A Case of Loathing

Rod Johnson, a waiter in Georgetown, was walking home one night through a park and passed an area known as a contact place for homosexuals. Suddenly, he was surrounded.

"They came out of the shadows," Johnson told The Washington Post. "They weren't waiting for me, just for someone." Someone gay. Beaten with baseball bats, Johnson didn't fully recover physically for months. His fingers were smashed and his arm and shoulder were broken in three places. It will be much longer before he will be able to control the memories of that ambush. He can no longer stand being alone in the dark, his windows are always locked and in his nightmares---always the same---he is brutally beaten. It is always the same nightmare.

Three 18-year-olds were arrested for the assault. One of them, Mark Hyder, explained that he and his friends had gone to the park that night specifically looking for gays to beat up. "I have a hatred for gays," Hyder said.

Johnson is one of a rising number of gays throughout the country who are considered fair game of roving bands of brutal homophobes. It is conventional wisdom that the most vicious hate crimes are racist, but the mounting evidence indicates that violence against gays is more ferocious than any other form of bigotry.

A 1988 study by the New York Governor's Task Force on Bias-Related Violence noted that attacks against gays and lesbians are more severely damaging than assaults against any other group. And case histories gathered by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (N.G.L.T.F.), San Francisco's Community United Against Violence and other groups give a vivid sense of how fierce many of these attacks are. There are also corollary newspaper accounts such as this story in the September 17, 1989, Washington Post:

In Doylestown, Pennsylvania, two men were sentenced to death for driving a homosexual man they had met in a bar to an open field and slashing his throat. "There's no question that they killed him only and solely because he was gay," said Bucks County district attorney Alan M. Rubenstein, who prosecuted the case.

But killing is not nearly satisfying enough. The ecstatic prelude---whether or not it results in death---is what especially turns on the gangs of righteous homophobes. In an article in the September 1990 Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Kevin T. Berrill, director of the antiviolence project of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and its expert on pogroms against gays and lesbians, writes:

Recalling victims of murder and other attacks that she has seen, Melissa Mertz, director of victim services at Bellevue hospital ... observed that "attacks against gay men were the most heinous and brutal I encountered. They frequently involved torture, cutting, mutilation and beating, and showed the absolute intent to rub out the human being because of his [sexual] preference."

Also contrary to conventional belief, gays---more than any other group---are "probably the most frequent victims" of violent bigotry. That was the conclusion of a 1987 report by P. Finn and T. McNeil sponsored by the Department of Justice. They note that the other frequent victims of violence because they're "different" are "blacks, Hispanics, Southeast Asians and Jews."

What pass for documentaries about bigotry on national television do not directly address many viewers' most cherished prejudices---such as the one that holds that gays and lesbians are perverts, predatory, probably child molesters, the original source of AIDS and, therefore, get what's coming to them. A prime-time program, however, that would begin to reveal the extent and horror of unleashed homophobia might awaken more of the populace to the savagery that explodes when homophobia is no longer limited to taunts and other verbal onslaughts. Typical, for instance, is this catalog of attacks from the June 1989 American Psychologist, compiled by the N.G.L.T.F. and recounted by Dr. Gregory M. Herek, a social psychologist on the Davis campus of the University of California:

In Portland, Maine, three women were assaulted after their assailant directed antilesbian epithets at them; all three women required medical attention, and one of them suffered a fractured jaw, several broken teeth and bruised ribs. ... In Boston, a gay man leaving a bar was attacked by three assailants who raped him with bottles, lighted matches and other implements while repeatedly stating that "this is what faggots deserve." ... In Stockton, California, a well-known gay minister was found dead in the trunk of his car; his skull was crushed, his throat was slashed and there were multiple stab wounds in his chest.

Yet the indomitable Representative William Dannemeyer stated on the floor of the House when opposing the inclusion of homosexuals in a hate-crimes-statistics bill: "Sexual preference has no business being elevated to the same status as race, color, religion or national origin."

On the other hand, Berrill is hardly engaging in hyperbole when he says, "Although we have made remarkable strides toward freedom [during the past twenty years], we remain a community under siege, battling an epidemic of bigotry and violence."

