It’s been six months since the April 9 slaughter of 25-year-old Jackson nurse Carlos Collins, and members of the conservative South's LGBTQ+ community find little comfort as the Oct. 16 arraignment of suspect Marcus Johnson approaches in Hinds County Circuit Court.
Collins’ relatives say Johnson successfully stalked Collins in the months leading up to his death, despite Collins seeing him as enough of a threat to file a restraining order against him. Critics in the LGBTQ+ community say local news has moved on to other topics, leaving an open national wound untended.
“Folks don’t care. It’s like society is still saying we deserve all the violence we go through,” says Atlanta entrepreneur and hairstylist William Galloway, who went to school with Collins’ older sister and considered Collins a friend. “We’ve tried so hard for so many years (to be accepted), and then when something tragic does happen, it’s like, ‘Well, another gay person gone. On to the next.’”
A former police officer, Johnson left the department under a cloud of “disciplinary" actions nearly 10 years ago, resigning just before he could be terminated. Officers arrested him in Louisiana almost immediately after Collins’ murder and extradited him back to Hinds County for prosecution. He claimed self-defense in his April court appearance, but he may update his plea at his arraignment. Hinds County Circuit Court is currently holding him without bond.
Collins would have been 26 this year, and the loss of all that potential boils with heartbreak. The root of his death likely goes deeper than one violent incident now sitting on Circuit Court Judge Faye Peterson’s desk, however. Therapists say tragedies like this too frequently spring from a much bigger issue of how this nation still treats the LGBTQ+ community.
An American Tragedy
This article does not intend to suggest the LGBTQ+ community is awash in mental illness and pathology. The progressive evolution of U.S. society now allows out-members of the queer community to live with more freedom now than ever. However, Hattiesburg psychologist Dr. Geralyn Datz says studies of psychological and environmental vulnerabilities in the community often explore the history of treatment from parents and family members for a reason.
“Not every family is accepting. Many abandon or mistreat their LGBTQ+ children or isolate them,” Datz told BGX. “There’s a larger prevalence of trauma within the LGBTQ+ community, and that includes physical, emotional and sexual trauma in the family of origin that raised the child, as well as through exposure to other individuals associated with the family or in schools.”
Rejection from one’s own parents is about as primal as betrayal can get, and it can manifest in terrible ways.
“The damage can start at a young age, when the kids come out and the family doesn’t want to deal with them,” says Aubri Escalera, a transgender and immigrant rights activist and LGBTQIA+ liaison for the office of Georgia Rep. Park Cannon. Escalera says the most routine family drama can explode into a conflagration when you add the element of queer—even if that element is just a child.
“Kids are curious, and oftentimes they experiment with one another. Now imagine a homophobic auntie discovering this and pressing charges on the participant who is gay. If one of (the kids) is 13 and the other child is 10, sometimes the older child will go to an institution, and that’s where they’ll begin their lives. Or they’ll end up starting out life with the label of being deviant, dangerous or broken. I see this in my community a lot,” Escalera says. “They’re institutionalized or in the system, and sometimes they’ve got to learn about their sexuality in the confines of a jail. And when they turn 18, they have no preparation, and this can lead to homelessness and drug abuse.”
“You can only do so much begging, trying to get people to see us for who we are.”
Even outside of these extremes, the family impact can follow a victim for life, twisting a potentially healthy personality into an ugly pile of baggage.
Galloway says his community contains far too many wounded, vulnerable egos and feigned self-importance, much of it stemming from early emotional trauma in the home.
“You can’t blame us,” Galloway says. “We’ve been a target for so many years, and I feel like we’re still unacceptable. A lot of us are out here putting up a fight trying to force people just to see that we exist, even today. You can only do so much begging, trying to get people to see us for who we are.”
Harm Can be Cyclical
Johnson has not been convicted at this point; he’s merely a suspect, and Hinds County Circuit Court has released no record of the suspect's psychological evaluation. However, therapists and people inside the LGBTQ+ community say they see hallmarks of society’s longstanding war on queer people in the kind of crimes for which Marcus is charged.
