Mike Alvear's Urge & Merge

About a hundred people showed up in the middle of an unrelenting downpour to hear community leaders voice everyone’s outrage over the police raid of The Eagle, a peaceful gay bar in Atlanta.

The best speaker by far, was Patti Ellis, the mother of two boys–one straight; one gay. Patti is one of the co-founders of the emotionally wrenching Family Acceptance, a site that helps conservative southern parents accept their gay children. At the end of her speech people were shouting, “We’re your kids too!”

I’d rather publish the text of her speech, but she did it off the top of her head, angering the rest of us who spent time preparing and still couldn’t hold a candle to her. Instead, you’ll have to settle for mine:

First, let me say what everybody’s thinking and nobody’s saying: forcing anybody to lay face down on the grubby floors of that bar constitutes a human rights violation under the terms of the Geneva Convention!

I mean, I’d rather be water boarded.

It’s a good thing the raid didn’t happen somewhere like Blake’s, where the crowd is younger, meaner and drunker. Imagine the police bursting into Blake’s in the middle of one of their drag shows when one of those queens was trying to hit the high note on her finale.

Oh. My. God.

There would have been a riot. The cops could’ve been killed! We can’t let this happen because there aren’t enough cops in the street as it is.

My point, and I do have one, is that this protest has nothing to do with The Eagle. It’s not about defending this bar, it’s about protecting the next one. Because if we don’t draw a line in the sand, these raids are going to happen again and again.

It’s my personal belief that the raid on The Eagle was motivated in part by a deep hatred and fear of gay people. You heard of the Gay Panic Defense? This was the Gay Panic Offense.

How else can you explain the police’s judgment that the possibility of two men making out in the corner of a bar poses a greater threat to this city than rape, robbery or murder?

How else can you explain a mentality that says the possibility of a handjob is more dangerous than the reality of a home invasion?

Over 50 crimes a day occur in the city of Atlanta and the police diverted up to 30 cops into a gay bar to arrest 8 people dancing in their underwear?

Why?

Gay panic. The belief that gay people pose a greater risk to the city than crooks, criminals and convicts.

I want to say this as plainly and bluntly as I can:

We got mugged by the police.

They stuck a gun in our ribs and said, “Give it up or else.”

They stole our dignity the way crooks steal our wallets.

The standard advice when you get mugged is Don’t Resist. We didn’t. But as any cop will tell you, the key to avoiding future muggings is not to make yourself vulnerable. Because muggers are always looking for an easy target.

Is that what we want to be? An easy target? Or do we want to take defensive maneuvers and make sure we never get mugged by the police again?

DON’T BE A VICTIM.

The spot where Mathew Shepard was beaten, tied and left to die in a cold, deserted Wyoming field.

For being himself.

For being different.

For being.

When it happened, most of my gay friends thought, “That could have been me on that fence.”  It wasn’t long after his murder that I came face to face with my own Matthew Shepard moment.  As I chronicled it in a local newspaper:

It was midnight.  I could sense the car slowing behind me as I walked toward a gay bar.

My friend John walked about ten feet behind me, the freezing temperature slowing him down and speeding me up.  A voice called from the slowing car and I turned around, thinking the driver was lost, looking for directions.

He wasn’t lost.  He and his friends found exactly what they were looking for.  And in that instant of realization, that moment when your heart stops and your feet take off, you understand, profoundly, what it means to be the object of unbridled hate.

Everything happened in a burst-all four doors in the car flinging open, fours sets of hands gripping of tire irons, bats and pipes. We took off, John and I, without a word uttered between us.  In the horrifying first few seconds of attempted escape, it dawned on me that they were more likely to catch John because I had been walking ahead of him.

Suddenly I heard the dull thud of metal on flesh and knew they had gotten him.  My heart was pounding so loud, my body was moving so fast and yet I could hear some little voice inside me saying *”You have to help him.  You can’t abandon him.  Even if it means dying in the process, you have to help him.”*

I stopped.  Turned around.  We were outnumbered two to one and we had no weapons.  What would I do?  What *could* I do?

I never had to answer the question.  By some miracle, they had only grazed John with the tire iron, and he managed to keep on running.  We reached a main thoroughfare and the oncoming traffic scared our attackers into retreat.  We had escaped.

John didn’t say much and didn’t stay long at the bar.  I realized only later that he had gone into mild shock.  The next day he knocked on my door and showed me something repulsive.  The backs of his legs, from his hamstrings to his calves were a sheet of swollen black and blue bruises.

A common result, his doctor had said, from the trauma of a full and sudden sprint from a standing position.  His tendons and muscles had nearly snapped at the explosive sprint that had saved his life, swelling and discoloring his legs with the blood of burst capillaries.  

To be the object of careening disgust, to be hunted for sport, these are the shadows cast by America’s darkest values.  It would be easy to dismiss our attackers as violent thugs but that would miss a larger point.  The men who chased us weren’t monsters; they were attentive pupils sitting at the foot of America’s great institutions. 

Whether it’s the military banning gay recruits, the Boy Scouts enshrining a policy of exclusion, or the church ex-communicating us for loving the wrong person, many of America’s institutions teach a very Un-American lesson:  Hate Thy Neighbor. 

Our attackers weren’t a cause of physical violence.  They were the effect of a dark consciousness.  A few years ago, Judy Shepard told an Oregon paper, “Do I blame the two young men who murdered my son?  No.  I blame society for giving them permission.”

Society gave our attackers permission, too.  They were simply taking the next logical step laid out by so many churches, families and institutions.   What comes after exclusion, expelling and ex-communicating? 

Elimination. 

Sometimes the lessons of America’s intolerance ends with helpless boys left to die on rural fence posts; other times it ends with grown men left to the luck of their instincts.

Fortunately, the numbers of those lessons are shrinking.  America’s social curriculum is changing, much like its science curriculum changed when evolution replaced creationism.  It is increasingly possible to be different and live a good, safe, productive life in America.

As long as you’re fast enough.