Writing in The Village Voice, an anonymous gay or lesbian struck a similar grim note: "I hate having to convince straight people that lesbians and gays live in a war zone, that we're surrounded by bomb blasts only we seem to hear."

A recent study by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force reports that "83 percent of the [gay] men and women believed they might be victimized in the future, and 62 percent said they feared for their safety."

But we do not know precisely how many gays and lesbians have been the targets of sadistic violence. Nearly all the reports I've seen say that those figures are incomplete. As Berrill, author of the most recent N.G.L.T.F. violence report, puts it: "Nor does this report measure the full extent of antigay violence and victimization. ... Because of underreporting by the victims and a lack of systematic data collection throughout most of the U.S., we estimate that the vast majority of antigay episodes ... were not documented."

The experience of one victim provides a sense of why much of the violence against gays and lesbians is underreported. As noted in The Washington Post, in 1983, two high school students met Ed Hassell in a local gay bar. He was taken to a deserted park, where they beat and tried to castrate him. The assailants pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon. Their punishment: probation.

"I would never file any charges again," Hassell told the newspaper.

According to a 1989 study reported in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, a startling 73 percent of the victims of antigay violence never said a word to the police about what had happened to them. One primary reason is fear of being a victim for the second time---a victim of the police. In that 1989 study, for instance, 67 percent of those who had not reported being victims of violence had experienced or perceived the police themselves as homophobic. And 14 percent were afraid that the police would bash them.

Also, 40 percent were fearful that reporting the incident and thereby being in a police file might disclose their sexual orientation to the public at large.

So it is fear of the police that, to a great extent, discourages reporting of physical attacks. Cops are not particularly empathetic to gays and lesbians. And they often tend to blame the gay or lesbian for having been attacked. (If they were normal, they wouldn't "provoke" all this hostility.) Judges, juries and prosecutors also sometimes blame this kind of victim for being a victim.

In the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, there is a story of a Broward County, Florida, circuit-court judge who "jokingly asked the prosecuting attorney, 'That's a crime now, to beat up a homosexual?' The prosecutor answered, 'Yes, sir. And it's also a crime to kill them.' To this, the judge replied, 'Times have really changed.' "

Somewhat. Just somewhat.

The question of who the perpetrators of this violence are must be preceded by illuminating the social context in which they feel emboldened---and, indeed, justified---in their attacks.

The New York Times has written of a study of homophobic attitudes by the New York Governor's Task Force on Bias-Related Violence: "In 'one of the most alarming findings,' the report found that while teenagers surveyed were reluctant to advocate open bias against racial and ethnic groups, they were emphatic about disliking homosexual men and women. They are perceived 'as legitimate targets that can be openly attacked,' the report said."

"In a survey of 2823 students from eighth to 12th grade," the Times wrote, "three quarters of the boys and half the girls said it would be bad to have a homosexual neighbor. The feelings were as strong among 12-year-olds as among 17-year-olds. Many students added gratuitous vicious comments about homosexuals; that was not the case with other groups."

Why do these student regard gays and lesbians as such permissible targets? Because they are far from full members of the society. Despite the widespread discrimination against gays and lesbians in jobs and housing, only two states---Wisconsin and Massachusetts---have civil rights laws protecting them against discrimination. A few dozen cities---including Chicago, San Francisco and New York---also have antidiscrimination statutes. But in the rest of the country, homosexuals are fair game for discrimination.

Knowing that gays and lesbians are societal outcasts, their attackers feel that they are acting on behalf of society in punishing them for the behavior that makes them outcasts.

And the political leaders of city, state and nation also largely ignore the state of siege under which gays and lesbians live. These leaders routinely excoriate those bigots who intimidate and attack blacks and Jews, but they seldom say anything about the state of danger in which homosexuals live.

An index to the defensive state of mind of many gays was a description in the Connecticut newspaper Fairpress of the opening of Norwalk, Connecticut's, first gay community center. A reporter for Fairpress was at times given only the first names of those attending the center's opening. They feared reprisals, they said, from clients or bosses or, in the case of a high school student, parents. One lesbian was afraid of being identified in a general-circulation publication. For some gays and lesbians, the more widely they are known not to be straight, the more possible is an attack. And not only a verbal attack. And not only a single attack. Many gays and lesbians have been victimized often.

