ABSTRACT
This chapter turns first to the history of the gay panic defense itself as a means of illustrating how ideological fictions work to support prejudicial legal doctrine. It focuses on one of the law's presumed narratives, the homosexual panic defense (HPD), in its capacity not only as a historical legal doctrine fraught with assumed fictions about gay and straight men. A symbolic phenomenon of social condensation that is a doctrine that encapsulates the 'sudden, overpowering fright, especially when groundless' concerning queer affairs, a fright that continues to grip much of the country. The chapter argues that the use and abuse of the legal doctrine of unwanted queer sexual advance, including its attempted employment in the Shepard trial, presents a case study in the influence of ideological narratives on the law. It considers common form of cultural discourse: the catharsis of Aristotelian tragedy, that quintessential narrative of anti-social conduct.
