Karen
Franklin, Ph.D.
Homophobia Often Found In Schools, Data
Show
By JAMES BROOKE
October
14, 1998, Section A, Page 19
Last Saturday morning, while Matthew Shepard lay comatose from a
beating, a
college homecoming parade passed a few blocks from his hospital bed in
Fort
Collins, Colo. Propped on a fraternity float was a straw-haired
scarecrow
labeled in black spray paint, "I'm Gay."
Few people missed the message. Three days earlier, Mr. Shepard, a gay
University of Wyoming freshman, was savagely beaten and tied to a ranch
fence
in such a position that a passer-by first mistook him for a scarecrow.
Today, officials at Colorado State University in Fort Collins reacted
with
outrage, opening an investigation and disciplinary procedures against
the
fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha. The fraternity chapter immediately
suspended seven
members and said they had acted independently.
But in a week when candlelight vigils for Mr. Shepard were being held
on
campuses across the nation, the scarecrow incident highlighted how
hostility
toward homosexuals often flourishes in high schools and universities,
gay
leaders said today.
"People would like to think that what happened to Matthew was an
exception
to the rule but, it was an extreme version of what happens in our
schools on a
daily basis," said Kevin Jennings, executive director of the Gay,
Lesbian
and Straight Education Network, a New York group dedicated to ending
anti-gay
bias in the schools.
Mr. Shepard, a slightly built 21-year-old, was beaten so severely that
he died
on Monday. He never regained consciousness after being discovered on
Oct. 7, 18
hours after he was lashed to the fence. Two men, Russell A. Henderson,
21, and
Aaron J. McKinney, 22, were arraigned on first degree murder charges
late
Monday night. Their girlfriends, Chasity V. Pasley, 20, and Kristen L.
Price,
18, have been arraigned as accessories after the fact.
In response to the killing, about 50 candelight vigils were scheduled
this
week, from Texas to Vermont, from Wayne, Neb., to New York City.
At the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins where Mr. Shepard was in
intensive care for five days, his parents, Dennis and Judy Shepard,
received
about 6,000 electronic messages of condolences. Today, when funeral
arrangements were announced for Friday in Casper, Wyo., the hospital
Web site
received 30,000 hits an hour.
University friends in Laramie, Wyo., have set up the Matthew Shepard
Memorial
Fund to raise money to pressure the state Legislature to pass
legislation
against hate crimes.
"I see his name going down in gay history as a catalyst for renewed
activism," said Matt Foreman, a former Wyomingite who directs Empire
State
Pride Agenda, a gay political organization in New York.
From around the nation today, gay leaders emphasized that campus
homophobia was
not restricted to college towns in the Rocky Mountain West.
Last year, in a survey of almost 4,000 Massachusetts high school
students, 22
percent of gay respondents said they had skipped school in the past
month
because they felt unsafe there, and 31 percent said they had been
threatened or
injured at school in the past year. These percentages were about five
times
greater than the percentages of heterosexual respondents. The survey
was
conducted at 58 high schools by the Massachusetts Department of
Education.
In a separate study of nearly
500 community college students in the San
Francisco area, 32 percent of male respondents said they had verbally
threatened homosexuals and 18 percent said they had physically
threatened or
assaulted them. The study was conducted this year by Karen Franklin,
a forensic
psychologist who is a researcher at the University of Washington.
Surveys of gay college students conducted in the late 1980's at Yale
University, Oberlin College, Rutgers University and Pennsylvania State
University found that 16 percent to 26 percent had been threatened with
violence, and that 40 percent to 76 percent had been verbally harassed,
said
the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a lobbying group based in
Washington.
Last year, a Des Moines student group, Concerned Students, recorded
hallway and
classroom conversations at five high schools on 10 "homophobia
recording
days." They estimated that the average Des Moines high school student
heard about 25 anti-gay remarks every day.
"Nine out of 10 'teaching tolerance' courses weed out gays," Mr.
Foreman said. "There are a lot of people preaching anti-racism and
anti-Semitism. But it is still very much O.K. to make anti-gay jokes,
to
express anti-gay sentiments."
A survey of the nation's 42 largest school districts found that 76
percent did
not train teachers on issues facing gay students and 42 percent lacked
policies
to protect students from discrimination based on sexual orientation,
said the
Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, which did the study last
month.
In Fort Collins, while the hospital officials struggled with an
electronic
avalanche of condolences, city police detectives were investigating a
different
kind of E-mail.
On Monday, hours after Mr. Shepard's death, two gay organizations, the
Rainbow
Chorus and the Lambda Community Center, received identical messages
applauding
the killing of Mr. Shepard. The messages closed with the words, "I hope
it
happens more often."
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