Furthermore, contributing to their pariah status is the fact that, unlike any other nonmainstream group, homosexuals are not allowed to be part of the Armed Services. If they're found out while in uniform, they will be discharged and, in some cases, subject to prison time. And the Supreme Court has declared (in Bowers vs. Hardwick) that "there was no fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy," implying, as Tom Stoddard, executive director of Lambda Legal Defense, explains, "that there might be a fundamental right to engage in heterosexual sodomy."

That Supreme Court decision officially so diminished gays' and lesbians' right of privacy that it has been called the Dred Scott ruling of this century. (Just before the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled in Scott vs. Sandford that blacks, those free or those in slavery, had no rights under the Constitution.) Bowers, while hardly as drastic as Dred Scott, ruled that under the Constitution, homosexuals, in their bedrooms, have decidedly fewer rights than heterosexuals.

So all in all, many Americans believe that homosexuals are not equal in any way to straight Americans. Kids hear it from their parents over the dinner table, the very font of prejudice. And adults' homophobia is strengthened by the confirmation of other adults at bars, in the office, at poker, at sports events.

A continuing foundation, therefore, is laid for the chronic violence against gays and lesbians. But the feral nature of the perpetrators is shored up in other ways. According to the University of California's Dr. Herek, many of the gay bashers "see hating gay men and lesbians as a litmus test for being a moral person." The homosexual is "a proxy for all that is evil," and so those who batter him are attacking evil.

Another explanation that Herek makes is that many of the assaults on gays are by teenagers. These attacks, he says, "may provide a means for such male youths to affirm their masculinity by attacking someone who symbolizes, consciously or not, an unacceptable aspect of their own personalities (e.g., homoerotic attractions or a perception that they are not sufficiently masculine)."

Also, since the homosexual is so manifestly the outsider---the outcast---beating him up reinforces the attacker's sense of solidarity with the inside group, the no-longer Silent Majority.

A somewhat more cosmic rationalization for this brutality is advanced by Bob Altemeyer, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba, who has studied this perilous phenomenon for some time. According to him, many of the attackers believe that they are, in a sense, doing great good for generations to come.

"They see," Altemeyer told The New York Times, "homosexuality as a sign that society is disintegrating and as a threat to their sense of morality. Their self-righteousness makes them feel they are acting morally when they attack homosexuals. It overcomes the normal inhibitions against aggression."

This messianic lust for destroying the inferior but infectious "other" is akin to the attitudes of those young whites, and not only in the South, who have beaten up and sometimes lynched and castrated blacks to prevent "race mixing" that would poison the purity of the white race. (Germans were not the only people with a violent craving for eugenics.)

A significant pieces of evidence about attacks on homosexuals is that attackers usually leave their own turf to hunt down gays or lesbians. Most other bias attacks, on the other hand, take place when the victim makes the mistake of entering alien territory---as in the murders of blacks in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, New York.

The need, then, to "purify" oneself of any doubts of one's sexuality or the need to save the world from creeping homoeroticism drives the avenger to seek out the homosexual rather than to wait for him to come into the neighborhood.

There is general agreement among analysts of violence against gays that AIDS is not a primary cause of the increase in this violence during recent years. According to Herek, while the epidemic has focused more attention on gays and has, indeed, led to more attacks on them, the disease has not so much made antigay feelings more aggressive as it has provided "a convenient hook" on which the bashers "can hang their pre-existing prejudices."

Those prejudices have deep historical roots. Not that most of the attackers know much about our history of discrimination and violence against gays. But certain highly charged prejudices last longer than people's specific memories of their grim antecedents.

In the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Berrill and Herek have distilled the American ways of dealing with gays:

In Colonial New England, executions for sodomy occurred as early as 1646. A statute passed in 1655 by the New Haven colony mandated the death penalty for lesbianism as well as male homosexuality. ... During the late 19th Century, the medical profession joined the religious and legal (continued on page 164)Loathing(continued from page 98) establishment in victimizing gay people. Homosexuality was conceptualized as a mental illness and various "cures" included castration, hysterectomy, lobotomy, drug therapies and shock treatments. ...

