The rumor that won't go away

Jocks say Littleton killers were gay, but friends deny it.

By Dave Cullen

Apr 24, 1999 | As the Columbine High School community -- and the rest of the country -- struggles to understand the reasons behind Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's Tuesday killing spree, more facts are emerging about the nature of the harassment they suffered at the hands of their classmates.

One rumor that refuses to go away is that the two were gay -- a story that led many to abuse them in life, and now, denounce them in death.

"They're freaks," said Ben Oakley, an angry sophomore from the soccer team, visiting the memorials in Clement Park for the first time Thursday. "They were in the Trench Coat Mafia, and that's something around our school that we consider freaks." He said students picked on the pair "all the time."

"Nobody really liked them, just cause they ..." He paused, then continued. "The majority of them were gay. So everyone would make fun of them."

Several self-described jocks volunteered similar rumors Wednesday and Thursday. "[A friend] used to tell me how they would take showers together," a member of the football team said. "He told me most of them were gay."

Other students reported sightings of the pair, and other Mafia members, "touching" one another, holding hands or groping in the hallways. But the stories were generally vague, secondhand and never from students who personally knew members of the group. Oakley's reply when asked to clarify what he knew was typical: "They would touch each other in school. People have seen them. One of them last year went up to a kid I know and did that," he said, demonstrating a crotch-grab on himself. When asked whether he was referring to Harris and Klebold specifically, he admitted, "I don't know," then added, "People in the group."

The media has mostly ignored the gay rumors, although on Tuesday the Drudge Report quoted from Internet postings claiming that the Trench Coat Mafia was a gay conspiracy to kill jocks at Columbine, a claim with no apparent basis in fact. A few newspapers have mentioned the gay rumors in passing. The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Mike Smith, a senior point guard on Columbine's state championship basketball team, saying jocks taunted the pair by calling them gay. "They were ones you'd make fun of," Smith admitted.

And according to Thursday's Drudge Report, which was still hyping the gay angle, the Grand Junction (Colo.) Daily Sentinel quoted another student saying the Trench Coat Mafia was widely viewed as gay. "Boys would hold hands in the halls sometimes," sophomore Jon Vandermark told the paper. "They were called freaks, homos and everything in between."

Not a single friend or acquaintance of Harris and Klebold confirmed the gay rumors. All either denied the story or said they had no idea about the sexual orientation of either student. "It's the stupidest thing I ever heard," said senior Melissa Snow, who had known Klebold since middle school, but only had limited contact with him this year, since he joined the Trench Coat Mafia.

Several students expressed anger at the jocks for spreading rumors to defame the two in death with the same slurs that dogged them through life. Dustin Gorton, a good friend of Harris and Klebold, was particularly outraged. "I think it'd be really funny if you tried to tell their girlfriends that they were gay," he said. Gorton, a brawny 6-foot senior dressed in camouflage pants, said prom pictures had been taken with Harris and Klebold and their girlfriends, but hadn't been developed. He promised that the media would never see the pictures, or find the two young women.

"You're never going to get those names. [The girlfriends] are so far hidden, and they are so screwed up right now," he said. Gorton described himself as a "nontraditional jock" who played Doom on the Internet with the two killers, as well as baseball with a team outside the school. He said he was not a member of the Trench Coat Mafia.

Next Page: "Gay" is the worst epithet

• View blog reactions