People are getting hurt: the rise in gay-bashing.

People who think "hate crime" is a nonstarter as a behavioral category--or who don't want "gay-bashing" included within it--should talk, as I did recently, with Lieutenant Bill Johnston of the Boston Police Department. Johnston heads the department's Community Disorders Unit, which investigates cases of bias crime; as such, he sometimes acts as a decoy in bars, both straight and gay, where attacks have been common. Interviewed by phone, he made clear why he thinks bias crime is crime with a difference, and why he includes gay-bashing within it.

"When I was a decoy in a straight bar where robberies had been taking place," he said, "I was just robbed. When I was a decoy in a gay bar I was not simply robbed, I was also beaten." When back-up officers arrived to make arrests, he added, the men who beat him were surprised that their behavior was taken seriously. "They said,'oh, he's only a fag'--as if they had been engaged in no more than a weekend sport."

The more familiar bias crimes rise out of racial, ethnic, or religious prejudice: crossburnings by the Ku Klux Klan, swastikas painted on synagogue walls, name-calling, physical attacks on African-Americans, Jews, Asians. Though some argue that it is improper to classify and punish crimes according to motive, supporters of bias crime laws argue it is necessary to track the incidence of bias crimes, and to punish them with special severity, because they can intimidate an entire class of people, and because they often include the threat or reality of violence.

There are indications that hate crimes in general are on the rise in the United States. The Anti-Defamation League has reported an 11 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents between 1990 and 1992. Dr. Howard Ehrlich, research director of the National Institute against Prejudice and Violence, said in a recent interview in Baltimore that the rise in hate crimes began in the mid-1980s, and reflects an overall escalation of violence throughout American society. Whereas earlier most of the violence was directed against property, today, he said, we are seeing "cruder and more personal forms of attacks."

That appears to apply in particular to attacks on gays. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute asserts that anti-gay harassment and violence in five major U.S. cities jumped by 131 percent from 1990 to 1991. An earlier (1987) report on bias crime prepared for the National Institute of Justice, a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded that homosexuals may well have become the most frequent victims of hate violence today. A single instance, among many that could be cited, took place in the Montrose section of Houston on July 4, 1991. A twenty-seven-year-old man, Paul Broussard, was beaten and stabbed to death outside a gay bar by a group of ten young men armed with knives and nail-studded two-by-fours.

Dr. Ehrlich attributes the rise to the increased visibility of gay men and lesbians. This follows a pattern: "When a traditionally subordinate group becomes more visible, levels of conflict increase." He cited the harassment and attacks suffered by some Arab-Americans when the Gulf War brought their presence into public awareness. Holocaust memorial services on college campuses, he said, are sometimes linked with an increase in anti-Semitic incidents. In the case of homosexuals, he points to such factors as the election of openly gay public officials, the emergence of AIDS, and the growth of churches like the MCC [Metropolitan Community Churches, whose members are predominantly gay]. Others might add the increasingly assertive (and, to many, offensive) tactics adopted by homosexual groups like ACT-UP in demonstrations aimed at individuals, groups, and institutions, including the Catholic church, and in campaigns to enact or preserve statutes outlawing discrimination against homosexuals in housing and employment, establishing inheritance and health insurance rights for gay partners, or granting recognition of "gay marriage."

Barry Goodinson, executive director of Dignity/USA, a national organization of gay and lesbian Catholics, and a member of our small inner-city parish in Washington, D.C., spoke with me about the varied forms that "gay-baiting" and "gaybashing" can take. Goodinson, thirty-two, is a graduate of Saint John's Seminary and College in Boston and of Georgetown University. Sometimes, he said, the attacks are verbal. "I was walking with a male friend near Dupont Circle, when a passerby yelled 'faggot' at us," he recalled. Such attacks, he said, have become more and more common--proof, for him, of "the current high level of homophobia." He would include as another form of gay-bashing the 1992 ballot initiatives in Oregon and Colorado aimed at banning civil rights protections forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Oregon' s, which would have required schools to teach that homosexuality is "abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse," failed, but Colorado's less extreme measure forbidding "protective status based on homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation," passed.