[In the McCarthy era,] homosexuals were branded as security risks and traitors ... and were expelled from Government and military service. Inspired in part by antigay witch-hunts in Washington, police departments across the country routinely engaged in bar raids, blackmail, entrapment and other abuse.

Then came the gay rights movement, and while it has accomplished a great deal in terms of solidarity---the election of gays to public office in some parts of the country and much more visibility for homosexuals as knowledgeable and determined fighters for their own empowerment---there is still rampant antigay discrimination and violence.

Bigotry does not die easily---as blacks, Jews, Hispanics and Asian Americans know. But changes in the law can change practices, if not attitudes. Local, state and Federal civil rights laws should be expanded to include discrimination on the basis of sexual preference. (Only two states protect the civil rights of gays and lesbians; in Federal civil rights law, they are excluded.)

Consensual sexual behavior among adults---homosexuals and heterosexuals---should not be penalized. But this change can best be made under state constitutions and state courts (as in the recent decisions by state trial judges that laws in Kentucky, Michigan and Texas were unconstitutional). There is little hope of the United States Supreme Court giving equal treatment under the laws to gays in this regard, because the current Court is markedly more conservative than the Court that decided Bowers vs. Hardwick.

And the press can be of considerable use in exposing police departments, prosecutors and judges who turn into suspects gays who come to them as victims of violence.

Meanwhile, there are some signs of change. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force reports the following at a sentencing hearing in November 1989:

For a defendant convicted of bludgeoning a gay man to death in Wethersfield. Connecticut, prosecuting attorney Kevin McMahon described the gay community as "the ultimate victim" of the crime and argued for the maximum prison penalty as a way to deter future antigay crimes.

In delivering a 40-year sentence for the murder. Superior Court Judge Raymond R. Norko said that "any crime against any person in our society must be treated equally. Otherwise, we lose our sense of civilization."

Still, in certain sectors---and not only among the thugs with baseball bats---the bigotry thrives. The rock group Guns n' Roses adds to the poisonous pollution when it sings: "Immigrants and faggots/They make no sense to me/They come to our country/And think they'll do as they please/Like start some mini-Iran or spread some fucking disease."

And Heavy D. and the Boyz celebrate cultural diversity with: "You'll be as happy as a faggot in jail."

It's all part of the atmosphere, helping frame attitudes and their consequences. When Stepin Fetchit was in vogue, most white Americans saw him as exemplifying most blacks.

Rap groups such as Heavy D. don't cause homophobia, but with some of their audience---young, unsure of their own sexuality---they nurture it. Ironically, considering their own sometimes outcast status, they legitimize antigay bigotry. (Audio Two: "Are you gay?/I hope that ain't the case cause gay mothers get punched in the face/I hate faggots/They're living in the Village like meat on some maggots.")

But because there are layers of hatred, sometimes intersecting among all of us, there is no sure way to be precise about the causes of specific tragedies caused by virulent homophobia.

Berrill writes:

The extremes of antigay domestic violence were revealed in a recent trial in Chicago for the murder of a four-year-old boy by his mother and her live-in boyfriend.

During the summer of 1987, the boy was starved, burned, stuck with pins and needles, beaten with various implements, scalded with steaming water, tied up and hung upside down and gagged for hours because he was perceived to be homosexual. His brother was also tortured for the same reason. The boy was eventually killed by a blow to his head.

And in Greensboro, North Carolina:

A high school student was beaten by his parents and thrown out of his home after they discovered gay literature and informational fliers in his bedroom. The boy suffered a broken arm as a result of his parents' attack.

Berrill, the man who has been most immersed in the compilation and analysis of these dark scenes of violence, spoke at a meeting at the University of Pennsylvania, sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Part of what he said gets to the core of homophobia and its relationship to other virulent, infectious phobias:

As with racist, anti-Semitic, sexist and other bias-motivated crimes, these attacks are intended to violate and isolate not just the victim but an entire group. Unlike opportunistic crimes, these attacks are motivated less by the desire to rip people off than to rip them apart---psychically if not always physically.

They are acts of terrorism intended to punish gay people, women and people of color for being visible and to frighten them from exercising ... freedom of speech, association and assembly.

And sometimes, they make it impossible for them to exercise those rights by obliterating them.