In 2005, Brandon Woodruff was a typical 19-year-old from a conservative small town in North Texas, off at a nearby college and just beginning to explore his identity as a gay man. Reading about Brandon as he was then, I’m reminded of so many of my own queer friends and family, who only fully blossomed into their true selves once they gained some distance from their homophobic upbringings.
Unfortunately for Brandon, on October 16, 2005, an unspeakable tragedy struck. His beloved parents were brutally murdered in their own home. Brandon, who was the last person known to have seen them alive, quickly became a suspect. Although he, by all accounts, had a close relationship with his parents, and many friends and family said that Brandon’s parents knew about his sexuality and remained supportive, the town’s homophobic law enforcement agencies fixated on him as the target of their investigation. The gun that killed Brandon’s parents was never found, the timing of the murders made it nearly impossible that Brandon could have been in the area to complete them, and the motive assigned to him was iffy — he wanted his mother’s old truck, according to police. But in Brandon, a town saw a degenerate and a liar — someone who had “lied” about his sexuality for so long, and who was apparently dabbling in sex work in the big city of Dallas. The prosecution was so desperate for Brandon to be guilty that they took to illegally listening to his conversations with his attorneys while incarcerated.
Once this was discovered, instead of throwing out the case against Brandon, a judge decided to appoint special prosecutors to try his case. Adrienne McFarland and Ralph Guerrero of the Texas Attorney General’s Office were sent to Greenville to try Brandon. Despite surely knowing better, McFarland and Guerrero decided to stick with the homophobic strategy of the previous prosecutors, going so far as to try to introduce into evidence a list of “extraneous offenses,” which included the so-called crimes of homosexuality and appearing in gay porn.
