Licensed to Kill is a 1997 documentary written, directed, and produced by Arthur Dong, in which Dong, a gay man himself, interviews six inmates who committed murder for reasons related to homophobia.
It is the third film in a series of documentaries where Dong explores anti-gay prejudice, and was the only film at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival to win two awards, the Directing Award Documentary and the documentary Filmmaker's Trophy. Syndicated from the Los Angeles Times. It received Best Documentary at the 23rd Seattle International Film Festival.
Dong cited a near-miss in 1977 with homophobic violence as an impetus for the project; the teenagers whom he and his friend largely evaded attacked two priests, Jim Brown and Douglass McKinney, shortly afterward just outside of the Castro District, San Francisco.
In discussing the subject matter of the film, Dong specifically stated that the documentary covers "straight attitudes about homosexuality". He also said that he specifically did not present a single solution to the dilemmas highlighted in the film. The film is preserved in the Library of Congress, and was included in the curriculum of Concordia University's Fall 1999 "Film Studies: Representation and Sexuality" course.
Synopsis After researching some 200 cases where the motive for murder involved homosexuality, Dong contacted 25 murderers convicted for killing homosexuals or for the commission of what would become a Federal hate crime following the murder of Matthew Shepard, and received agreements from 15 to be interviewed on camera for the film. Dong included only six of the interviews he conducted in the final footage. For Dong to include them in the final product, the inmates had to meet two criteria specifically: admission of guilt, and admission of homophobia as a motive. Footage for the seventh murderer included in the documentary was compiled from videotapes of police interrogations.
Cases Raymond Childs murdered 55-year-old Wall Street attorney David Schwartz of Cravath, Swaine & Moore on November 19, 1992. Childs stabbed Schwartz 27 times and cited a gay panic defense. Childs was paroled from Fishkill Correctional Facility on March 16, 2023.
Donald Aldrich and his friends Henry Earl Dunn and David McMillan went to Bergfield Park, a known gay hangout in Tyler, Texas on November 30, 1993. The three men kidnapped Nicholas West, drove him outside of town, and assaulted and battered him. They ordered him to strip to his underwear. Eventually, they began to shoot him: in his hand, nearly severing a finger; in both arms; in his torso with non-fatal wounds. West was shot a total of nine times, with the ninth being a fatal gunshot wound to his head, fired by Dunn. Both Dunn and Aldrich were sentenced to death. Dunn was executed in February 2003. Aldrich was executed via lethal injection on October 12, 2004, in Huntsville, Texas.
Corey Burley and two friends – allegedly Freddie Earl Thorton and Frederick Eugene Kirby, both of whom were charged in the incident as well – went to Reverchon Park on October 26, 1991. There they approached Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant, and his lover, Hugh Callaway. The three harassed and physically assaulted the pair, eating the food the couple had sat down to enjoy as they battered them. After approximately twenty minutes, the perpetrators robbed the couple before Burley shot Nguyen in the abdomen. Burley was sentenced to life in prison; however, he will become eligible for parole on October 31, 2026. He is serving his life sentence in McConnell as of June 18, 2024.
William Cross admitted to killing William T. Lemke, age 51. Lemke's body was found on the roof of the Wilson Avenue Men's Club on a weekend where 12 people were killed in Chicago. During the investigation, police determined Lemke died on April 9, 1994. He was sentenced to 25 years in the Dixon State Correctional Center of Illinois. On July 13, 2006, he was released on parole.
U.S. Army Sergeant Kenneth Junior French walked into Luigi's Restaurant in Fayetteville, North Carolina on August 6, 1993, and began firing indiscriminately. He murdered the owner, Peter Parrous, and his wife Ethel, as well as two patrons, Wesley Scott Cover and James F. Kidd. Seven others were wounded in the mass shooting. French stated that he was highly intoxicated at the time. Unlike the other murderers featured in the film, none of French's victims were thought to be homosexual; rather, his actions were out of anger toward then-President Bill Clinton for announcing his intent to lift the ban on homosexuals in the United States Military. As of June 20, 2024, French was incarcerated at Pender Correctional in North Carolina.
Jay Thomas Johnson went to Loring Park on July 31, 1991, and shot and killed Joel Larson. On August 10, 1991, he went to a known gay hangout on a beach in Minneapolis. He killed former Minnesota State Senator John Chenoweth and severely injured Cord Drazst. He confessed to his crimes and pleaded guilty. Unlike the other murderers in the film, he recognized he was in fact gay himself both before and after his committed murders. He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences plus fifteen years, and is serving his time as an openly gay man with HIV. As of June 20, 2024, Johnson was incarcerated at Stillwater Correctional in Minnesota.
