I was trying to find a quote from the movie sleepers for my paper (yes, i somehow managed to write a paper on godfather last semester and one on sleepers this semester), and i came across a mildly interesting review of the movie by Roger Ebert. He made some good points about how some of the dialogue was cliched, how Father Bobby never explains his decision to lie b/c he can't, and how the code of the streets is similar to the code followed by the mafia. But here's where he loses me:

So what we really have here is a situation in which the pop culture version of the Mafia code, as popularized by the evangelist Mario Puzo and elaborated by his acolytes like Carcaterra, is valued above traditional morality. If you doubt that the movie depends on homophobia to justify its morality, ask yourself: If the boys had been beaten but not sexually molested, would the movie play the same way? Would the priest arrive at the same decision? Would the verdict seem as justified?

correlation does not equal causation. yes, if you remove the rape, the movie plays different. and yes, the rape happened to be man on man (or in this case, man on boy). but that doesn't mean that the increased sensitivity of the viewer makes them homophobic. What if they were little girls who were raped by male prison guards? would we be any less horrified? absolutely not. Rape, for whatever reasons (and that's a whole different rant) is a different TYPE of crime. It just is. It's not just physical anguish but mental as well.

If those kids were just beaten it would have played out as a different movie. But I don't think i'm homophobic for thinking that. I saw the victims as "kids" and not "boys".