Lez Keep It Real

Erin Davies, a 29-year-old graduate student at Sage Graduate School, began her day like any other. She left her home in the historic Mansion Hill neighborhood of Albany, NY intending to go to her part-time job at a Moe’s, a local Mexican restaurant. Full of smiles and an optimistic anticipation for the day, she headed towards her parked 2002 grey Volkswagen Beetle. But when she drew closer, she saw something red on her hood.

“From where I was standing, I couldn’t read what it said so I kept walking,” Erin explained. “When I got close enough to read it, I realized what is said. I stopped dead in my tracks in total shock.” What Erin saw were the words, “u r gay” written in red spray paint. After a few seconds, she noticed another word, “fag,” glaring back at her from her driver’s side window.

“After what the person wrote sunk in, I thought to myself – it’s because of the rainbow sticker on the back of my car.”

Erin has been out of the closet and living life openly as a lesbian for the past 12 years. She couldn’t fathom anyone who knew her would do such a thing, nor have just cause to do so.

“If someone who knew me wanted to personally hurt me, they wouldn’t write, ‘u r gay’ on my car,” she said. “It’s like writing ‘u r straight’ on someone car who is straight. It doesn’t have any impact or weight.”

Erin assumed that whomever spray-painted her car wanted her to feel that being gay was a bad thing instead of something she should be proud of. Her rainbow sticker was an obvious display of gay pride and clued the culprit in on her sexual orientation. Being that she was on her way to her part-time job, Erin didn’t have time to call the police. So she got in her car and began to creep up the street. After getting only about a half block, people were already pointing and gawking at the homophobic graffiti on display.

“I put my car in reverse and went right back into the spot I had left it. It was a good thing my girlfriend was home that day. Had she not been home, I would have probably broken down emotionally.”
Erin eventually made it to her part-time job, but left early so that she could call the police and report the incident. While waiting for the cops to arrive, she noticed over 50 people walk by her car. “It brought strangers out on the streets together to form a dialogue,” she said. “People were shocked, disturbed and outraged by what they saw.”

Transforming a crime into a cause

It took two days for Erin to digest what had happened. She felt violated and yet, at the same time, oddly empowered. At first she wanted to remove herself physically and maybe somewhat emotionally from her car. She rented a different car and tried to put the incident aside but kept getting stopped by neighbors, friends and strangers who voiced their support and anger for had happened or to scold her for having the rainbow sticker on her car in the first place.

“I realized at that point that I couldn’t get away from this,” said Erin. “I figured that maybe there was a reason for it.”

After weighing a few options, Erin made the decision to ditch the rental car and keep her Volkswagen Beetle as it was. She took it school one day as a test drive to see if it would incite any reactions like it had in her own neighborhood.

“I wanted to see if I could get any unsolicited reactions on video,” she said. “I do a lot of documentary work and found the polar responses to be quite intriguing.”

Erin drove her newly transformed bug to Sage Graduate School where she is working towards her MAT in Education. She parked it in front of the admissions building and with in one hour, public safety received over 50 phone calls mentioning the car in both good and bad light. Erin was asked to remove her car from campus and was also dismissed from working an event she was scheduled to work over the weekend because the school officials didn’t want her car there.
However, her advisor, Cheryl VanDenmark, and Connell Frazer, the dean of the school of education, both encouraged Erin to keep her car at school and to continue driving it to raise awareness. At this suggestion, an idea began to form in her head.

“That night I was on Capital News 9 and initially decided I was going to drive the car for one week, which seemed like an eternity at the time,” said Erin. “Soon my timeline of a week turned into a month and so on and so forth.”

The very next day, Erin received a call from a close friend of hers who set up a website and a Myspace page for the aptly named, “fag bug.”

“He loved how I took the incident to a place that was high profile, and seeing the various reactions I was getting, he said he could see me taking [the car] across the country and doing it on a much larger scale.”
With that Erin launched the “fag bug” campaign that is now garnering national attention.

Hitting the road

At the end of June, Erin will hit the road with her “fag bug” and travel across the country and in Canada stopping in various cities, at pride events and participating in speaking engagements along the way. The point of the trip is to expose the kind of homophobia that is still a regular occurrence in today’s society.

