Keeping the Closet Door Closed 20 Years Later

The name Bob Gross has meaning in the greater Lansing community. For some it was his stellar career as a high school sports reporter for the Lansing State Journal. For the LGBT community it is his violent death that calls us to remember his name.
Gross was the victim of a brutal anti-gay murder in June of 1996. He met Robert Durfee at a local bar in Lansing. The two went back to Gross’ downtown apartment, where Durfee strangled and repeatedly stabbed Gross. He then doused Gross’ body with gasoline and set it on fire.
Durfee would claim he witnessed the murder, but did not participate – despite detectives finding blood on his clothing. He claimed, according to a 1997 Associated Press story, that two men he had arranged to have sex with Gross had committed the murder.
Prosecutors charged Durfee with first degree murder and argued that he had killed the sports writer because he was gay. Durfee was convicted.
The anti-gay motive was revealed during a preliminary hearing in Lansing’s 54-A District Court only days after the murder. But the LSJ, then as now, didn’t report that fact. In truth the anti-gay bias of his murder was not fully reported by the LSJ until months later, the day the trial was slated to start in Ingham County Circuit Court.
Gross’ murder brought the Lansing LGBTQ community together and helped push through a comprehensive human rights ordinance.
But if you, like many of LSJ’s readers did this morning, read about Gross’ induction into the Greater Lansing Area Sports Hall of Fame scheduled for Thursday night, you wouldn’t know any of this history.
Let’s be clear – Gross absolutely deserves the induction – the reason the LSJ wrote about him in the first place; but the deliberate glossing over the facts surrounding his murder and the continued closeting of his existence does a disservice to both his memory and to the legacy he left in Lansing. You also wouldn’t know this history from the bio provided by the organization.
“Bob Gross – Longtime sportswriter for the Lansing State Journal.” That’s all the group writes about Gross on its website announcing the biographies of the 2016 inductees.
Bob Every, chairman of the group, said he didn’t want to “tarnish [Gross’] reputation,” by acknowledging how he died. He said the group was honoring Gross’ sports writing contributions and support for prep sports. A career tragically cut short by a homophobe in a barbaric act of violence.
Don’t tell Every that, though.
“I know this,” he said when asked about the concerns that Gross’s tragic murder was being glossed over. “I am going to honor Bob Gross for what he did. I have no idea, nor can I wrap my mind around how he died. I could care less.”
LSJ’s failure to note this factual information is also a violation of basic journalistic obligations. But don’t take my word for it.
“They certainly have an obligation to report the context, otherwise the reader fills it in with whatever they think fits,” Kelly McBride, an ethicist with the Poynter Institute in Florida told me Thursday morning. Poynter is one of the nation’s top education programs for journalists.
LSJ officials did not respond to a request for comment for this editorial.
Sure I could chalk this up to institutional issues at the LSJ specifically and Gannett more generally. The writer, Brian Calloway, was not at the LSJ in 1996 and 1997 when this story was headlines. And the LSJ staff has complained – as have many of us who rely on their previous reporting – about the lack of online archival resources.
Maybe this glaring error would not be such a gaping wound if it didn’t continue a pattern that has spanned 20 years.
Cheryl VanDeKerkhove is a longtime activist in the Lansing area. When Gross was murdered, she was head of the Lansing Association for Human Rights and owner of the LGBTQ bookstore the Real World Emporium. The bookstore served as a de facto community center in Old Town in Lansing.
She and others fought hard to get the LSJ to report the facts about Gross’ murder. We both recall a meeting with top brass from the LSJ with the LGBTQ community and their explanations as to why they had not yet reported the facts surrounding the motive of his murder.
Gross had been mostly closeted, they argued, and they wanted to respect their colleague’s privacy.
The second reason they gave activists and community members that day over lunch, was a concern about the impact of potentially prejudiced reactions from parents that a gay man had been in their children’s locker rooms. During that period, gay men – as transgender people are today – were painted as child sex predators.
It became a balancing act, she told me.
“I honestly felt that they were trying their best to be fair to the story, the LGBT community and the memory of Bob Gross,” she told me by Facebook this morning. “The extreme prejudice of the time introduced considerations that shouldn’t have had to come into play and that unnecessarily caused those interests to be at odds with one another.”
But I also know that I sat in the sweltering heat of the 54-A District Court in Lansing all those years ago and I was next to the reporter assigned to the case. When he was asked if he was going to report on the anti-gay bias motive, he said he had been told by editors not to.
But it’s 20 years later. That extreme prejudice, while still with us in relation to members of the lesbian, gay and bisexual communities, has been dampened. That vitriol is mostly reserved for the transgender community now. There is no excuse not to talk about Bob as the full, complex man he was. A brilliant sports writer, an amiable spirit, a closeted gay man brutally murdered because he was gay – all are true, and all informed the man who is to be honored this evening.
By not acknowledging these realities, his memory is being tarnished. And his brutalized, burnt corpse is being shoved into the closet of history.