Brandon Teena
American murder victim (1972–1993)
Brandon Teena (December 12, 1972 – December 31, 1993) was an American transgender man who was murdered, along with Phillip DeVine and Lisa Lambert, in Humboldt, Nebraska, by John Lotter and Tom Nissen, in what would become known as the Humboldt Murders. His life and death are the subject of the films The Brandon Teena Story and Boys Don't Cry. The murders (specifically Teena’s), along with that of Matthew Shepard nearly five years later, led to increased lobbying for hate crime laws in the United States.
Life
Brandon Teena was born on December 12, 1972, in Lincoln, Nebraska, to JoAnn Brandon. His father died in a car accident in Lancaster County eight months before he was born, and he was raised by his mother. Teena and his older sister Tammy lived with their maternal grandmother in Lincoln, before they were reclaimed by their mother when he was three years old and Tammy was six. The family resided in the Pine Acre Mobile Home Park in northeast Lincoln. JoAnn received disability checks and worked as a clerk in a women's retail store in Lincoln to support the family. As young children, both siblings were sexually abused by their uncle for several years, and Teena sought counseling for this in 1991. JoAnn remarried in 1975, divorcing in 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brandon Teena” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.