Taking it to the people: activists spread Clinton's hate-crimes message to Middle America.

When President Clinton stepped up to his bully pulpit and said that a diverse society will not tolerate violence against minority groups, gay men and lesbians welcomed the chance to share their experiences with him at the November 10 national summit on hate crimes.

But once the camera lights were extinguished, the stories filed, and the editorials written, everybody went home. However noble the president's intentions, he won't be around when another teenager gets called a "fag" at school. He can't intervene on a darkened street when a lesbian couple is followed home in their car and beaten in their driveway. And he can't stop a group of bored suburban kids from piling into a truck to look for a gay man to harass.

Although federal protections are crucial in the effort to prevent gays from becoming targets of violence, much of the work begins at the grassroots level. With that in mind the Washington, D.C.-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force went on the road during the three weeks leading up to the White House Conference on Hate Crimes, sponsoring town-hall meetings in nine cities. The group's executive director, Kerry Lobel, visited places without statewide hate-crimes laws or whose existing legislation regarding bias-motivated crimes does not include any reference to sexual orientation -- places such as Detroit, Houston, Nashville, and Tulsa, Okla.

The goal was to get gay men and lesbians to talk about their experiences with hate crimes and to gather support for local legislation that might help reduce the level of violence. In Detroit, for example, Jeff Montgomery of the gay rights group the Triangle Foundation talked about Michigan's existing hate-crimes laws and Paula Ettelbrick, political director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, discussed how organizations can lobby for legislation.

"We hope people will take this issue on, will work for hate-crimes laws, and will educate police, prosecutors, and judges," says Lobel. "If one person can see that his or her story could make a difference to a local city council member or a state legislator or the president, that will be a good thing."

The NGLTF invited participants to put into writing the story of how they or someone they know has been a victim of a hate-motivated crime. Several hundred such accounts were collected and delivered to President Clinton at the summit, Lobel says. Many of the meetings served as brainstorming sessions, bringing together individual citizens and activists from gay and lesbian community groups, churches and synagogues, and college campuses to discuss how to push for legislation, education, and awareness.

To counter those lawmakers or citizens who oppose hate-crimes legislation because they view it as a "liberal issue," Bill Turner, cochairman of the Nashville-based Lesbian and Gay Coalition for Justice, suggests as a strategy that local organizers emphasize the importance of law and order. "I think true conservatives are supposed to have a respect for law," he says.

Coalition building among other minority groups targeted for violence was another theme that ran throughout discussions at several of the meetings. "We need to find ways to support each other when these things happen, because they all stem from the same basic problem of intolerance of difference," says Christine Robinson, a member of the coordinating council for the Freedom Coalition, a grassroots civil rights group based in Lawrence, Kan.

For that reason, the local organizers of the meeting in Little Rock, Ark., brought together a panel of seven speakers representing groups that advocate for the rights of ethnic minorities, women, and the disabled. "Where you see violence against one group of people, you see violence against other groups of people," says Judy Matsuoka of the Women's Project, a social-justice group that convened the local meeting. Victims often may face "double or triple jeopardy" because they fit into multiple categories of minority groups, she adds, citing the example of Alan Walker, a 31-year-old African-American man in Arkansas who was brutally murdered in November 1996 while in drag.

With so many of the forums' attendees having experienced bias-motivated crime first- or secondhand, the issue of reporting the incidents became a focal point. "Nearly everyone who attended the forums has been a victim of a hate crime or has known someone who has been a victim," Lobel says. "This has been in startling contrast to the reported incidents that are logged by police departments and sent to the FBI."

In Arkansas, for example, Matsuoka says only seven hate crimes, including those committed against groups other than gays, were reported in 1995. Police need to learn what constitutes a hate crime, she says, and victims need to feel safe enough to come forward. In Lawrence, Kan., some victims don't report an incident because they believe they are somehow responsible for their own victimization, says Robinson.

In the end the primary accomplishment of the meetings was that of motivation: Participants came away with the desire to do something about hate crimes, and that was an important step. "I've seen more response on this issue than I've seen on anything else," says Turner. "Hate crimes are especially directed at our very existence. The motivation is to try to eliminate us from the face of the earth, in a certain sense. It's a do-or-die situation."