Eight Bullets: One Woman's Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence.

For years I have teased the love of my life about her rather ceaseless paranoia about attack. When I publish on lesbian and gay topics, she insists that my byline give only the state where we live, never the town. In the most liberal of settings - Harvard Square, for instance - she becomes furious if I accidentally forget we're among the straight folk and touch her as if we're in love. In our own house she will kiss or hug me only if all the shades are drawn.

It's a strange way to live for an affectionate person like me, someone who naturally puts my arm around friends and family, who would love to hold her hand almost everywhere we go. But I know enough horror stories, and have been the target of enough verbal garbage (you can't imagine some of the disgusting things teenagers spit out), to know there's reason to indulge her.

One of the worst of those horror stories - the nightmare of every lesbian I know - is Claudia Brenner's. In May 1988, she and her girlfriend went for a weekend hike on the Appalachian Trail. Hiking away from their first campsite, they happened across a creepy man, moved on, happened across him (toting a hunting rifle) again on the trail, and finally found themselves a shady, remote camp spot. But he was waiting.

As they began kissing and playing sexually, he shot Brenner's girlfriend, Rebecca Wight, in the liver. Within hours, Wight died. Brenner was critically wounded by five bullets to her face, neck, and arm, escaping death or paralysis only because a bullet heading toward her spine slowed when it shattered her molars. Eight Bullets - the number he fired - is the story of that attack.

It's a story I never wanted to incorporate so specifically into my daily consciousness. Eight Bullets minutely chronicles Brenner's journey, from the time she met and began dating Wight through the killer's pursuit, capture, and sentencing. We learn the details of every decision made on that camping trip, every step taken and word uttered. We follow her as she agonizingly leaves her bleeding lover and walks four miles to a road, where she flags down a passing car with a flashlight. We trace her helicopter trip to the Hershey Medical Center's trauma unit, her surgery, and her shocked recuperation. We hear about each step taken by her extended friendship family and post-trauma support team, which is anchored in stereotypically lesbian fashion by Brenner's ex-lover, Anne, and Anne's new partner, Gina. We learn of the surprisingly respectful treatment by the Pennsylvania state police who investigate the case and pursue the killer, even after Brenner decides to come out and reveals that she and Wight were lovers attacked for their affections.

What surprised me as much as it did Brenner is that the police and prosecutor thought their respect and concern were an unremarkable part of their job. Brenner attributes this respect to being a poster-girl victim: a pretty white woman, a serious architecture student, open and articulate, flanked by stable, loving family and friends. And the assailant, Stephen Roy Carr, was a poster-boy suspect: an unemployed drifter who had served time in a Florida prison and jumped parole. Although the defense tried to suggest that Wight and Brenner's lovemaking provoked the killer, the judge ruled this irrelevant. In a plea-bargain, Carr was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no parole.

Despite her "perfect" victim status, Brenner knows that being attacked for being lesbian or gay is far from remarkable. There's Jenny Jones's talk-show guest, Scott Amedure, murdered because he mentioned his affections to the wrong guy. Or Charlie Howard, thrown over a Portland, Maine, bridge by a group of young men. Or the Latina woman, Anna-Maria Rosales, shot and killed when leaving a Washington, D.C., gay bar. Or the fifty-five-year-old Vietnamese man, Loc Minh Truong, beaten unconscious on Laguna Beach.

In 1994 nine national tracking centers reported twenty-two hate killings of lesbians and gay men and 887 physical assaults. There was a total of 2,064 incidents of anti-gay harassment, with 30 percent against women - incidents that have been documented as underreported. While this total remained roughly the same as the year before, down from a 1992 high, incidents have become increasingly more violent - perhaps predictably, considering the greater publicity given to our pursuit of our civil rights, and the response of hate.

That Claudia Brenner's is the attack that most chills me, and other women I know, tells me how much we expect attack. Going into and out of lesbian or gay bars, announcing a crush on national TV, walking on a known gay beach - in such places we know enough to fear those unstable folk (drifters, adolescent boys, angry unemployed men) who decide to release their frustrations on our heads, spines, and kidneys.

But the belief that elsewhere we're safe is false. In fact, in my own state, only 8 percent of 1994's hate incidents happened in known lesbian or gay gathering places; 39 percent happened near the victim's home, and 32 percent on a public street or place of business. The attack on Wight and Brenner illustrates how wrong is the idea that we can keep ourselves safe by being good girls and boys. Eight Bullets chills me into respecting my spouse's fears.

After a slow recovery from her attack, Brenner became an outspoken advocate, appearing in Congressional hearings and on talk shows to tell her disturbing tale. In the course of these appearances, as in her book, she straightforwardly makes the argument that Progressive readers surely know: hate violence is bred when intolerance is socially endorsed.

Brenner's shooting is of a piece with killings in abortion clinics, the blowing up of the Oklahoma City federal building, the swastikas painted in Jewish cemeteries. Wight is dead because of casually slung hate language (did I hear someone say "Barney Fag?"); because we're shut out from social institutions like marriage; and because political and religious leaders cynically launch campaigns to demonize us, replacing the Communists as the currently favored bogeymen, thus painting targets around our heads, at least in the minds of our least stable and most violent citizens.

Does that sound too strong? In the month after the passing of Colorado's Amendment 2, which barred civil rights for lesbians and gay men, anti-gay violence increased by 275 percent - and decreased again dramatically when the appeals court ruled the measure unconstitutional. I do not, therefore, think it too strong to say that Wight is dead because of endorsements like the Vatican's, which Brenner quotes: "When civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when ... irrational and violent reactions increase."

But because Brenner's book is unevenly written and makes such arguments at a fairly basic level, Eight Bullets is perhaps best read by people new to these issues; by other such victims who want to hang onto the words of one who survived and went on to a healthy, productive life; and by those interested in tracing one woman's evolution from private citizen to outspoken advocate.

For those looking for a more complex vision, let me recommend Heather MacDonald's video, Ballot Measure 9, a stunning chronicle of the threats and violence targeting lesbians and gay men and our allies during Oregon's 1992 anti-gay hate campaign.

After seeing it a second time, I hesitantly asked my friends - their faces disturbed, their eyes hollow - if they'd cried, too.

They had. And not just at our enemies' viciousness, but, like me, at the fact that so many heterosexual allies risked their lives to speak out on our behalf. One such woman had the lug nuts on her wheels loosened, so that she lost control of her car on a mountain road.

It still surprises and moves me - how numb one gets to being considered trash! - that non-gay strangers like Brenner's detective, or the NAACP in Oregon, or so many others might grasp our humanity enough to come to our aid. Because isn't that the only way to prevent more tales likes Brenner's?

(E.J. Graffs writing has recently appeared in The New York Times, Out, The Women's Review of Books, and the new literary lesbian fiction anthology, "Tasting Life Twice." She was a 1993 winner of the Astraea National Lesbian Action Foundation's Emerging Writers Awards.)