Please note, this is not my diary. I offered to post it for Robyn (aka rserven) from DailyKos. Her original diary can be found here.
When I lived in Arkansas I became involved with PFLAG, first only with the email list tgs-pflag (I eventually became a facilitator) until I met a woman from the Little Rock chapter (Hi, Esther!). I started going to meetings. There I met people who thought I might also be interested in the Arkansas Gay and Lesbian Task Force. So I started going to their meetings, too, and was in short order elected to the board. As often has been the case since I came out, I was spreading myself too thin.
One day Willie Wagner got beaten up during school lunchtime in Fayetteville. Again. Broken nose, bruised kidney, hematomas, lacerations. The three guys who did it said, “You’re getting what you deserve, faggot.”
On another day I met Willie’s mom, Carolyn…
[Note: My words, but the facts…and quotes…are as reported by Debra Bailey, in the March, 1997 issue of Triangle Rising. My memory needed refreshing.]
Carolyn drew people together, me included, to help with this issue. She told us Willi’s story. [Willi has since changed the spelling of his name.] Willi had been harassed since junior high for being gay. It continued into high school. His teachers said that if he chose to be gay, he would have to expect such treatment. Everyone told Willie’s parents to ignore such incidents and that there would be no punishment for those who had done the harassment.
After the bashing the school administration said that it wasn’t a hate crime, that it wasn’t a gay bashing, but maybe it was sexual harassment. So maybe they should write a policy about that. That’s when the Task Force and PFLAG got involved. Change started. Diversity training was begun in the school system. Work towards hate crimes legislation began at the state level. Ted Kennedy made his and his staff’s services available. But more was needed.
Carolyn (that’s an audio interview with Carolyn) on GenderTalk) and her husband Bill, a Wal-Mart employee, filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education charging that sexual harassment of gay and lesbian students violated Title IX. Since discrimination based on sexual orientation was not a violation of state law, the OCR issued guidelines stating that Title IX applied. Lamda Legal provided invaluable assistance formulating the agreement with Fayetteville Public Schools that they
…overhaul its policies and procedures and train faculty, staff, and students with written reports of progress to the OCR until June 1999.
Carolyn didn’t stop. She became National Vice-President of PFLAG for the year 2000. Here is some of her writing, entitled Understanding your Gay Teen. Here is a little about the family and others at The PFLAG National Conference and the Millennium March on Washington. Carolyn spread her wings and became a founder of Families United against Hate. Playwright/songwriter/diarist Steve Schalchlin (Living in the Bonus Round, The Last Session, The Big Voice: God or Merman?) wrote William’s Song about Willi.
Yesterday, I read Crisis Corps Volunteer’ s 2 Dead: Who will homophobia kill next? and thought I would post something about Willi. I googled “Carolyn Wagner” PFLAG, since we have been out of touch. I found this.
Sat May 13 05:47:15 CDT 2006
Carolyn Wagner, long time progressive activist, one time PFLAG National Vice President, and co-founder with me of Families United Against Hate, has become victim of a vicious hate crime. She has been stalked and harassed since January by a right wing extremist group who know of her work in gay rights. One of them attacked her at her home last month, and she has had major spinal and nerve damage as a result. She suffered some paralysis in her legs and is having emergency surgery tomorrow at St. Anthony’s Medical Center, in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
The family submitted to the victim’s compensation board in Arkansas to cover medical and security expenses and were denied. They needs help with medical bills not covered by her husband Bill’s Wal-Mart insurance and other expenses.
Please help if you can. ~ Send donations to help with expenses to her husband:
Bill Wagner
PO Box 993
Waldron AR 72958
I am in shock. I would like someone to tell me how Carolyn is. Check that. I would like somebody else to tell me how Carolyn is. I am already her friend. She needs more. She deserves more.
I know a recommend is hardly enough. Since I just posted one of my periodic tirades on how much scapegoating and bullying suck, at bare minimum I should thank you for sharing the real human consequences that can result from such hatefulness.
Thanks James, that’s why I offered to post this here for Robyn : we have to remember that marriage rights are not the only GLBT issue, and in fact equality and protection from discrimination go much, much further (farther? I always get those mixed up. I think further here.).
One part of her story that really got me was this:
I mean really, just wow. Chose to be gay? And that he should expect further beatings? And these are people who teach children?
Speechless.
