Safe Is Nowhere

...It's a story I never wanted to incorporate so specifically into my daily consciousness...

...When I publish on lesbian and gay topics, she insists that my byline give only the state where we live, never the town...

...There was a total of 2,064 incidents of anti-gay harassment, with 30 percent against women—incidents that have been documented as underreported...

...What surprised me as much as it did Brenner is that the police and prosecutor thought their respect and concern were an unremarkable part of their job...

...Or the fifty-five-year-old Vietnamese man, Loc Minh Truong, beaten unconscious on Laguna Beach...

...Graff (E.J...

...Does that sound too strong...

...And not just at our enemies' viciousness, but, like me, at the fact that so many heterosexual alUes risked their lives to speak out on our behalf...

...But because Brenner's book is unevenly written and makes such arguments at a fairly basic level, Eight Bullets is perhaps best read by people new to these issues...

...We learn the details of every decision made on that camping trip, every step taken and word uttered...

...We learn of the surprisingly respectful treatment by the Pennsylvania state police who investigate the case and pursue the killer, even after Brenner decides to come out and reveals that she and Wight were lovers attacked for their affections...

...For those looking for a more complex vision, let me recommend Heather MacDonald's video, Ballot Measure 9, a stunning chronicle of the threats and violence targeting lesbians and gay men and our allies during Oregon's 1992 anti-gay hate campaign...

...Although the defense tried to suggest that Wight and Brenner's lovemaking provoked the killer, the judge ruled this irrelevant...

...As they began kissing and playing sexually, he shot Brenner's girlfriend, Rebecca Wight, in the liver...

...While this total remained roughly the same as the year before, down from a 1992 high, incidents have become increasingly more violent—perhaps predictably, considering the greater publicity given to our pursuit of our civil rights, and the response of hate...

...After a slow recovery from her attack, Brenner became an outspoken advocate, appearing in Congressional hearings and on talk shows to tell her disturbing tale...

...Because isn't that the only way to prevent more tales likes Brenner's...

...by other such victims who want to hang onto the words of one who survived and went on to a healthy, productive life...

...One such woman had the lug nuts on her wheels loosened, so that she lost control of her car on a mountain road...

...They had...

...Graff's writing has recently appeared in The New York Times, Out, The Women's Review of Books, and the new literary lesbian fiction anthology, "Tasting Life Twice...

...That Claudia Brenner's is the attack that most chills me, and other women I know, tells me how much we expect attack...

...Brenner was critically wounded by five bullets to her face, neck, and arm, escaping death or paralysis only because a bullet heading toward her spine slowed when it shattered her molars...

...Brenner's shooting is of a piece with killings in abortion clinics, the blowing up of the Oklahoma City federal building, the swastikas painted in Jewish cemeteries...

...And the assailant, Stephen Roy Carr, was a poster-boy suspect: an unemployed drifter who had served time in a Florida prison and jumped parole...

...Eight Bullets minutely chronicles Brenner's journey, from the time she met and began dating Wight through the killer's pursuit, capture, and sentencing...

...Within hours, Wight died...

...and because political and religious leaders cynically launch campaigns to demonize us, replacing the Communists as the currently favored bogeymen, thus painting targets around our heads, at least in the minds of our least stable and most violent citizens...

...In the course of these appearances, as in her book, she straightforwardly makes the argument that Progressive readers surely know: hate violence is bred when intolerance is socially endorsed...

...Or the Latina woman, Anna-Maria Rosales, shot and killed when leaving a Washington, D.C., gay bar...

...We hear about each step taken by her extended friendship family and post-trauma support team, which is anchored in stereo-typically lesbian fashion by Brenner's ex-lover, Anne, and Anne's new partner, Gina...

...Wight is dead because of casually slung hate language (did I hear someone say "Barney Fag...

...Eight Bullets—the number he fired—is the story of that attack...

...Despite her "perfect" victim status, Brenner knows that being attacked for being lesbian or gay is far from remarkable...

...because we're shut out from social institutions like marriage...

...After seeing it a second time, I hesitantly asked my friends—their faces disturbed, their eyes hollow—if they'd cried, too...

...Going into and out of lesbian or gay bars, announcing a crush on national TV, walking on a known gay beach—in such places we know enough to fear those unstable folk (drifters, adolescent boys, angry unemployed men) who decide to release their frustrations on our heads, spines, and kidneys...

...In our own house she will kiss or hug me only if all the shades are drawn...

...In the month after the passing of Colorado's Amendment 2, which barred civil rights for lesbians and gay men, anti-gay violence increased by 275 percent—and decreased again dramatically when the appeals court ruled the measure unconstitutional...

...In the most liberal of settings—Harvard Square, for instance—she becomes furious if I accidentally forget we're among the straight folk and touch her as if we're in love...

...Or Charlie Howard, thrown over a Portland, Maine, bridge by a group of young men...

...For years I have teased the love of my life about her rather ceaseless paranoia about attack...

...Eight Bullets chills me into respecting my spouse's fears...

...We trace her helicopter trip to the Hershey Medical Center's trauma unit, her surgery, and her shocked recuperation...

...Brenner attributes this respect to being a poster-girl victim: a pretty white woman, a serious architecture student, open and articulate, flanked by stable, loving family and friends...

...It's a strange way to live for an affectionate person like me, someone who naturally puts my arm around friends and family, who would love to hold her hand almost everywhere we go...

...She was a 1993 winner of the Astraea National Lesbian Action Foundation's Emerging Writers Awards...

...irrational and violent reactions increase...

...One of the worst of those horror stories—the nightmare of every lesbian I know—is Claudia Brenner's...

...The attack on Wight and Brenner illustrates how wrong is the idea that we can keep ourselves safe by being good girls and boys...

...In May 1988, she and her girlfriend went for a weekend hike on the Appalachian Trail...

...39 percent happened near the victim's home, and 32 percent on a public street or place of business...

...and by those interested in tracing one woman's evolution from private citizen to outspoken advocate...

...We follow her as she agonizingly leaves her bleeding lover and walks four miles to a road, where she flags down a passing car with a flashlight...

...But he was waiting...

...In fact, in my own state, only 8 percent of 1994's hate incidents happened in known lesbian or gay gathering places...

...In a plea-bargain, Carr was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no parole...

...There's Jenny Jones's talk-show guest, Scott Amedure, murdered because he mentioned his affections to the wrong guy...

...But the belief that elsewhere we're safe is false...

...But I know enough horror stories, and have been the target of enough verbal garbage (you can't imagine some of the disgusting things teenagers spit out), to know there's reason to indulge her...

...It still surprises and moves me—how numb one gets to being considered trash!—that non-gay strangers like Brenner's detective, or the NAACP in Oregon, or so many others might grasp our humanity enough to come to our aid...

...Hiking away from their first campsite, they happened across a creepy man, moved on, happened across him (toting a hunting rifle) again on the trail, and finally found themselves a shady, remote camp spot...

...E.J...

...In 1994 nine national tracking centers reported twenty-two hate killings of lesbians and gay men and 887 physical assaults...

...I do not, therefore, think it too strong to say that Wight is dead because of endorsements like the Vatican's, which Brenner quotes: "When civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when...