The Roanoke Times

Printed Sept. 30, 2000

In London, a neo-Nazi was convicted this summer of planting a nail bomb at a gay bar in the city’s Soho district, killing a pregnant woman and two male friends and injuring 70 others.

In Grant Town, W.Va., two teen-agers stand accused of punching and kicking a gay man to death, then driving over his body to make it look like a hit-and-run.

From Texas to New Jersey to Virginia, authorities have yet to solve the killings of as many as 30 gay men and transvestites, thought to be the work of several serial killers.

In North Carolina and elsewhere, law officers are still looking for Eric Robert Rudolph, who is charged with the 1996 Atlanta Olympic bombing and a bombing seven months later that injured five people at a gay nightclub in Atlanta.

Experts on homophobic violence say the shooting spree last weekend in Roanoke that killed Danny Lee Overstreet and wounded six others was one of the worst anti-gay attacks in U.S. history.

But those who track hate crimes say it is not unprecedented. Rather, they say, it’s an example of the continuing tide of violence directed at gays, lesbians, bisexuals and other sexual minorities.

"It's not unique in terms of the way lesbians and gay men have been victimized in the United States," said Gregory Herek, a psychology professor at University of California at Davis who is working on a book about sexual prejudice. "To say that doesn't lessen the tragedy for the victims and the victims’ families."

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, a gay-rights organization, says reports of anti-gay incidents rose for five years in a row before showing a slight decrease last year. The number of anti-gay murders in the United States rose from 26 in 1998 to 29 in 1999.

Coalition spokesman Jeffrey Montgomery said anti-gay violence has remained high, even as the overall crime rate in the United States has plummeted.

The coalition recorded 1,965 anti-gay incidents last year. That figure includes assaults, bomb threats, vandalism, police harassment and other forms of discrimination. The group estimates 65 to 70 percent of such incidents don’t get reported.

Tod Burke, an associate professor of criminal justice at Radford University, said many gays and lesbians are reluctant to report crimes against them because they're afraid they'll be "outed," or that they'll be treated poorly by police or judges.

Most hate crimes don’t target large numbers of victims at once, as happened in the Roanoke, London and Atlanta incidents. More commonly, the violence is targeted at a couple or a single victim, as in the Grant Town killing.

The anti-violence coalition's 1999 annual report included these examples:

• In Happy Valley, Calif., two white supremacist brothers have been charged with murdering two gay men in the couple’s mobile home. One of the brothers told a newspaper that he shot the men because he believes homosexuality is a sin: "I'm not guilty of murder. I'm guilty of obeying the laws of the creator." The brothers also face charges in three synagogue fire-bombings and an abortion-clinic arson.

• In Cleveland, two gay men were leaving a bar when two young males jumped out of some bushes yelling "faggots" and "Queers, you are going to get it." The attackers hit the two men with plastic milk crates and chased them down the street.

• In Massachusetts, a woman with lesbian pride bumper stickers was struck at a traffic light by three men in a truck who called her "dyke" and "fag." The woman sped away but the men caught her and smashed into her truck repeatedly, giving each other "high fives" as they drove away.

Most gays and lesbians haven't personally been victims of hate crimes. But gay-rights activists say the threat of mayhem is a day-to-day reality, like lynching in the Jim Crow era, that undermines people’s sense of well-being and their freedom to live their lives as they choose.

"It’s just a fact of gay life in this country," the anti-violence coalition's Montgomery said. "I’m not suggesting that gay people walk around constantly looking over their shoulders and being in fear. But it’s part of the psyche that at any moment, something like that can happen to us."

The public often doesn't understand this, Radford University's Burke said, but the Roanoke shootings may help educate people about the prevalence of hate crimes against sexual minorities: "You can't downplay it when you have seven people shot."

Major episodes of violence have often served as a rallying point in the fight for gay rights.

In 1978, Daniel J. White, an ex-cop and former San Francisco supervisor, walked into City Hall and shot and killed the city’s mayor and Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s first openly gay supervisor. Milk became an icon of the gay-rights movement in the city and across the nation.

In 1980, Ronald K. Crumply, a mentally deranged former New York City transit cop, shot and killed two people and wounded six others outside a Greenwich Village gay bar. Two days before the shootings, he called his father and claimed he was being pursued by hundreds of gay men. It was one of a series of serious attacks in Greenwich Village that helped spark organized efforts to combat anti-gay violence in the city.

The 1998 torture and murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming, produced an outpouring of outrage and activism across the United States. Soon after, a Time/CNN poll found most Americans believed the same kind of attack could happen in their hometowns.

The murder fueled efforts to add sexual orientation to federal hate crime protections. Legislation to do that is now the subject of negotiations presided over by U.S. Sen. John Warner, R-Va.

"When Matthew Shepard was killed, it was huge in terms of people's response," said Shirley Lesser, executive director of Virginians for Justice, which tracks anti-gay violence. "It started to turn the tide."

Social change comes slowly, Lesser said, but she expects the Roanoke shootings will foster more activism and more change -- in Roanoke and across the nation.

"Any time that the reality of discrimination and hate hits people in the face, they're spurred to action," Lesser said. "The question is how long that action will continue."

Mike Hudson can be reached at 981-3332 or mikeh@roanoke.com

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