Jeffrey Alan Swinford, Ronnie Lee Birchett, and Bobby John Fox met Chris Miller in a public park before the quartet went to Miller's apartment in Little Rock, Arkansas to use cocaine. Swinford alleges that Miller made sexual overtures to all three men who had intended to rob him before getting high, targeting Miller because of his homosexuality. Fox and Swinford both pleaded guilty to first degree murder on August 1, 1995; Birchett's case was 'converted' because he was only 17 at the time. Fox served six years for the murder before being paroled; when he fled to east Texas in 2001, he used the name Brian Stucker. As of June 20, 2024, Fox was incarcerated at Williamsburg Federal Corrections Institute and not scheduled for release until November 21, 2027. Asked about killing Miller in the documentary Licensed to Kill, Swinford said Miller's death meant there was "one less problem the world had to mess with".
Production Included in the film are scenes from daily U.S. life showing the violence directed toward homosexuality, both specific – one neighbor attacking another; and in more general terms, such as the programs of Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed, to show the viewer how pervasive the invective towards gays had become at the time the film was made. Johnson specifically mentions Robertson's The 700 Club as influencing his decision to murder men he perceived to be gay. Additionally, Dong included anti-gay rap, television coverage of the AIDS epidemic, and speeches by politicians such as William Dannemeyer.
Dong originally had also wanted to include content regarding lesbian murders; however, none of the killers of lesbians he contacted were willing to be interviewed. While at one point footage of violence against lesbians had been edited for inclusion, Dong felt that to do so without the interviews to balance it would merely be "tokenism".
Initially, the film didn't include footage of the victims' corpses, and test audiences found themselves disturbed by their sympathetic responses to the killers. Dong stated that one of his goals with the documentary was to show that the men who committed the crimes included in the film could very easily be a next-door neighbor, but that after the test audience response, he needed balance to convey the intended message.
The film budget consisted of grants from various foundations totaling US$135,000, including a Rockefeller Foundation grant bestowed in 1995. It was presented on 16 mm film and took less than two years to produce. In June 1997, Dong stated that he intended to edit the 80-minute documentary to a 30-minute version that could be shown in high schools.
Release The film debuted at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, where the original print was mangled and a replacement had to be flown in for the scheduled screening. Afterward, Dong handled distribution personally, scheduling the film for theaters in cities with a large number of murders where the victims were gay, and planning opening days for the anniversaries of those murders included in the film. It also played at other film festivals, such as the Berlin International Film Festival, the London Gay Film Festival, the 23rd Seattle International Film Festival, the 15th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival March 6–13, the 1997 Asian American International Film Festival in New York, the 1997 Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival July 18–20, the 42nd Valladolid International Film Festival, October 24 - November 1, 1997 and at the 1997 Hawaii International Film Festival on November 15, 1997, alongside Dong's other works Forbidden City, USA (November 16) and Coming Out Under Fire (November 17).
Johnson got his own screening of the film, which Dong recorded and discussed at an April 17, 1998 screening in Minneapolis. Johnson praised the film for pointing out the ignorance prevalent in U.S. society, and for its accuracy. Johnson criticized the fact that he appears "emotionally distant" in the film, but admitted to having affected that facade intentionally. Johnson also commented on the similarities between the fact that the crimes portrayed in the film are committed in darkness and society's judgments that force gay people to hide.
A one-hour version of the film debuted on PBS June 23, 1998 as part of its POV series. According to the Blades contact at the Georgia Voice, in June 1998 Georgia Public Television only aired one of the LGBT programs scheduled for PBS channels nationwide: Licensed to Kill. Seventeen minutes of the follow-up with Johnson is included in the 2007 PBS POV DVD boxed set release, along with interviews of Frank Chester, David Feikema, and Frederick Kirby.
Licensed to Kill has occasionally been screened following anti-gay hate crimes. Following the brutal beating of Matthew Shepard, a screening of the PBS version was held in the Natrona County Courthouse in Casper, Wyoming, just hours prior to Shepard's death. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures held a public screening of the documentary at the Ted Mann Theater on December 14, 2021, a week after the murder of Nikai David in Oakland, California.
The UCLA Legacy Project handled film restoration for the June 25, 2024, Blu-ray release.
Reviews The film received mostly positive critical reviews, for both theater and television releases, even from reviewers who took exception to the inclusion of excerpts from religious programming.
Theatrical screenings Barbara Shulgasser for the San Francisco Examiner was disturbed by the effect of the seven murderers. She commented on how the majority of the perpetrators seem to be uneducated, yet Johnson has a smooth logic that led her to define the common trait among the killers as "psychopathology". She ends her review pointing out that French offers up an excuse as though equating murder to freedom of speech. She rated the film 2.5 out of 4 stars. Janet Maslin of The New York Times commented on the fact that the documentary doesn't focus on obvious answers. Maslin also noted that Dong's patient methods in questioning the murderers helps highlight the need to question each killer's reasoning for his actions. The Advocate Mark Huisman pointed out the lack of hyperbole in the film and noted specifically the danger of an idea of one group having superiority over another permeating a society.