified as a male than you do believing she was just mentally and emotionally screwed up.
No, I post here, because that who Teena was and that is what happened to her. So what she identified as a boy. There are situations where it doesn’t matter who you think you are or you identify with – you either handle it, or you don’t, and Teena was responding emotionally to domestic violence, rape and beating as a girl. Males react differently when subjected to the same. One of the symptoms of mental illness is behavioral inadequacy in social situations. When Teena Brandon was driven back from the hospital after she was raped, the way she talked showed her mental illness and how her symptoms helped her survive prior abuse. Based on things she said, Teena reacted emotionally as a female, not a male to the rape and beating. Teena may have identified as male, but she was a girl, and the crime is a better example of violence against women than it is of transphobia. Nissen knew that Teena was biologically female and he desired her sexually, same with Lotter. To call Nissen’s prior arrests as “sex raps” trivializes his crimes and his prior female victims whom he put in the shelter for battered women, and if you believe that diminished sexual assault charges exclude the possibility of rape, you are naive. As far as diagnosing trans people, sex reassignment surgery is the cure of last resort, and only after all of the other issues have been address. Had Teena Brandon been getting quality psychiatric care, they would have addressed her sex abuse trauma, her eating disorder, her OCD, her alcohol abuse, and only then suggest sex reassignment etc. Unfortunately Teena Brandon was the indigent patient under state care, and all they did, was giver her a handout about trans people.
1 – How many Post Op Transmen do you know who joined the military? None, because the multiple surgeries leave the person in no physical condition to run around in the field in combat boots. There are military men who transitioned to female after they enlisted, but that is a smoke from another fire.
2- How many Transmen joined straight male criminal organizations or associated with heterosexuals? None that I know. Most women who transitioned to men are gay, middle aged, and have been in stable lesbian relationships within the confines of LGBTQ Community for many years.
Obviously, Teena Brandon’s life did not follow that pattern, and unusually, she associated with her male homosexual cousins, but that did not last long, they kicked her back out of their house and back to her mother after she helped them get on their feet in Omaha.
All of the psychological issues Teena Brandon suffered from may be common pathology of the gay and transgender, but Teena’s mental illness was the result of confirmed child sexual abuse and possible incest, and one other thing.
A lot of women join military and jump out of airplanes, and most of them are not LGBTQ.
You say that they could have raped anybody, maybe Lisa Lambert, but that is not how domestic violence and criminal underworld work. Lisa Lambert did not associate with them and lived a town away. and socially was worlds apart. Teena Brandon did the opposite, making herself susceptible to domestic violence, that she was running away from, but never learned to handle. Teena Brandon was competing with Nissen for status, he was her chauffeur, and she lied about a lot of things to inflate her position. She also got him in trouble with adults and later every reason that they sucked up to her turned out to be a lie. Have you seen the jacket she was wearing? This was more of a contributing factor to rape than any sexual orientation issues.
You have no clue just how traumatized Teena Brandon was, how she was headed for statutory rape charges having to do with her dating and giving alcohol to fourteen year at age 20, 21, and little do you know, that had she made it to prison for the violation of probation charges, she had a chance of being involuntarily committed to a State Psychiatric Hospital. That aspect of her life escapes you, because you have no appreciation for just how traumatized and dysfunctional she was.
No, Teena Brandon was a woman. She was hurt as a woman, she suffered as a woman, and her murder was a crime of violence against women. I am not just saying the way you are saying it, he he trans he. Unlike you I know all of the details of how she was beaten, and I know what it signifies. I also know how Teena Brandon reacted to certain things, and she reacted as a girl. You can’t take it away from her. Like I said before, the media vultures created a trans icon where they should have really dug into the events.
I’m sorry, but where is there evidence of this? He went as far as one could imagine in those times to live his life authentically to his gender identity, despite the enormous risks involved. And if he had any moments where he may have paused or fallen prey to repression along the way, is it any wonder, given the options facing him at the time—abandonment, incarceration or death? I just can’t figure out why you and a couple of others on here are so insistent on co-opting this story to suit your own narratives? I’m sorry if the subject gives you the vapors, but it just seems to me like you’re protesting a bit too much…
Steve, do you know how many times Nissen and Lotter beat Teena during the Christmas Eve? Four times. Each time they did so by punching and kicking her in the belly. Do you know who punches and kicks women in the stomach? Look it up. It’s a specific form of violence used against women. If you think that life of crime, addiction and mental illness is living authentically to masculine gender identity, I pity you. Men and women react differently to being raped and being punched in the stomach. Based on conversations Teena had with people after the rape, in the car on the way from the hospital and with her sister, emotionally, Teena Brandon was a girl, as opposed to bring a mature woman. Teena Brandon’s psychological symptoms were the result of early childhood exposure to criminality, domestic violence against her mom and her sister, and alcohol abuse first. Any gender identity issues should come second after these more immediate concerns. Her psychiatrist failed her, which is why there is no clinical literature about her case, her story did not enter clinical annals, the way boy who dreamt of wolves, and other interesting psychiatric patients did. Finally, one of the last statements that Teena made was – there is no Brandon, I am Teena.