Charlie Howard
A few months ago, I left Maine to attend graduate school in North Carolina. The past two years I had been living back in Maine were good ones for me, both on an individual level and as a member of the state's lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender community.
In 1995, we defeated the Concerned Maine Families referendum attempt to deny queer folks civil rights protection. Then last May, Governor King signed into law L.D. 1116, which added "sexual orientation" to the state's civil rights law. It was a historic event, and it was indescribably exciting to have been a part of it.
Shortly after I moved, however, The Christian Civic League (CCL) of Maine, with the assistance of the Christian Coalition, produced a sufficient number of petition signatures to block implementation of the new law and bring it to a referendum vote. The referendum will be decided in a special election on February 10, 1998. If the CCL is successful in this referendum, it will be the first time in this nation that a statewide law of this sort has been repealed.
The prospect of repeal worries me very profoundly, as I hope to return to Maine one day. As I ponder what might happen if the CCL and its executive director, Michael Heath, prevail, I find my mind continually coming back to one thought - Charlie Howard.
Most Mainers probably remember Charlie Howard. He was a young gay man from Bangor who was murdered in the Summer of 1984. He was attacked by three young men who saw him on the street and thought it would be fun to beat up a faggot. They brutally beat him into unconsciousness then threw him off the State Street bridge into the Kenduskeag Stream, where he drowned.
I was fifteen years old at the time and spending the Summer with my grandparents in Hancock County. I vividly remember watching the news report of Howard's murder on Channel 2. I learned a frightening lesson that day: Faggots get killed. It would take me another seven years to learn to stop running from the fear that message caused and to reclaim my identity and soul. Charlie Howard's murderers did more than rob him of his life. They helped rob me of my adolescence.
Michael Heath and his followers have said they don't condone anti-gay violence. They frequently spew empty platitudes about "loving the sinner, hating the sin." And yet they still use such words as "vile," "evil," "perverse," "sick," "abnormal," and "abomination" to describe queer folks, and say that we are "a lie from the Pit of Hell."
The effects of such hate speech are well known. It relegates the targeted group to an inferior, even subhuman, status in the minds of their attackers, making them that much easier to attack. One need only consider the Holocaust or, in this country, the brutal lynchings of African-Americans between the end of the Reconstruction and the rise of the civil rights movement.
And since the Religious Wrong objects to comparing sexual orientation to "immutable" characteristics such as race, consider the recent horrors in Bosnia, where the so-called "ethnic cleansing" had little or nothing to do with race or language, but rather was based on religious affiliation. Religion is most clearly, to use the CCL's phraseology, a "lifestyle choice" and not immutable, yet it enjoys the same protection the CCL wishes to deny those of us who were born homosexual or bisexual.
The reality is that anti-gay hate speech places both straight and queer people alike at risk. It would not have mattered to Charlie Howard's murderers if he had been straight, simply because they PERCEIVED him as gay, and therefore less human and less deserving of life.
This type of violence is not a thing of the past, either. In the Fall of 1996, a 15-year-old Windham High School student was attacked by a group of teens when one his attackers yelled, "Let's go beat up the fag!" The victim had his elbow broken by one of the attackers who was swinging a metal lock wrapped in a bandanna. A similar incident occurred in Oxford around the same time.
Then in May 1997, a suit was filed against a 16-year-old Cony High School student for having brutalized a younger student, whom he perceived to be gay, over a period of greater than four months. The 15-year-old victim had been beaten, kicked, had his head slammed into the ground, and had been slammed into lockers repeatedly, despite multiple attempts at intervention by teachers, administrators and Augusta police.
At the time of the Windham and Oxford incidents, Assistant Attorney General Steve Wessler reported a significant increase in anti-gay violence (Heath and company have repeatedly accused Wessler of excessively inflating these figures but have never offered any evidence to substantiate their claims.). This increase corresponded roughly with Concerned Maine Families' anti-gay referendum in November 1995. It also parallels what has happened in other states, such as Colorado and Oregon, as a result of Religious Wrong-sponsored anti-gay referenda there.
Surely the connection between hate speech and hate crimes is apparent to Michael Heath.His predecessor, Jasper Wyman, used to use the same inflammatory rhetoric that Heath now uses. Wyman, however, finally realized that his words led to others' violence and has cited that publicly as one of the main reasons he left the CCL. Heath must know this, but he apparently does not care.
Of course, I still haven't said what this has to do with L.D. 1116 itself. It's quite simple, really. By giving us some measure of security in our places of work and in the greater community in the state, L.D. 1116 will better allow us to challenge the lies and stereotypes that groups like the CCL continue to perpetuate. While this won't eliminate the violence overnight, or even eliminate it entirely, it will make our lives safer in the long run.
The CCL understands this well. On their web site they assert, not incorrectly, that "the major reason gay people want these laws is to gain social approval of their lifestyle." If we have societal approval - i.e., society ceases to be anti-gay - then we will cease to be targets for anti-gay violence.
However, they also affirm their desire that homosexuality remain "universally regarded as immoral and perverse." The implications of their desired societal mindset are not lost on those of us who are its target.
If the CCL wins this referendum, the likely end result is obvious and probably inevitable - more Charlie Howards. This is because no matter how much they rant about the "homosexual lifestyle," mythical lifestyles never get murdered. Real gay people, however, do.
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