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r -hate crimes-
problem American society needs to address — as
it gets accustomed to more openness about homo
sexuality itself, said Steven Salmony, a psycholo
gist in Chapel Hill, N.C., who has done research
into hate groups.
“It’s going to present a really demanding
challenge for all of us. This is a difficult problem,
whether we’re talking about gays in the military, or
g3ys in the larger society,” he said. “There has been
for a long time, a fear among many people of the
way gays express their needs for love.”
V
Michelangelo Signorile was 9 when his ears
first burned with the jeers “sissy” and “queer" from
his New York schoolmates. Scared the taunts were
true, he turned his fear and fury on other outcast
boys.
“I became a queer-basher to prove I wasn’t
queer,” Signorile writes in his book, “Queer in
America.”
“You’d make sure to do it in front of everyone
... toshoweveryoneelseyou were macho,” Signorile
said, describing how he punched and pummelled
his victims. “But 1 think also it was showing your
self.”
Eventually, Signorile, a 32-year-old writer
best known for “outing” famous but closeted gays,
accepted that he was gay.
But until the age of 17, the threat of ostracism
and fright at his budding homosexuality turned
Signorile into a schoolyard gay basher _ two rea
sons among many that psychologists offer to ex
plain anti-gay violence.
Research into such violence is as scant as
reports of the incidents themselves. What informs
the experts is a mix of observation, experience,
educated assumptions and common sense.
Gregory M. Herek, a social psychologist at the
University of California at Davis widely ranked as
the nation’s leading expert on anti-gay violence,
describes a knot of reasons that homosexuals are
targeted.
The clots of young men who visit gay neigh
borhoods to pounce on homosexuals may hope to
prove they belong in their peer group of “real men."
Those who target lesbians feel affronted by
women who don’t appear to need men, even as
objects of sexual desire.
In a society inured and secretly — and not
always secretly — excited by violence, the rough
ing up of homosexuals may seem appropriate.
Gay bashers may be acting on sexual confu
sion, unsettled by any attraction to their own sex
and lacking understanding about sexuality.
Amongyoung men, especially, there’sa strong
need to prove themselves and to forge bonds,
Herek said.
“The teens and early 20s is a time of identity
consolidation, struggling with issues of manhood
and masculinity, how one becomes a man,” he
said. “By attacking a gay man or a lesbian, these
guys are tiying symbolically to affirm their man
hood.”
Gay bashing can be a way of expressing
values, Herek said. “Like saying Tm a good person,
I adhere to these values. I’m a good Christian,
homosexuality is the devil and I’m going to attack
this,” he said.
Plain old xenophobia, fear of strangers, may
also be at work.
“The fact that (homosexuality) is uncommon,
and therefore it’s strange, and if you, yourself... get
a little excitement out of a same-sex person, this
could be upsetting," said Ray Bixler, psychology
professor emeritus at the University of Louisville,
an expert on gender differences in behavior.
Under the tangle of feelings that ignite gay
bashers lies a hatred of women, suggests Matthew
Weissman, a psychologist in Washington, D.C.
“We are a culture that fears and despises the
feminine aspect of character,” Weissman said. The
sticky stereotype of women as passive and weak
gets attached to gay men, he said.
“I think for a lot of straight people, when they
think a gay man may let himself be penetrated, it
opens up fears among men about passive desires.”
All this, experts say, occurs at a time when
American society seems hospitable to hate and
derision directed at homosexuals.
“To the extent that we have in this culture ...
people espousing the notion that homosexuals are
deviant, are less than fully human, then perhaps
that contributes to an atmosphere where it’s thought
somehow acceptable to harassand physically abuse
them,” said Gene Nichols, dean of the law school
at the University of Colorado in Boulder and chair
of a school task force that investigated anti-gay
harassment and violence on its campus.
“The culture defines outgroups and accept
able targets,” Herek, the social psychologist at the
University of California said.
In times past, the members of outgroups
would have been members of religions or racial
group. Today, lesbians and gay men seem tobethe
most prominent outgroup in America.”T
jfrcfyg” tKD Non-Pnom Voice of m Gay & Commit
The young and
(he ruthless
by Fred Boyles
AP National Writer
(AP)In medicine, an epidemic is defined as an ’
unexpected increase in the number of cases. Often,
that increase presents itself in dramatic fashion, as
when epidemiologists took alarmed note of the
strange new disease that came to be called AIDS.
But the notion of an epidemic of teen homicides,
James Alan Fox says, was slow to form.
Fox, the dean of the college of criminal justice
at Boston’s Northeastern University and an expert
on FBI homicide statistics, long has linked a bulk
of society’s violence to 18- to 24-year-old males, a
population group he calls the “young and the
ruthless.”
Even as violent crime surged in the late 1970s,
Fox was predicting it would ebb as baby boomers
aged. That prediction held true; in the first half of
the 1980, homicides dropped 23 percent. But then
all the conventional and statistical wisdom went
out the window.
Even as the 18-24 age group shrank, its
homicide rate began to climb. From 1984 through
1991, homicides within the group increased by 62
percent. More disturbing was the sudden burst of
homicide among those 14-17. From 1976 to 1985,
the homicide rate among these juveniles held
steady. But it began to climb sharply after that,
increasing 124 percent by 1991.
Why the sudden increase? Fox lists various
possibilities—the introduction and sudden popu
larity of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s, which
brought guns in with the drug trade and touched
off an arms race in the inner city; the numbing
drumming of violence on television, movies, even
video games; cutbacks in government funding for
youth programs. These trends portend a dark
future. By 2005, the 15- to 19-year-old segment of
society will grow 23 percent. Within some minori
ties, the teen population will grow by more than
two-thirds.
“We’re in for a demographic double
whammy,” Fox said. “Not only are the teen-agers
maturing into more violent young adults, but the
number of teen-agers is growing.”
Even if the rate of homicide suddenly levels
off by then, the number of murders is likely to
increase with the growth in the number of teen
agers.
“We’re now seeing six teen murders a day,”
Fox said. “There’s no telling what it will be in the
future.”Y
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