Candidate Sees Gays as Enemies

It was Sunday, and the afternoon had been long and dispiriting.

I had been visiting a friend who lives up the canyon on Curson Street, on the northwestern edge of Hollywood. As I drove south toward Hollywood Boulevard, I paused, as I often do, alongside Plummer Park. For some time, its upper reaches have been given over to small vegetable plots, gardened by people lucky enough to secure an allotment.

Growing vegetables is my hobby--often my solace--and the thought of walking among other gardeners’ plots was suddenly comforting. I wanted to be absorbed in something other than my own circular thoughts.

I parked the car and began to walk. The sky was gray and low. A north wind poked its chill fingers down the hillside, and its touch held the promise of rain.

There is a special, austere quality to a California garden at this time of year that can be found nowhere else. Our winter vegetables--cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts--are nearly done; our spring vegetables--lettuce, peas, onions--are green with vigorous hope. There are no clear endings and beginnings here, just old life giving grudging way to new.

As I walked and studied the small gardens, I became aware of other people on the path: two men in virtually identical jeans, plaid shirts and parkas, walking arm-in-arm. It would have taken an obvious detour to avoid each other, and I wasn’t unhappy for the company. We paused and talked a bit in the way gardeners will. They spoke about their herbs and, particularly, the tarragon they were nursing through the winter; I bragged discreetly of my sugar snap peas’ robust progress.

It was the sort of conversation in which strangers with a common interest might engage--and yet somehow different. Over our few sentences hung a kind of edgy, threatening presence, like the low, rain-soaked clouds blotting out the day’s last light. I chalked it up to the weather or, perhaps, my intrusion on their affectionate solitude.

Later, as I scanned the news at home, I realized that only hours earlier, a gay man walking through a park not far away had been set upon by two young men. He was savagely beaten, as was a woman passerby who went to his assistance. Shortly afterward, his alleged assailants--two young men from West Hollywood--had been arrested.

Still, I wondered, had the men I encountered seen in me--a burly, bearded, middle-aged guy with a cigar stuck between his teeth--a potential gay basher? Had what I interpreted as simple unease actually been apprehension?

“How should I know?” my friend who is gay said the next day when I asked him. We have been friends for some time and have a great deal in common: for example, an interest in Arts and Crafts furniture and a Catholic school education. He recalls acts of oppression and sexual hypocrisy; I remember Gregorian chant and the social encyclicals of Leo XIII. We take what we need from our pasts, I guess.

“Look,” he said, “the point is that every gay man I know, including myself, has at some time in his life been the target of some violent bozo’s barbaric rage. It is a fact of life. Gay people are verbally abused, attacked and beaten all the time. It’s happened to me and it’s happened to everyone I know. That’s the way it is. Other people may not want to accept it, but that’s the way it is.”

Hyperbole? Tragically, no.

Since 1990, the U.S. Department of Justice has been charged with collecting accurate statistics on hate crimes in this country. According to its findings, the most frequent targets of criminal bigots are not members of racial, ethnic or religious minorities, but homosexual men and lesbian women.

In 1990, the last year for which comprehensive figures are available, more attacks on gay people--1,204--were carried out in North Carolina than in any other state. One case involved a couple who battered their own son into insensibility after finding homosexual literature in his room.

That same year, there were 997 officially recorded assaults on gay men and lesbian women in Texas, 563 here in California, 529 in Illinois, 387 in Ohio, 268 in New York, 246 in Maryland and 241 in West Virgina. Among those attacks, 1,078 were specifically directed against men with AIDS. About one in five anti-gay hate crimes occurred on a college campus.

Similarly, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute reports that in 1990, such assaults increased an average of 42% in the cities of Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Last year in Los Angeles, according to local organizations monitoring the situation, the number of reported hate crimes against gays and lesbians increased by 22% to 199.

Competent social scientists, who have examined this national disgrace, believe that as appalling as these numbers may appear, they understate the number of attacks on gays and lesbians by as much as 85%.

Over the past few months, the number of such crimes reported throughout Southern California has continued to increase, along with their intensity:

* In San Diego, one man has been killed and others beaten and robbed in a series of attacks carried out in the North Park and Hillcrest neighborhoods.

* The Orange County Visibility League, a gay and lesbian organization, has set up a 24-hour hot line to respond to an increase in assaults, several of which have occurred in or near Laguna Beach.

* At Cal State Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, flyers were distributed offering free baseball bats to anyone willing to engage in “gay bashing and clubbing.”

These are things that cannot be rationalized as aberrations. Nor can the fact that presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan this week captured nearly 37% of the votes cast in Georgia’s Republican primary by running a campaign whose centerpiece was a homophobic television advertisement.

It is the first time a candidate for national office has done such a thing. But if it can be shown to have contributed to his strong finish, Buchanan surely will not be the last.

It is the dreary truth about American politics that it requires some visible enemy to kindle popular enthusiasm. To marshal support for economic reconstruction, it has become necessary to turn our Japanese allies into opponents.

To wage the struggle for so-called traditional and family values within the Republican Party, it has become necessary to find an “enemy” at home. Energized by his showing Tuesday, Buchanan plans to continue his struggle with George Bush through the California primary.

How many of our gay and lesbian people will be made casualties to their ambition?