Karen Franklin, Forensic Psychologist

As Russell Henderson pled guilty last week in the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student, in Laramie, Wyo., he told the victim's weeping parents that he was sorry for what he'd done. On the same day, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs delivered an even sorrier message: Reported antigay attacks in the United States were more violent last year, and caused more hospitalizations.

Those who consider the 1998 Shepard case unique should review recent but less publicized history: Last month, in rural Alabama, two men confessed to killing Billy Jack Gaither, 39, a gay man who lived with and supported his disabled, elderly parents. The killers asked him out for a drink, slammed an ax handle into his head, and burned his body on a pyre of tires. A few days later, in Richmond, Eddie Northington's head was found on the footbridge to a gay men's cruising area.

Last October, teenage boys in Buffalo beat and stomped Gary Trazaska, 41, to death, trading high-fives in the process. Last month, in rural Georgia, Tracey Thompson, 33, also known as Billy Joe Turner, was beaten to death with a baseball bat. All these cases - all with the identifying marks of bias crimes - are from the past six months.

Why are gay men and transsexuals - who are assaulted more frequently than lesbians - seen as acceptable targets for Saturday night torture games? Part of the answer lies in the casual demonization of homosexuals, a kind of hatred our society no longer tolerates against race or religion. Part lies in the narrow straitjacket of American masculinity, a tightly bound insecurity that makes some men explode, proving their manhood on the bodies of less "manly" men. Undoing both will be harder than passing bias crime laws.

Researchers and historians have long noted that bias attacks increase when a group is making social gains, as lesbians and gay men are now: coming forward in the media, in synagogues and churches, in schools and workplaces and families. Indeed, according to FBI statistics, although other bias crimes are going down, antigay crimes are going up.

Researchers say that perpetrators of bias crimes - whether against gay people or other minorities - generally act out of three (sometimes overlapping) motives: ideology, thrill, and defense. In the first category, ideologues are on a moral mission to save the world; they see their targets not as human beings, but as social plagues. In the second category, thrill-seekers are looking for excitement, and they get their direction from stereotypes and hate language. They account for some 40 to 50 percent of antigay attacks.

The third group, the defenders, are trying to protect their territory, whether it be their neighborhood, their women, or their own sexuality. What's called the "homosexual panic defense" - assaulters who excuse themselves by saying they became irrational when a gay man made a pass at them - can have many justifications. (Of course, if torture and execution were acceptable responses to an unwanted sexual advance, the world would have many fewer heterosexual men.)

When some men realize they are talking to a gay man, they interpret normal smiles or gestures as flirtation, and so consider their violence justified. Sometimes men react violently to the thought that gay men might treat them as they themselves would treat women, or to their own thoughts about two men together. As a result, they try to destroy the gay man as if he, not their own imaginations, sparked those fears and images.

"Destroy" is the right word: Bias attackers act with an excessive rage - what researchers call "overkill." In one 1993 Boston-area study by Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Conflict and Violence at Northeastern University, victims of bias assaults were three times as likely as other assault victims to be hospitalized.

New statistics released last week by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs suggest that although overall numbers of antigay bias crimes were down 4 percent from 1997, cases of violence increased 12 percent. Thirty-three gay men and women were killed in attacks last year, twice the number in 1997. However, all researchers find antigay crimes to be vastly underreported, in part because of fears of police bias, so perhaps only the most vicious are being counted.

Melissa Mertz, director of victim services at New York City's Bellevue Hospital, said that "attacks against gay men were the most heinous and brutal I encountered. They frequently involved torture, cutting, mutilation, and beating, and showed the absolute intent to rub out the human being" - and, symbolically, all homosexuality.

What, exactly, are men attacking? If men "naturally" recoiled from male-male sex, as some suggest, it would be just as natural for straight women to recoil from lesbians. Yet several studies show that men are vastly more antagonistic toward gay men than women are towards lesbians. For men, something other than sex is at stake: manhood, a harsher ideal than womanhood.

In the past hundred years, feminism has given girls much more latitude in how to be women. We can be cheerleaders or basketball players, study mathematics or literature, have children or careers or both. But society still sneers at men who want to move into women's territory. A girl can wear pants and play soccer, but a boy can't wear a skirt or cry without being called names.

A 1993 study by the American Association of University Women found that 23 percent of grade-school boys reported that they had been called gay; most of them went on to call another boy the same thing. Of course, no one imagines that 23 percent of 9-year-old boys are gay: What's questioned is their manhood.

An early study, done in 1984 by Kathryn N. Black and Michael R. Stevenson at Purdue University, found that men who score higher on "feminine" characteristics (and may be either insecure about, or have been challenged about, their masculinity) are also more antagonistic toward homosexuality.

Antigay prejudice spreads like lice in a school. "That's so gay" is today's playground slur of choice; according to one Iowa middle-school study, it is heard in classrooms and playgrounds up to 25 times a day. And teachers rarely stop it, either because they think it's meaningless or because they're afraid they'll be thought gay themselves.

Jamie Nabozny sued his Ashland, Wis., school system and in 1996 won a nearly $1 million settlement for what he had undergone at the hands of his high school classmates: being urinated on, beaten, and subjected to a mock rape in a classroom while 20 other students jeered. The school administration had said he should expect to be assaulted for being gay.

Ever since then, the lawyer who tried Nabozny's case has been getting calls detailing similar attacks, and administrative indifference, at schools around the country.

A recent study by Karen Franklin, a University of Washington forensic psychology fellow, found that nearly 1 in 5 young men said they had attacked or physically threatened someone for being gay. An additional half said they had either hurled jeers or witnessed assaults. Franklin reports that as she passed out her survey, the young people "often advocated or defended such behaviors out loud in the classrooms," saying they would attack again if they could.

How can society prevent such assaults? In part, we must change the language so that it does not give the more violent among us the tacit go-ahead to lynch or rape or bash. "Faggot" must become the "F word," as unacceptable and socially shocking as the "N word." Parents and teachers must make clear that "gay" is not a slur.

Schools must teach respect. In Bangor, in 1984, three high school boys threw a gay man, Charlie Howard, over a bridge to his death. One of those boys, now a man who has served his prison term, speaks to junior high schools about respecting others. When he talks, he's saving lives, as well as teaching respect. But it shouldn't take a repentant murderer to make the case.

"We all have a constitutional right to be nasty," Levin says. "That doesn't mean we should teach that it's OK."

Karen Franklin, Ph.D.