Defenders of such initiatives say that laws to protect homosexuals aren't necessary because gays and lesbians are already covered by civil rights laws and don't need "special" protection. But, according to sources like Boston's Lieutenant Johnston, gays are the object of attacks precisely because of their sexual orientation--and police efforts to respond to the problem are hindered because victims are often reluctant to press charges or even to contact the police because they fear harassment at work, loss of jobs, or alienation from their families if they do testify in court on the nature of the incident. Johnston recalled a 1990 case of a man who had been severely beaten. "There's no doubt it was an antigay attack," he said. "It took place in the South End, where there's a large gay presence, and the perpetrator was using terms demeaning to homosexuals." The police were ready to classify the episode as a bias crime, but were stymied by the victim's reluctance to prosecute. "Only in the gay community do you find this kind of fear," he added. "1 never see it in bias crimes involving blacks or Hispanics."

Who are the gay-bashers? Known perpetrators are predominantly males in their teens or early twenties, often from middle-class backgrounds. A segment of the CBS program "Street Stories" aired last year was based on a police decoy operation begun in Houston after the murder of Paul Broussard. It included an interview with a nineteen-year-old man who regularly drove into the Montrose section of the city with a friend to prey on homosexuals. He compared beating them to smashing pumpkins on Halloween; they did not appear to him as real people. "It just seems like they're their own race," he said. "I don't really feel no remorse about anything 1 ever did to a gay person....It's just the way I grew up."

Lieutenant Johnston believes antigay attacks are socially encouraged. He notes that "gays are the only group in the United States that it's okay to beat up," and points out that even when police make an arrest and a victim is willing to testify, prosecutors may balk at prosecuting vigorously; when they do, they are often thwarted by judges who give lenient sentences. The assumption seems to be that the perpetrators are basically good kids who should not be burdened with a criminal record.

Religion also plays a role, in Johnston's view. "People fall back on their religious beliefs to justify their hate," he says. Some preachers do condemn homosexuality and "gay lifestyles" in terms that, to homosexuals, appear to brand them as evil persons not worthy to live. While both Catholic and mainstream Protestant authorities have generally supported laws banning housing and job discrimination against gays, and the Catholic bishops of Oregon and Colorado opposed the antigay referenda voted on last November, most of the same churches have refused to alter their basic ethical teachings on homosexuality. The Catholic stance, which opposes discrimination against gays, while characterizing homosexual acts as objectively sinful, was complicated by a statement distributed to U.S. Catholic bishops by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in July 1992 entitled "Some Considerations Concerning the Catholic Response to Legislative Proposals on the NonDiscrimination of Homosexual Persons." The document asserts that it is not unjust discrimination to oppose legislation protective of gay rights in areas like teaching, athletic coaching, adoptive parenting, and military recruitment. The Oregon bishops said there was no conflict between their opposition to the referendum and the CDF statement.

Some incidents in Oregon tend to support Dr. Ehrlich's view that increased visibility brings increased hostility against marginalized groups. According to the National Catholic Reporter (October 30, 1992), the pastor of one Oregon parish received a telephoned warning against publicizing the bishops' statement opposing the referendum; when it was ignored, vandals set fire to an office in the rectory and painted such phrases as "Catholics love gays" and "Kill Catholics and gays" within the church. The spokesperson for a group organized to fight the referendum--a grandmother who heads the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon--reported receiving telephone threats saying she should be killed for betraying Christianity.

Dr. Ehrlich's thesis is pushed a step further by Gary David Comstock in a 1991 book, Violence against Lesbians and Gay Men (Columbia University Press), which contends that heightened violence against gays fosters still greater insistence by gays and lesbians on becoming active in their own cause. That insistence was evident in our own parish a few weeks before last November's meeting of U.S. bishops in Washington, D.C., when Barry Goodinson invited worshipers to sign a petition being circulated nationwide by New Ways Ministry, an advocacy group for gay Catholics. The petition, directed to the hierarchy, took specific issue with the CDF's apparent fear that legislative protections for gay men and lesbians could threaten family life, and contended that there is no empirical evidence to support such fear. Among the 14,000 persons across the country who signed the New Ways petition were two who are themselves bishops, Walter F. Sullivan of Richmond and Thomas J. Gumbleton of Detroit. Many parishioners at Saint Aloysius signed, and so did I.