Hate: the crime that's not necessarily a crime.

As gay men and lesbians prepare to take part in annual gay pride events, antiviolence activists are bracing for another annual occurrence: a spike in antigay hate crimes. The phenomenon is, sadly, easy to predict, the activists say.

"Often it's very pronounced and very direct," says Tracey Conaty, field organizer for the Washington, D.C.-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "As soon as visibility increases, so does the violence."

Part of the reason for high rates of antigay hate crimes in June, when many cities traditionally celebrate gay pride, is that the summer months draw more people outside, increasing the potential pool of crime targets and perpetrators. Nonetheless, the apparent link between higher gay visibility and increased antigay violence tan be startling. In the Boston area last June, for example, three gay men were killed the weekend after the city's gay pride parade sparked a bitter debate about homosexuality in the mainstream press. Gay activists were left to speculate about the effects of the public acrimony, wondering just how much it had contributed to the killings.

And pride parades aren't the only examples of a correlation between visibility and violence. Bea Hanson, director of client services at the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, recalls when antigay violence in New York City rose during an especially divisive debate in 1992 over how homosexuality should be addressed in the city's public schools. "That was the first year that our incidence [of reported antigay hate crimes] didn't go down after the summer," Hanson says.

Violence can also rise during election campaigns on antigay referenda. in 1992, for example, the reported incidence of antigay violence increased in Oregon and Colorado as debate heated up over measures that sought to deny any civil rights protections to gays and lesbians on the basis of their sexual orientation. During a subsequent attempt to pass another such referendum in Oregon, a lesbian and a gay man were killed when the home they shared was firebombed. And in 1995 in Maine, activists reported that yard signs in opposition to an antigay referendum were riddled with bullet holes.

Nationally, reported antigay hate crimes increased by 6% in 1996 over the previous year, according to a March 11 report. But officials of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, which compiled the report from information provided by 14 antiviolence programs around the country, say they aren't surprised by the increase. They point to inflammatory election-year rhetoric over same-sex marriage and the Supreme Court's ruling against Colorado's Amendment 2: Both issues kept gays and lesbians in the public eye for much of the year.

That expressions of gay pride can lead to antigay violence may seem ironic. The irony deepens in consideration of the psychological toll exacted by such violence, which can renew doubts and fears among gays and lesbians about their sexual orientation that they may have long ago put behind them.

"Hate crimes attack a basic part of the victims' identity--their sense of who they are and of the community in which they belong," says Gregory Herek, a research psychologist at the University of California, Davis. "Most lesbians and gay men have gone through a coming-out process that includes having to overcome their own sense that being gay is a bad thing. From the perspective of a victim, a hate crime can feel like an instance of being punished directly and in a very dramatic way for being gay."

Herek's research indicates that victims of antigay hate crimes suffer deeper and longer periods of psychological distress--including depression, stress, and anger--than do gay and lesbian victims of comparable, nonbias-related crimes. Worse is that the damage from hate crimes extends far beyond targeted individuals, victimizing, in effect, the entire community, says Rob Knight, executive director of El Paso, Tex.-based Lambda Services, which operates a national hot line for victims of antigay hate crimes.

"The perpetrator of a hate crime didn't necessarily pick the lesbian in the parking lot because he didn't like her hairstyle," Knight says. "He picked her because she's gay. Anybody in that group could have been a victim, and everybody realizes that, so the entire group suffers."

In an effort to prevent antigay violence, activists are pushing for new laws in statehouses and in Congress. But those efforts beg the question, Do laws against antigay hate crimes really work? The short answer is that no one knows. The report by the antiviolence coalition shows that reported antigay bias crimes are on the rise even in areas with laws against them.

In fact, some argue that hate-crime laws are not the answer for stopping the violence. For one thing, determining the true motivation for a crime is often difficult, hindering prosecution under such laws. In addition, says Karen Franklin, a research psychologist in Oakland, Calif., in the real world, criminals don't calculate their moves based on the specific punishment they will suffer if caught: "When people are committing these kinds of crimes, they're not thinking on that level."

But supporters say the laws have important benefits--even if current laws haven't been on the books long enough for those benefits to be reflected in crime statistics. For one thing, they help keep at least some of the gay-bashers off the streets--a goal that is all the more important since research shows that people who commit hate crimes often are repeat offenders. "Those who are prosecuted and convicted of these crimes spend more time in jail or have stiffer sentences handed to them," says Winnie Stachelberg, legislative director for the gay lobbying group Human Rights Campaign. "And, obviously, I think that's a terribly important message."

Laws against hate crimes are only part of the solution, however. Pushing for more police training--on gay and lesbian issues as well as on hate crimes--is another priority. Also important is overcoming the fear many gay and lesbian victims have of reporting hate crimes to police in the first place.

But whatever the limitations of strong hate-crime laws, there's a fundamental reason to push for them, argues Dianne Hardy-Garcia, executive director for the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas, an Austin-based political group: Hate crimes reflect the belief that the lives of gays and lesbians simply don't matter. And in the end, she says, "how do we get employment or other protections if they don't even value our lives?"