“Nobody
deserves that.” We’ve all heard this
phrase used about extreme acts of violence toward gay
people and other “others,” like blacks and Jews.
It’s a chilling phrase that points to a troubling
fact—that many people only recognize the humanity
of those who are different from them when violence strikes.
I’ve been mulling over the phrase since I heard
it again in a disturbing new play, The Laramie Project,
which looks at how Matthew Shepard’s murder shook
up the small Wyoming town where the young gay man was
brutally attacked. The dialogue of Moises Kaufman’s
play is drawn from transcripts of actual interviews
with residents of Laramie conducted by the playwright
and members of his theater company in the months after
Shepard’s death. In one unsettling scene, when
an interviewer asks a devoutly Christian straight woman
for her thoughts about Shepard’s murder, she says
with a shudder, “Nobody deserves that.”
The implication behind the phrase is clear: We, in fact,
“deserve” most of the prejudice we experience.
By making ourselves visible, lesbians and gay men are
just “asking for it”—to be denied marriage
rights, to fear the loss of our jobs, to have our sexual
activities criminalized, to die of AIDS, to be shunned
by our parents and our churches, to be tossed out of
the military, to have our fitness as parents challenged,
even to be verbally harassed.
You can see this implied in an Associated Press poll
taken in May of this year. The results indicate that
46 percent of Americans still believe homosexuality
is a choice, while another 20 percent aren’t sure.
Many of these same Americans think lesbians and gay
men don’t merit rights like marriage and domestic
partnership because we’ve perversely opted to be
different.
I imagine, though, that many of those questioned in
the AP poll would, like the character in Kaufman’s
play, say that lesbians and gay men don’t “deserve”
to be beaten to death. In the same way, the killing
of four black girls in a Birmingham, Ala., church bombing
in 1963 helped turn the opinion of many whites against
racial segregation. And, following World War II, many
non-Jews finally “got” anti-Semitism when
they saw graphic photos of the Nazi concentration camps.
To illustrate further, take the example of the students
at the urban college where my partner teaches. In an
English composition class called “The Family,”
she recently assigned the reading of an article about
the extreme experience of a young lesbian who lives
in Utah. Last fall, the woman’s parents and brothers
savagely beat her, because lesbianism presumably dishonored
her Jordanian family. Her brother wielded a knife and
threatened, “You’re gonna die tonight.”
Her terrifying ordeal ended only when she promised to
renounce her female lover and return to Jordan.
Now many of my partner’s students are openly homophobic.
They think nothing of making retching noises when two
men kiss in a movie. When a speaker from the local anti-violence
project spoke to them about the harm inflicted by words
like “faggot,” some of them shrugged it off.
If studies about young people and anti-gay violence
hold true, many of them have probably engaged in verbal
or physical harassment themselves.
However, when they read about the brutal assault on
a lesbian by her own flesh and blood, the unique form
of prejudice that gay people face finally came clear.
They began to recognize that the family, commonly viewed
as a refuge, may sometimes be a source of emotional
and physical violence for those who are gay.
Because extreme violence gets through to people, the
lesbian and gay community faces the dilemma of how much
we should accentuate its occurrence. In fact, we often
overemphasize it, treating the horrific experiences
of Matt Shepard and Billy Jack Gaither as the norm rather
than the exception.
Despite how effective focusing on extremes might be,
it’s equally important to steer public attention
toward the very common fear of violence that
lesbians and gay men experience. Sneers, slurs, and
threats create a hostile environment, to borrow a phrase
from sexual harassment law. Although fear alone won’t
make the nightly news, it’s what most lesbians
and gay men face on a routine basis. And getting others
to acknowledge how living in fear affects human beings
is essential to achieving social change.
For example, how many straight people are aware that
it takes substantial courage for a lesbian or gay man
simply to hold a lover’s hand in public? I’d
like to see us all try this educational action: Ask
a couple of straight people you know to refrain from
any public displays of affection toward a spouse or
lover for just one day. Tell them to imagine that if
they slip up, they could be verbally or physically assaulted,
or both. Ask them how it makes them feel, emotionally
and psychologically, to be always on guard.