Now you know why all of us queer folk are always going, “Look, there’s an awful lotta work to be done here…”
We pretty much all have stories like this. We all know of someone gay and/or gay-friendly — or even someone who just “looked gay enough” in the wrong place at the wrong time — who’s been beaten to death, near to death, raped, stalked, harassed in damned serious and terrifying ways.
People trivialize it constantly. Choose the lifestyle and all that, like being gay is akin to just waking up one day and deciding to ram your arm down the sink disposal. And they always remove any responsibility from the larger homophobic society, any violence that gay or gay-friendly people experience at the hands of nutjob homophobes is always curiously covered up and then the violent acts turned back onto victims in these ways it’s discussed. It’s crystal clear victim-blaming.
Marriage equality actually is relevant, though. When groups don’t have equal rights in a society, people within the groups suffer not just from the lack of legal protections, but also because the very act of that institutional inequality is very powerful and has far ranging consequences; one of those is that it supports and enhances a more widespread social inequality, and violence often becomes a part of that. It’s always so hard for me to see how much homophobia still permeates the Democratic party that, no matter how many times we queers try to explain, there’s an inability or unwillingness to see the connection between equal rights and the violence that bigots always do to people in any group that doesn’t have equal rights.
Thanks for posting this here, ejmw, I know you are an ally.
Thanks for sharing IndyLib. Your point about marriage inequality feeding the greater social inequality is well made.
Without turning this into a Russ for 2008 commercial, this is one of the issues that Feingold is, IMHO, heads and tails above the rest of the Democratic party. I remember reading his press release earlier this year and thinking Damn, someone FINALLY gets it and isn’t afraid to stand up and say it.
I was nearly run down by some kids in an SUV as a teen because I apparently “looked” gay. That was about a quarter of a century ago, but the memory will be with me for a lifetime.
Let’s just say there are reasons why I refuse to give a free pass to those who spread hate.
My daughter has several openly gay friends in high school, an openly gay coworker at her new job, and we live next door to a lesbian couple. When the lesbian couple first bought the house someone knocked their mailbox down. I wasn’t sure if it was because they were gay and someone was being hateful, sometimes the high school kids cruise through the neighborhood and knock down the mailboxes that aren’t bricked in. Where we live we haven’t experienced any hazing of gays around us, doesn’t mean that it can’t happen here though…..just that I we haven’t experienced any of it in this area of the South and we do have openly gay people we converse with daily here. I do know that my daughter’s coworker was afraid that my daughter wouldn’t want to talk to her anymore once my daughter discovered that she was gay but my daughter assured her that that wasn’t the case….maybe that is how she is normally treated here, I don’t know but I do know that we can always be the change that we desire.
Words of wisdom from Focus on the Family as they launch a new anti-gay website where they say Dogs aren’t born mooing and people aren’t born gay.
The really cute thing (Awww, just adorable!) is they had a spokesman dressed up in a dog costume for the unveiling of the website. Aren’t they clever?
Barf.
Hmm, you would think the Bible would have something negative to say about dressing up in a dog costume to make a political point, wouldn’t you? You’d also think these people had never heard the word “bisexual”, or that they perhaps think it refers to the mythical offspring of a cocker spaniel and a Jersey cow.
It’d be a gas to nod at them about how yes, people can change, and throw a bunch of postmodern social constructionist theories at them about pliant and plastic sexualities manipulated by culture, then ask when they plan to re-examine the social construction of their heterosexuality just to make sure for sure they’ve weeded any trace of teh gay out, lest it surface unexpectedly on them at a bad time in the future. We must always be wary of teh gay, for it lurks, waiting for an opportunity to strike, just like Chuck Norris. (Okay, maybe not just like Chuck Norris.)
I think sites like that one are so profoundly stupid that they read like an SNL parody of the religious right. Sometimes I have a hard time believing that this isn’t all an elaborate, sick joke that I just don’t quite get.
Hello, I read the original diary at DKos, what I found mind-boggling was (1) teachers’ siding with the aggressors (hello? What kind of roles are you a model of?) and (2) this brave mother being attacked for actually taking the side of her son. (Family values, anyone? Or is it OK only if Bush bursts into oh-so-convenient tears and brings up his LEEEEETTTTTLE girls?) What is even worse: this mother being brave enough and taking up the cause of ANYONE who might remotely be like her son? Like, showing compassion that transcends the confinements of tribe and clan?
I also noted that the news reserven had access to was from May this year. I’m sure ANYONE would be grateful for ANY updates…