The Wake

“Every hour someone commits a hate crime. If you witness a hate crime, report it.”

Look for posters bearing these words the first week of the semester in residence halls on the University of Minnesota campus. Three other posters will be part of a campaign produced by the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action to spread awareness of hate crimes at the university. The gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community in particular faces harassment, violence and discrimination at a presumably open-minded campus.

Beth Zemsky, founding director of the GLBT Programs Office who served until 2003, recalls many “common practices” of discriminating against GLBT members, such as paint scratched off of cars bearing rainbow flags. Residence hall doors to rooms in which gays lived were spray painted with the words “I hate fags!” and queer literature was started on fire and slipped under doors, she says. Posters hung in residence halls for the GLBT Programs Office were ripped down so frequently that they were often printed twice in anticipation they would need to be put up again, she says.

These types of hate crimes have persisted. In the past year there has been a significant spike in hate crimes targeting GLBT. Although there were several hate crimes involving bias against specific religions and races from 2001 to 2004, there were no reported hate crimes aimed at GLBT, according to the University Police Department. During 2005 there were five reported hate crimes against GLBT, police Deputy Chief Steven Johnson of the University of Minnesota Police Department says.

Although this increase in GLBT hate crimes over the past year may be striking, Zemsky points out that the number of cases that are reported may depend on how many hate crimes are occurring overall. When people see hate crimes happening around them, the number of incidents reported by victims goes down, she says.

“People think it is the way the world is,” Zemsky says.

Although the statistics may not project all hate crimes that occur, individual incidents can help exemplify the occurrence of hate crimes and cause the university to react, raise awareness and prevent future tension.

In the fall of 1990 the president of the university established a task force, which eventually became an official part of the University Senate, to explore how campus was experienced by lesbians, gays, and bisexuals and to suggest how the university could create support. As the task force’s work drew to an end in 1993, someone broke into the gay and lesbian student association office in Coffman Memorial Union, trashed it, spread feces everywhere and wrote “Die Fags!” on the walls. This brought the reality of hate crimes to the forefront and caused the university to respond.

This incident sped up the decision to create the GLBT Programs Office in December 1993 to address the harmful effects of discrimination. Now that the office has been open for a little over 12 years, the university can work to make it easier for victims of hate crimes to tell their stories and report their abuses. Owen Marciano, assistant director of the GLBT Programs Office, has seen an increase in the number of reported bias incidents against GLBT in the last year, which he attributes to a social and legal support of harassment of GLBT people and the current political administration’s failure to address homophobia. However, he ensures that the university continues to work to restructure and increase the visibility of the reporting procedure.

“The definition of homophobia is ‘fear and/or discomfort with homosexual people,’” Marciano says. “And I think that oftentimes fear leads to anger, resentment and hatred, which could consequently lead to harassment.”

A second task force filed a report on April 30, 2004 and created a university-wide GLBT commission, which works to enhance GLBT visibility, resources and access, and identify the needs of the GLBT campus community.

Also in April of 2004, the university’s theater program put on The Laramie Project based on the murder of a gay University of Wyoming student named Matthew Shepard, who was beaten and left for dead outside of Laramie, Wyo. The play ran in conjunction with several other events coordinated by B David Galt, director of the GLBT Programs Office, including a speech by Matthew’s mother, Judy Shepard, and an advertising campaign about gay members of the university community that ran in the Minnesota Daily and was exhibited in the Rarig Center.

The Laramie Project opened up discussions about tolerance of GLBT members. However, on the last night the play ran, the exhibition of advertisements was stolen from the Rarig Center. Although this was not a direct attack on an individual, the GLBT community felt threatened.

Incidents like these can be especially hurtful to a member of GLBT when they let their guard down, Julie Sweitzer, director of the Office of EOAA, says. Verbal abuse is also a common way that GLBT people are harassed.

“The sharp stab of hateful words puts them in tears,” Sweitzer says. “They can never fully trust.”

EOAA not only provides support but works with the Coalition for a Respectful U, a group of students, faculty and community members who hold monthly meetings to commit to an inclusive campus climate. The coalition generated the idea for a poster campaign in hopes of connecting with students where they spend time and providing an outlet for the reporting of hate crimes. The posters will be used by EOAA, the Social Justice Leadership retreats run by Housing and Residential Life and Student Affairs.

The EOAA hopes the posters will open a discussion about the topic from different perspectives and encourage people to speak up, building allies for the GLBT community, Sweitzer says.

“An individual may think they won’t need this information,” Sweitzer says. “But they can remember the posters and know where to call.”