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Arkansas won't execute 39-year-old Davis Carpenter and his lover Joshua Brown, 22, but no thanks to lesbian and gay groups, which issued no call to spare their lives as they went to trial, starting last month, for capital murder. On April 18th, Carpenter accepted a plea bargain of life without parole to avoid possible execution. His lover was sentenced to the same for rape and murder the week before.

For gay groups to oppose a death sentence for Brown and Carpenter would have meant expending political capital-- the two men were charged in the death in September 1999 of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising, after tying him to a bed, gagging him with his underwear, and having sex with him. When Brown stopped to have a sandwich, the youth, contorted so he couldn't breathe, asphyxiated.

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Right-wingers seized on the killing as Matthew-Shepard-in-reverse, with gay men cast as the demonic murderers. Anti-gay chat rooms and opinion shows buzzed with indignation at the mainstream press for not giving the story the same front-page play as Shepard's 1998 death.

That gay groups never opposed Arkansas's bid to execute the gay men shows that their commitment to fighting the death penalty is wan, contends Bill Dobbs of Queer Watch.

For human rights organizations the world over, opposing capital punishment is a bread-and-butter concern. But among US gay lobby groups, the issue is more like wasabi or mint jelly-- a condiment to retrieve from the back of the fridge only once in a while, if at all.

Only in the last several years have gay groups shown interest in capital punishment, after pressured to do so when a Wyoming prosecutor sought the death penalty against two men charged in Shepard's murder. A few gay organizations have gone on record against the death penalty, but have taken little action. In the face of a horrible killing with uncomfortable homosexual overtones, gay groups kept their distance, showing no concern for the way right-wing pressure might make a fair trial difficult.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force says it's against capital punishment across-the-board. While the Dirkhising trial was under way, NGLTF bragged in a press release about its extensive work in Arkansas with local groups and state legislators. But spokesman David Elliot says NGLTF has done no work on the state's death penalty and made no statements on the case. Nor did Lambda Legal Defense say anything, a group which also in theory opposes the death penalty. The Human Rights Campaign, on the other hand, abandoned its stated agnosticism on state-sponsored killing, with spokesman David Smith calling for punishment for Carpenter and Brown "to the fullest extent of the law"-- which in the context of Arkansas criminal justice is as good as saying the men should die.

Shocking and reckless as it was, Dirkhising's killing probably didn't fit the bill for premeditated murder. Brown and Carpenter were part of the family to Jesse and his siblings, Dirkhising's mother told the court. Jesse stayed with the men on weekends with his mother's consent, and he helped out at Carpenter's hair salon.

The men maintained that the death was an accident "The night before, he had hog-tied [me], so I thought I'd get him back,'' Brown told police. "I left him for five minutes. I didn't think I had tied anything that tight. I just left to go eat a sandwich.'' As soon as they saw Dirkhising passed out, the men, hysterical, called the cops.

Arriving on the scene, police made no attempt to resuscitate the youth, who still had a weak pulse, as they weren't carrying disease-protective masks.

Brown and Carpenter's guilelessness is suggested by the full confessions they gave to police.

Whether it's the right-wing casting gay men as sex-crazed maniacs or gay groups making-over the Shepard murder into Christ's Crucifixion Part II, turning crimes into political campaigns means risking the chances for fair trials. In the end, justice prevailed in both the Shepard and Dirkhising cases-- at least to the extent that the wrong of the killings was not compounded by more killing-- this time by the state. But in staying silent on the death penalty in a high-profile trial, gay groups missed a chance to do the difficult, principled thing.