“Stalking and predatory behaviors are more common within the LGBTQ+ community than in the cis community,” says Datz. “Twenty-seven percent of gay men and 26% of bisexual men have experienced stalking victimization in their lifetimes. This compares to just 16% of heterosexual men.”
Similarly, 35% of lesbian women and 30% of heterosexual women have been stalked in their lifetimes, while more than half, (54%) of bisexual women have been stalked, according to the Stalking Prevention, Awareness, and Resource Center (SPARC).
“There’s a couple of reasons for the vulnerabilities,” says Datz. “This may not speak to Collins, but individuals in that community are more likely to be homeless, and when they're homeless, they are more likely to be preyed upon. That is one super logical, very obvious reason these individuals can be (easily targeted).”
Additionally, she says, people who are traumatized in their childhood sometimes develop trust issues, as well as a tendency to select companions who reenact the trauma they’ve experienced. This lends itself to a kind of grooming for new trauma.
“Betrayal from a family member is the betrayal of someone who supposedly loved them and was supposed to keep them safe,” says Datz. “As sad as that is, that sometimes becomes ‘normal’ for someone who was repeatedly abused. No matter how dysfunctional, it is still familiar. We call that ‘traumatic reenactment’.”
Collins himself did not appear to be a victim of a troubled childhood. His acquaintances (including this writer’s own son, who shared a dorm with him at Hinds Community College) described Collins as “confident” and “radiant.” Many gay Black men from the conservative South wait until college to finally venture from the closet, but Collins appeared comfortable with himself long before his freshman year at Hinds.
But a healthy mind does not always inoculate you from the mental illness of others.
“This other guy is older, almost 10 years older,” says Escalera. “Carlos had a lot going for him. He had a career going on. A stalker could easily envision a life without Carlos, and that impending lack of balance could drive them crazy. Maybe they wanted to live this lie with him. We can’t know for sure, but there’s a lot of trauma and isolation in the LGBTQ+ community.”
Licensed Master Social Worker and therapist Dr. Nancy Keys says she also can’t speak directly to the psychology between Collins and Johnson, but she’s confident a history of family rejection can upturn a can of mental illness onto most anybody. Some of the more common results include depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, trauma and PTSD, to name a few.
“A lot of people don’t even know they’ve been traumatized, but hurt people hurt people,” Keys says. “They are confused, and it does so much damage. … There is a lot of violence that comes of people not being able to accept themselves and from problems that stem from childhood. People don’t realize the effect that trauma can have on children or adults. It can lead to suicidal ideations, depression, OCD, intrusive thoughts. I’m a firm believer that trauma is the stem of everything when it comes to us being violent or angry with one another, especially in the (LGBTQ+) community.”
Escalera says the abuse is even worse in the judgmental, hyper-conservative South, and this potentially paves the way to drug addiction and a legion of self-destructive behaviors and compulsions.
“Old school households don’t like homosexuality. I was raised to believe that all gay people have diseases, and I should stay away. And of course, we know that’s not true, but there are older generations that contain feminine men who even now are afraid to identify as homosexual, and they’re going to spend their whole lives in the closet,” Escalera says. “Many LGBTQ+ young adults are isolated from their families just because they’re different."
Even slightly more accepting parents may find themselves rejecting their own child because the grandparents won’t allow it, she adds. Disowned or abused youth often flee to bigger cities to find new chosen family, but they’re still vulnerable to injurious behavior such as unprotected sex and self-medication.
Mixing all this nihilism and a shattered sense of self with illicit chemicals does nothing to defuse the potential for self-harm or the potential for harming others.
Built for Malfunction
Despite legalizing gay marriage and a host of pro-LGBTQ+ laws, U.S. social systems do little to derail the lingering damage. Collins’ sister, Alisha Hudson, said the local police department failed to enforce the restraining order her brother filed against Johnson. Records show Collins submitted at least one order of protection against Johnson on March 5, 2024. However, Johnson allegedly wandered around Collins’ apartment and hovered near him at public events with near impunity. Johnson even allegedly installed cameras on abandoned neighboring property to better spy on him. Hudson told reporters her little brother feared for his life and claimed he was frustrated by a court system that could not keep his stalker at bay.
