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The film Boys Don’t Cry diverges from the The Brandon Teena Story in several ways, most notably in the total exclusion of the third shooting victim, Philip DeVine, from the narrative (in addition to Brandon Teena, Lotter and Nissen shot Brandon’s friend Lisa Lambert and Lisa’s sister’s boyfriend, Philip DeVine).

But Boys Don’t Cry is clearly based on the documentary. Even the cinematography echoes that of the documentary, with its lingering focus on long empty country roads, wide cornfields, and the quiet beauty of the Nebraska countryside. Hopefully the filmmakers of Boys Don’t Cry intended their film to be something of an homage to the documentary, because otherwise, as filmmaker Susan Muska told PlanetOut.com, “It's a cheap rip-off.”

Boys Don’t Cry’s debt to The Brandon Teena Story is most apparent in the way Brandon is portrayed: as a handsome, gentle youth with a weakness for pretty girls who nevertheless broke the law by forging checks and stealing cars. Hilary Swank’s performance as Brandon is simply breathtaking, and she clearly deserved the Oscar she won for her work in the film; the way she completely inhabits the character of Brandon is mesmerizing.

Chloe Sevigny’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of Lana Tisdel is equally convincing, and watching her romance with Swank’s character brings a poignant note of much-needed optimism to this tragic story.

Both the documentary and the film expose a disturbing core of homophobia among not only the killers but Brandon himself, who insists early on in Boys Don’t Cry that he is not a “dyke.” Susan Muska explained to PlanetOut.com in 2000 that the research she and Olafsdottir undertook in Nebraska revealed a deep-seated fear of being labeled a lesbian. Muska notes, “There was this attitude of, ‘Well, he's going to get a sex change operation,’ and that was OK for some reason. But the fear of being a lesbian, or the suspicion that they were lesbian, was not OK.”

Similarly, in the case of Gwen Araujo’s murder, it is the fear of being labeled gay that was unacceptable for Magidson and Merel. Nicole Brown, a witness at the party where Araujo was killed, has testified that upon learning that Araujo was male, Merel—who had had sex with Araujo—immediately claimed that “I’m not gay.”

According to Merel’s attorney Michael Thorman in an interview with the Dallas Voice, Merel was driven to murder out of “shame, humiliation, shock and revulsion” that resulted from realizing he had slept with a man.

Transgenderism is a complicated issue that is deeply embedded in our society’s notions of what it means to be a man or a woman, and it cannot be easily unraveled or understood. What The Brandon Teena Story and Boys Don’t Cry did for transgenderism was to reveal its existence in all its complex humanity. As the murder of Gwen Araujo shows, we as a society have not taken many steps forward in coming to accept those of us who do not easily fit into the boxes “male” or “female.”

So while it has been over ten years since the death of Brandon Teena, and several years since The Brandon Teena Story and Boys Don’t Cry have been available at your local Blockbuster, the problems that these films brought to light have not been resolved.

Taking the time to watch them again—or even to watch them for the first time—is as rewarding as it is painful, because it reminds us that as far as we have come in terms of fighting homophobia, we still have a long way to go, and the fight to make the world safer for people like Brandon Teena is worth it.