Executive order: enough hate already.

President Clinton wants to get tough on perpetrators of hate crimes. Gay activist say it's about time 

After years of driving around East Point, Mich., with a gay pride flag on his truck, Mark Stanow removed the decal in August. "I'm very proud of who I am. I used to love it when someone would see the flag and honk or wave. It was like, Yeah, we are family," says Stanow, 34.

But on the night of August 11 a group of teenage boys spotted the decal when Stanow and his partner pulled into a service station to buy a pack of cigarettes. The teenagers followed Stanow's truck out of the parking lot and tailed him for 40 minutes. Stanow says they were yelling "fag" and "queer" while trying to ram his truck. Finally, he pulled over.

"I'd had enough," Stanow remembers. "As I started to get out of the car, one of them sprayed me in the face with Mace. They were kicking me and screaming `fag, fag, fag.'" Stanow suffered four broken ribs and eye injuries. His Partner was beaten even worse and suffered a broken bone over one of his eyes. Of the four teenagers involved, three were charged with assault and destruction of property.

Stanow has hired a lawyer to make sure his attackers are prosecuted to the full extent of the law. "They're juveniles, and I'm worried they are going to say `poor boys' and let them off." Because the attack occurred in Michigan, the teens have not been charged with a hate crime. Michigan is one of 30 states lacking specific protections for gay and lesbian victims. When the state's Ethnic Intimidation Act was passed in 1988, the phrase sexual orientation was, crossed out in the last minute of the legislative session. Efforts to amend the law to include sexual orientation are planned for the fall session, and Stanow plans to lobby his senator.

Meanwhile, advocates for victims like Stanow and his partner are preparing for the White House Conference on Hate Crimes, to be held November 10. Like Michigan's, the federal hate-crimes law excludes sexual orientation. Activists have been pushing the Clinton administration for years on the issue, but a recent spate of hate crimes nationwide--including the high-profile bombing of Atlanta's Otherside Lounge, a lesbian bar--has brought the problem to the forefront.

"The president is going to use his bully pulpit in this area," vows Richard Socarides, a special assistant to the president who serves as his liaison to the gay and lesbian community and who will be director of the hate crimes conference. Besides calling for the conference, Clinton directed U.S. attorney general Janet Reno to convene a working group of 25 people to undertake a broad review of hate crimes. The group will present its recommendations at the conference. In addition, the administration plans to involve the U.S. Department of Education to bring the discussion into the nation's schools.

According to a report issued by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects, the incidence of hate crimes against gays and lesbians increased 6% in 14 major cities in 1996. Christine Quinn, executive director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, says the attacks have become more violent. "In 1995 the most common weapons used were rocks, sticks, or bottles--something you would pick up off the ground. In 1996 the most common weapons used were bats, clubs ... something you would bring from home."

This year alone Arizona, Delaware, Nebraska, and Louisiana have included sexual orientation in their hate crimes laws, bringing the total number of states with such protection to 20, plus the District of Columbia. But activists say the patchwork of laws, some strong and some weak, has left the country with an unequal system of justice. "We need a baseline for punishment of crimes against gays and lesbians, " says Winnie Stachelberg, legislative director for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobbying group based in Washington D.C.

Even in states with hate-crimes laws protecting gays, getting the cops and courts to enforce them can be difficult. "In Massachusetts it's somewhat spotty depending on the county you live in," says Robb Johnson of the antiviolence project at Fenway Community Health Center in Boston. "Cape Cod, for instance, handles them very well. But central Massachusetts has a long ways to go." Like his counterparts nationwide, Johnson tries to convince reluctant police and prosecutors that they have a hate crime on their hands. He recalls one case where it took police a year to classify the murder of a gay man as a hate crime. Sometimes, he says, prosecutors ate reluctant to add a hate crime charge out of fear it will cost them the case. "They just go for murder me. They don't want to have to introduce another charge whose elements they have to prove."

Problems also exist on the sentencing side. In July 23-year-old Ronald Henry Gauthier of Montana was sentenced to 10 years' probation by a Houston jury for the murder of Fred Mangione, a 46-year-old gay man who was stabbed 35 times with a deer-gutting knife in the back of a truck in the parking lot of a gay bar. Gauthier held Mangione down while another man, Daniel Bean, 21, did the stabbing. (Bean, Gauthier's half brother and a self-described white supremacist, got life in prison.) "There's a real acceptance of this type of violence, " says Dianne Hardy-Garcia, executive director of the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas. She called the lenient Gauthier sentence "par for the course" in Texas, where hate crimes overall increased by 7 percent in 1996.

Also in Texas, Nancy Rodriguez is waging a battle to keep the men who killed her gay son in 1991 behind bars. Of the ten involved in the attack, six are in jail, and Rodriguez is fighting to keep them there. She has enlisted various chapters of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in letter-writing campaigns lobbying the judge to deny parole. "I've turned into an activist," Rodriguez says. "It's not going to bring my child back, but if I can help save one child, it's worth it."

Texas has a hate-crimes law, but it does not specify the groups protected. Instead, it outlaws all crimes based on bias or prejudice. Hardy-Garcia says that the law is useless for gays and that attempts to strengthen it have failed in the Texas legislature.

She blames the increase on the emerging visibility of gay men and lesbians. "In the past you had to make an effort to find a gay bar or a park where gays and lesbians go," she says. "Now more people are aware of where we are." The rainbow sticker, for example, is no longer a secret among gay men and lesbians. For Stanow's attackers, in fact, it apparently was a bull's-eye.

Still, many gay hate-crime victims have begun to speak up. When the Michigan legislature takes up adding sexual orientation to its hate-crimes law, 33-year-old Jim Calcaterra says he'll be there to testify. Calcaterra allegedly was beaten by a bouncer outside what he calls a "straight redneck" bar in New Baltimore, Mich., in September 1996 after an altercation with a bar patron who he says called him a "fag." According to Calcaterra, police did not arrest anyone until after he told his story to a local television station.

The incident transformed Calcaterra into an activist. "This pulled me out of the closet. I went out and got a rainbow sticker and put it on my car."