Behind closed doors: domestic violence.

Dana walked into the only battered women's shelter in her Midwestern city with a bloody nose, bruises across her chest, and a couple of fingers as mangled as her spirit.

A caseworker raced to her, first calling in a doctor to tend to her wounds and then leading her to a room where she could rest. "You're in a safe place now," the caseworker comforted. "You can relax."

Dana believed her and sank into a soft cot, falling asleep without even slipping under the covers. For three days she let her paranoia subside, letting down her guard to tell her caseworker of the daily abuse she suffered at the hands of her lesbian partner.

On the fourth day Dana ran out of the shelter screaming. She had walked into a common area to find, sitting casually on a couch, the woman who for two years slammed Dana's face against the kitchen counter whenever Dana came home a few minutes late. "I just got the hell out of there, got into my car, and drove 600 miles to my mother's in Chicago," says Dana, who doesn't want her last name used. "I later found out that [her partner] told them she was abused, and because she's a woman they just checked her in too."

At least Dana had three days of peace. When Curt Rogers of Boston fled the torment of a lover who had restrained him for three hours and threatened his life, there was no place to turn. "A gay man cannot get into a shelter, period," says Rogers, who found hideouts with the help of coworkers in the weeks after he ran away. "A lesbian, depending on the shelter or her willingness to hide her sexuality, can go somewhere. The gay man is left hanging."

Neither gay men nor lesbians have good options, and gay groups around the nation don't seem eager to touch the issue, according to the second annual "Report on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Domestic Violence," published in October by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. The report's release gave the issue its greatest surge of publicity yet, prompting a spate of stories in the mainstream media that advocates hope win lead to a broader recognition that domestic violence doesn't happen just to straight women. "We are about 20 years behind the battered women's movement in terms of information and certainly in terms of the amount of resources available," says Susan Holt, project coordinator for domestic-violence programming at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center.

No shelers exist for men, though in San Francisco, Boston, and a few other cities, battered males can obtain hotel vouchers from domestic-violence agencies. None of the nation's 1,500 battered women's shelters are devoted to lesbians, although some have caseworkers who focus on lesbian clients. And most crisis hot-line operators answer the phone expecting traditional battered-women situations. "I called one of those once," Dana says, "but I hung up when the woman on the phone asked me if `he' was still there or if I expected `him' to come home soon."

If few services are available to the gay abuse survivor, even fewer exist for the batterer. In Boston a group for lesbian and bisexual abusers was formed this year by Emerge, the nation's oldest agency treating batterers, and the organization hopes to start one for gay male abusers in the next year. Emerge's clientele consists almost entirely of straight men court-ordered into therapy, something that judges rarely demand of gay or lesbian abusers. "They'll more often be self-referred or urged to do this by a therapist or partner," says clinical director Susan Cayouette.

Hundreds of male batterer groups meet across the nation, but Cayouette and others don't allow gay abusers to attend because they believe it creates a volatile situation among men already prone to violence. "What we found is that straight men have an added problem -- that there's racism and homophobia there as well as the sexism Chat makes them abusive to women," says John Hokanson, community liaison and chief educator at End Violence Now, an Atlanta-based group offering support services for victims and education for perpetrators of same-sex domestic violence.

Little reliable data are available to measure how pervasive gay domestic violence is, but activists frequently refer to several unscientific surveys over the past decade that claim that 25% of gay and lesbian partners are battered. The study by the antiviolence coalition cited 2,352 cases of abuse in 1996 in 12 U.S. cities, a vast undercounting but still the most the coalition has ever been able to document, says report coauthor Greg Merrill.

If the 25% figure is correct, that's the same percentage estimated for women in heterosexual relationships. Yet activists meet with widespread resistance when they push the issue among gay men and lesbians. "Many people have expressed to me a great deal of embarrassment that we've revealed this report to the mainstream media because we shouldn't be promoting negative information about us," says Merrill, director of client services at San Francisco's Community United Against Violence. "People just don't want to talk about it. Gay people feel immune to domestic violence the same way straight people in the beginning of the AIDS epidemic felt immune to HIV."

Instead gay men and lesbians focus on combating hate crimes or winning various legal rights. "You tend to say, `OK, I'm going to go home to the person who knows I'm gay, and I want to believe it's a safe place,'" says Hokanson. "There are a lot of hate crimes, but then to come back to our own relationships and be bossed around or abused is something we don't want to talk about."

Unlike the way gays worked early on to involve heterosexuals in the AIDS crisis, heterosexuals aren't rushing to insist that domestic violence is also a gay concern. Rather, gay domestic-abuse activists actually spend time trying to convince society that gay domestic violence exists. They're also working to debunk the notion that people in same-sex relationships ought to be able to defend themselves. "The person who is contacted for help will often assume that this is a mutual battering situation, which is a myth," says Lynn Frost, a lesbian abuse survivor on staff with Little Rock, Ark.'s Women's Project, one of the reporting agencies for the study. "Because both persons are of the same sex, the counselor or volunteer assumes there is not a power issue involved."

Police officers often make the same assumptions, a key reason gay men and lesbians rarely file domestic abuse reports. "I would never call the police, because police officers are notoriously not safe," says Connie Burk, executive director of Advocates for Abused and Battered Lesbians, based in Seattle. "Very often officers can't figure out who is the abuser, so survivors are arrested instead because they're bigger or more butch."

It's Sgt. Norman Hill's job to fix that in Boston. Hill, the police department's liaison to the gay community, gives recruits a six-hour training program on gay issues, an hour of which is devoted to handling same-sex disputes. "I think the workshops are working, because I have had instances where people have walked up to me on the street to say, `I had a problem with my significant other, and we had to call the police, and they were excellent.'" Such success heartens activists but remains rare, with many officers denying that ignorance of gay issues interferes with their work. Sgt. Ernest Whitten of the Little Rock Police Department's domestic-violence division bristled at the suggestion that his officers might need training on how to handle gay domestic abuse, insisting, "We deal with them all the same." And abuse survivor Rogers, who started Boston's Gay Men's Domestic Violence Project after leaving his abusive relationship, says some officers in other parts of Massachusetts dismiss his message: "Try going into a room with 16 police officers in uniform who don't want to hear your story. Then you have to explain your gay relationship to them and tell them how it went bad, knowing you're confirming their inner thoughts about how it was doomed."

Progress on any front has been slow, primarily because few of the millions of dollars spent annually by state and federal agencies are earmarked for the gay-related component of the problem. "It burns me up that a gay man who is a victim of domestic violence is being denied services simply because he is a gay man," Rogers says. "We're talking about life-and-death services, protection from a batterer. Things will eventually change, but people are going to have to get angry, get noisy."

First, though, the community needs to be educated. Unlike the battered women's movement -- which received a huge boost from the publicity surrounding the murder of O.J. Simpson's ex-wife and allegations that Simpson had abused her -- gay abuse survivors have few famous examples or national talk shows to mirror their plight. Olympic diving star Greg Louganis revealed intimate details of domestic abuse in his autobiography Breaking the Surface and on the speaking circuit, but advocates say even his efforts weren't enough to jar a reticent community into alarm.

Indeed, many gay men and lesbians prefer not to believe a problem exists, says Dana, the abuse survivor. In the year after she left her lover, she tried to describe her experiences to her new lesbian friends but found they didn't want to listen. The 36-year-old woman has retreated to writing about her trauma on America Online message boards and hoping that someday someone other than her therapist will believe her. "If that kind of thinking exists in our community," she muses, "how can we expect anyone else to care?"