Jackson Police Department Public Information Officer Tommie Brown says the ineffectiveness of the restraining order had nothing to do with Johnson’s career as a former cop. Jackson Municipal Court Administrator Chakita Williams told BGX in an interview that certain living situations can complicate protective orders, such as when a victim and the assailant recently or currently share an apartment containing both their belongings. It gets even more problematic if one of the parties is a consummate lawbreaker.
“Some people, they just don’t respect the law,” Williams says.
Johnson was terminated from the Jackson Police Department in 2013, after less than a year of employment. Within a year of his release, Hinds County officials were charging him with false pretense, grand larceny and two counts of impersonating an officer at an apartment building near Jackson State University, according to The Clarion Ledger. Using another officer’s badge number, an old citation book and a stolen city police radio, Johnson wrote a false citation to a female student, and then allegedly attempted to elicit sex from her in exchange for dismissing the bogus ticket.
Williams says when a judge determines somebody has repeatedly violated a protective order, the arbiter can issue them time to serve, which “could be weeks, or it could be months.” But that process is not instantaneous, and Collins was brutally murdered within a month of filing his order.
Studies on the effectiveness of temporary restraining orders are severely mixed. Steve Albrecht, told Psychology Today that one study claims protective orders “are effective in keeping victims safe about 85% of the time, while another report suggests a less optimistic 15% success rate.”
“Sadly, most (domestic violence) suspects have already proven they are not good rule followers and don’t always fear the police, arrest, jail, prison, or even death by their own hands or via the police,” Albrecht wrote. “Someone who says, ‘If I can’t have you, no one else will,’ and means it, is not often deterred by papers, even when they are handed to them through the screen of a patrol car or betwixt the bars at jail.”
Before it went offline, Johnson’s Facebook page sported rage-filled diatribes of aggressive possessiveness and grievance. Should the judicial process in Hinds County result in conviction, Escalera says the warning signs were clear. She adds that many of those signs are not so unfamiliar to individuals with a broken or damaged childhood.
“Carlos was a very attractive man with a career. And when you have things going for you, sometimes people prey on that,” Escalera says. “They’re afraid of rejection and being left alone. Again, for a lot of people, this negativity comes back to childhood rejection.”
A clabbered court system obstructed with delays and red tape sometimes can’t work fast enough. The City of Jackson, like many municipalities across the U.S., struggles with under-staffing, and it can’t easily focus mitigating services on LGBTQ+ residents. It wasn’t until 2021 that LGBTQ people were even eligible to file for domestic violence protections in all 50 states. Plus, few domestic violence shelters offer programs specific to LGBTQ relationships. Victims of abuse sometimes believe they must hide their identity to shelter operators, and with good reason. In 2019 the Trump administration proposed removing Obama-era nondiscrimination protections for transgender people seeking shelter, despite HUD Secretary Ben Carson assuring Congress the administration would keep the protections in place.
President Biden later withdrew Trump’s proposal allowing homeless shelters to discriminate against transgender people. But that doesn’t stop bigots from trying to use the court system against other U.S. citizens. One conservative Christian law firm, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates a hate group, recently urged an Alaskan judge to block the city of Anchorage from requiring a faith-based women’s shelter to accept transgender women. And critics say some domestic violence shelters still refuse to serve transgender victims of violence, or they may agree to do so only if the victim provides medical proof of gender transition.
Transgender abuse victims who are refused sanctuary must often resort to “men-only” homeless shelters. As one might imagine, people harmed physically, emotionally and financially by men may not prefer a crowd of men during recovery.
Stacey Howard, director of Grace House shelter in Jackson, said some victims don’t have the reserves to get a restraining order, much less sanctuary.
“I’m lucky to have resources to protect myself, so I don’t have to stay at my residence like a sitting duck. I could stay with family or in a hotel, but some of these things are beyond people’s reach,” said Howard. “They may not have family in the area, but have a job anchoring them here, or they may not have the money to stay in a hotel. So, they’re stuck in a circumstance that keeps them unsafe.”
