The state’s murder trial against Wyndham Lathem felt more like the plot of a Law & Order: SVU episode. The brutal killing of cosmetologist Trenton Cornell-Duranleau was either a BDSM, drug-fueled threesome gone horribly wrong, or a murder-suicide pact that went astray.
But thanks to prosecutors playing into every salacious detail of the crime and a rabid press corps clinging to every word, BDSM practitioners and victim advocates alike say that the coverage and legal strategies had more to do with historic anti-queer sex negativity and misconceptions about kink than a gruesome murder.
Prosecutors say Lathem, the acclaimed microbiologist, formerly of Northwestern University, helped stab his boyfriend, 26-year-old Cornell-Duranleau, more than 70 times with Andrew Warren. For his role in the killing, Warren, a former Oxford University employee, pled guilty to murder in 2019 and was sentenced to 45 years in prison. He was a witness for the state.
During his testimony, Lathem told the court that Warren killed Cornell-Duranleau out of jealousy during a threesome, after Lathem previously rejected the British citizen romantically. Lathem said that he and Cornell-Duranleau engaged in consensual knife play and used meth during sex, a phenomenon known as chemsex that is most common among gay men.
Warren testified, however, that he and Lathem planned to kill each other, but that Lathem had a last-minute idea to kill Cornell-Duranleau instead.
When the grisly murder made headlines in 2017, reporters parroted the rumors that the killing was part of a strange sexual fetish, for the pair to kill someone and then themselves. The men had fled Chicago, only to surrender separately in California.
The trial against Lathem began at the end of September, and reporters across the city described in scant detail the “kinky knife play” he allegedly engaged in with Cornell-Duranleau. Those reporters particularly failed to provide those allegations in the context of the reality of kink and BDSM. Some reporters also waxed poetic about the approriateness for such a trial to be the subject of a high school field trip, which also ignores the sex, drugs, and violence students are already exposed to on their own.
“From the rape-crisis perspective, some of the best examples of consent and boundaries come from the BDSM community,” says Sarah Layden, director of programs and public policy at Resilience, formerly Rape Victim Advocates. “I think there’s a real stark difference between the BDSM community that actually has pro-consent, pro-boundary models, and those that engage in the same behavior, but don’t abide by those consensual models, don’t abide by those boundaries, and actually don’t really give a shit.”
Common mantras in the kink community are “safe, sane, and consensual” and “risk-aware consensual kink.” This means that everything in the “scene” is previously and continually agreed upon, that harm has been minimized as much as possible, and that the people engaging in the practice understand the risks associated with what they are doing—whether that’s spanking and flogging, or something more controversial like knife play.
Gary Wasdin, the executive director of the Leather Archives & Museum, says that incidents like Lathem’s—where kink and queer nonmonogamy are central—are nothing new to the fetish community. Wasdin says sensational trials and viral news stories like this also put BDSM groups in an awkward position by forcing them to defend themselves while also putting distance between them and sexual behaviors that go far beyond kink.
“[The trial] will stigmatize everything from gay relationships to nonmonogamous poly relationships to kink and fetish [relationships],” Wasdin says.
For Gene, a local knife-play aficionado for nearly 20 years, such stark misconceptions are common and prevent people from learning how to practice safely.
“It’s a knee jerk reaction and it becomes sensationalist,” Gene, who asked not to use his real name, says. “Like, ‘Let’s see how many people we can just get fired up over this.’ It doesn’t really get to the truth. When I see it happening in the news, I look at it, I kind of wince, and then I move on. It’s an oversimplification to try and say that just because he died by being stabbed that it was ‘kinky knife play.’”
But there’s another problem with painting the murder as being the product of a sexual fetish held by both Lathem and Warren. Murder and decapitation are not “fetishes” like those on display at LA&M or the back rooms of bars. If Lathem and Warren indeed conspired to kill Cornell-Duranleau to seek a sexual thrill, that’d make them psychopaths, not kinksters.
When people kill out of sexual thrill—in the vein of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy—we call them psychopaths and sexual sadists; defense lawyers argue insanity, and states make every effort to lock them up or execute them.
In fabricating the killing’s proximity to Wasdin and Gene’s kinks, the court and the press paint all people who engage in BDSM as cut from the same cloth, that kink is inherently violent and unsafe, that Cornell-Duranleau’s slaying was the eventual conclusion to the debaucherous deeds to which he consented.
Layden, Wasdin, and others also call into question whether press coverage would be similar if a queer trio was not involved. If it were two men and a woman, or two women and a man, it’s hard to see how the media and prosecutors would play up the sexual, salacious details of the crime. It speaks to the way media and the courts have long pathologized queer sexuality, and queer people as sex-craven, violent aggressors.
As stated in Jordan Blair Woods’s 2018 California Law Review article “LGBT Identity and Crime,” “The history shows that until the mid-1970s, the criminalization of homosexuality left little room to think of LGBT people in the criminal justice system as anything other than deviant sexual offenders.”
It’s not just kink communities or horny queers that suffer. Layden says trials like this are indeed rife with homophobia and sex negativity. But they also put the blame in part on the victim, in this case Cornell-Duranleau.
“I think for people that are in the BDSM community, it basically sends a message that if you engage in these behaviors, essentially, you’re contributing to your own harm, and you deserve to be raped, and in this instance, killed,” Layden says. “It also sends the message that if you engage in these types of sexual practices, consensually, and something happens to you, it’s your own fault.”