this is long but stick with me, because we need to remember Charlie Howard.
Charlie Howard moved to Bangor, Maine during the early 80s. he was proudly gay and discriminated against because of it.
he was kicked out of a club for dancing with a man and assaulted by a woman in a supermarket, who yelled slurs at him. his kitten was found strangled on his porch.
on July 7th, 1984, as Charlie left a potluck with a friend, a car full of teenagers–3 boys, 2 girls–pulled up beside them. Charlie was chased down by the boys, brutally beaten, and called slurs. he had severe asthma and began having an attack. the boys dangled him over a bridge and, when he begged for his life because he couldn’t swim, they pried his hands off of the railing and threw him over. his friend fled to pull a fire alarm, but, by the time authorities got there, it was too late: Charlie had drowned. he was 23.
the murderers left the crime scene to attend a party, where they bragged about what they had done. they were minors and all the boys served under two years. the girls faced no chargges for not reporting the crime and helping the murderers leave the scene. the memorial in honor of Charlie that now stands beside the bridge has been defaced with homophobic slurs on numerous occasions. he’s dead and people still want to spit on his ghost.
Stephen King says that this crime is what woke him up to the violence faced by LGBT+ people. as a straight man, he had had the privilege of not having to think about this issue and says that this complacency and ignorance is what led to Charlie’s murder.
King included a fictionalized version of the murder in IT. in the novel, a gay man named Adrian is brutally beaten and thrown off a bridge as his boyfriend watches. he barely survives the fall and Pennywise is waiting for him at the bottom, drawn by the fear, suffering, and hatred. It crushes the still living Adrian’s ribs and bites him while taunting Adrien’s boyfriend, before dragging Adrian into the sewers.
It revels in the event and uses an image that is explicitly linked to the hate crime to torment Adrian’s boyfriend. this moment is there to make a clear statement: the homophobic murder of an innocent gay men is an act of pure, depraved evil. the embodiment of evil literally kills Adrian to conclude the hate crime.
Pennywise/It is also fueled by acts of racism, antisemitism, sexual violence, domestic abuse, and child abuse. he is monstrous in every sense, and often meant to represent the real bigotry and violence faced by children and marginalized people.
tl;dr: Stephen King was so horrified by the brutal murder of Charlie Howard, an innocent gay man, that he included a recreation of the hate crime in his book and added Pennywise to comment on the pure evil of homophobia and Charlie’s murder.
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