Howard added that “there are countless unfortunate nuances” to navigating insufficient state and local laws. “Even if the stalker’s name is not on the lease, if they have been allowed to live there there is some element of access that a (stalker) has a right to. A restraining order should make that null and void … but it’s difficult for men sometimes to admit they need help.”
Some gay men, she added, don’t even suspect their stalker or abuser to be capable of delivering serious damage until the day they suddenly do.
“This doesn’t sound like the case for (Mr. Collins), but people are always getting sweet-talked into overlooking prior violence and going back into a dangerous situation. The abuser claims they’ll never cross a certain, life-threatening line, but you don’t cross that line until you’ve crossed it, then there’s no more line,” Howard said.
Undoing the Damage
Discrimination by law enforcement is also still an issue in 2024, say critics. Even today some cops wrongly believe abuse in same-sex relationships is mostly mutual and that both partners are effectively swinging fists. This is one of the reasons both LGBTQ+ partners sometimes get hauled off to jail when a bloodied victim calls 911. Escalera said many police also simply don’t take the queer community seriously and consider them overly dramatic. But if anything is clear from the all-too-common deaths of trans community members like Ashley Burton and Koko Da doll it’s that murder threats are not to be taken lightly.
“This is why we need to create more LGBTQ liaisons to re-evaluate policy and change the language,” said Escalera. “It’s time to shift things. We need victim’s advocates, like the city of Atlanta’s LGBTQ advisory committee. We need more police like Malik Brown, director of the Mayor’s Division of LGBTQ Affairs.”
Escalera urged members of the LGBTQ+ community to seek out grassroots organizations and support groups that push for mental health initiatives. She also pressed community members to be hotly aware of their government and get involved in society and politics, “so you can pass legislation that prevents violence,” like a new Tennessee law that authorizes GPS monitoring protections for Tennessee domestic violence victims.
She also pressed the LGBTQ+ community to more fully embrace the “T” in “LGBTQ”. The queer community has been battling alienation in America since the cracking of the Liberty Bell, but trans people are at the bottom of the totem pole, even among other members of the community.
“There’s no sense in not being inclusive of one another,” Escalera said.
Datz warned there’s no easy, quick answer, however, and that much of the repair work comes down to increasing society’s tolerance so that LGBTQ+ neighbors and family members don’t suffer in silence.
“Silence can be very perpetuating,” Datz said. “The toxic guilt and power that perpetrators hold thrives in secrecy.”
But Collins’ fatal experience suggests that speaking out to friends, relatives and police has limited effect when you’re a member of an invisible, often alienated group. The best way to counter that, says Keys, is to dispel the invisibility. In the American South that means no longer allowing religion to throw a wall up between Southerners and the LGBTQ+ community. She says it’s long past time to open our eyes and see the color around us.
“I’m a strong Christian woman, but my Christian beliefs must be put aside,” Keys said. “This community deserves loving, supportive people. We’ve got to put down feelings and be able to say hate crimes will not be tolerated and then focus on ways to make things better by being non-judgemental and reaching an open hand to people who are going through a hard time.”
Keys also urged members of the queer community to consider therapy when needed. A good therapist can defuse the brooding pathology that puts people in dangerous situations. Many healthcare-deprived Americans don’t realize therapy is even possible, however.
“A lot of people don’t understand that therapy is within their reach,” said Keys. “You can work at Burger King or McDonalds and get it, and other top employers also offer mental health services. Just get on your phone and Google ‘affordable care’ and find a free support group or pro bono services. You won’t know until you try.”
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“Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays” (PFLAG) offers this extremely helpful link to a wealth of resources for LGBTQ+ adults and youth needing intervention, therapy, and health and safety assistance. Waiting on the other end are wonderful groups like The Trevor Project, The GLBT National Youth Talkline and Trans Lifeline, and several domestic violence lifelines, among many other vital resources. The Lighthouse/BGX wants you to know you are not alone.
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