“The typical reaction,” explained Erin. “Is to cover something like this up as quick as possible and to move on with our lives. But even if it was covered up, I would still see that image every time I saw my car.” Rather than pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened, Erin is thrusting herself into the public eye in order to make a profound statement.

“Homophobia isn’t just my problem to solve,” she said. “It’s everyone’s. We all need to come together to figure out where this type of behavior comes from, who is teaching it and how it can be changed.”The lesson of the “fag bug” is that, even in 2007, somewhere, someone is learning to be hateful. “Rather than be bullied into taking my rainbow sticker off my car, I’m going to try and get one million people (gay and straight) to add my “fag bug” rainbow sticker to their own cars so that the kinds of people who support this kind of behavior know that we aren’t going to let them target us again!”

Erin hopes to get a national television network to film her on her cross-country trek and turn it into a documentary series. Her primary goal is to raise awareness among people who aren’t in the gay and lesbian community. By documenting her trip, she hopes to expose a multicultural perspective on why America is so intolerant towards acts of hate.

“We hear the word ‘fag’ being thrown around in schools and daily conversations so often, but we don’t stop to think of how that term can be hurtful to some people,” said Erin. “There is no way to avoid it. I’m confronting homophobia, hate and intolerance head on rather than let it control me. If every hateful act inspired groups of people to withdraw from being visible, then [the gay and lesbian community] would quickly bring ourselves back thirty years.”

By calling her campaign “fag bug,” Erin is taking the power out of the word ‘fag’ and making it part of a fun, playful and intriguing movement. “Words no longer have power over us when we decide to change the meaning of the word,” she added.

A lesson before driving

Coincidentally, Erin has already been involved in the GLBT movement as an activist for the past ten years working with GLBT youth in Baltimore on a play called, “Living Proof.”

“It was meant to empower them and do something positive to counter all the negative statistics out there regarding GLBT youth, like suicide, depression, isolation, HIV, homelessness, etc.,” said Erin.

She has learned from her youth work that the GLBT community as a whole is constantly looking for a hero, for someone to speak up for them, and through this incident, she has been able to provide that, to stand up for people who may have encountered a similar situation but lacked the courage, confidence or resources to face it.

“My ‘Living Proof’ is that I am outlasting a bad situation and turning it into something positive through my journey,” said Erin, in reference to the play she was working on. “If I had kept this all to myself and removed the graffiti from my car, I’d feel unsafe in my neighborhood and be fixated on who did it, what happened and why it happened to me.”

Because of Erin’s persistence, the police have been forced to take this situation seriously though they have yet to find the culprit or culprits.

“I was grilled three separate times by different officers about who my enemies were,” she said. “There was no acknowledgement of this being a hate crime until after my decision to keep the car as it was made the local news.”

Since she took a stand, Erin’s entire neighborhood and community, family, and friends as well as the national and international media, have supported her. She’s received letters and e-mail from all over the country and from around the world praising her.

“So far I’ve gotten 1000 nice e-mails and two negative ones. A local mechanic even left me note offering to fix my car for free because he was so disgusted by what had been written on it.” With so much support and appreciation for what she has chosen to do with her “fag bug,” Erin knows that she made the right decision.

“As far as my healing with this goes, I feel very positive about the fact that I can take this negative situation and turn it into a positive one.”

Pimpin’ the ride

At the end of her journey, Erin hopes to turn her car into her “fag bug” sticker as a visual reminder for everyone in the GLBT community to feel proud of who they are. She has already approached MTV’s Pimp My Ride with Xzibit to transform her “fag bug” into a moving pride symbol.

“Having my car painted will bring things together, and make me excited to drive my car again,” said Erin. “It would be an exciting conclusion to my trip.

Though she may end up having the paint removed from her car, and stripping her bug clean only to have repainted and detailed with vibrant rainbow colors and the “fag bug” slogan across the side, Erin will always remember the red spray paint that launched her into a journey of self empowerment and gave her a new found pride in the GLBT community as a whole.

To contribute to the “fag bug” campaign, to buy a “fag bug” sticker, or to contact Erin for an event in your city, visit her website.

Erin plans to keep us all here at Lez Keep it Real updated throughout her journey with guests posts once a week. Stay tuned to find out where and when “The ‘fag bug’s been spotted!” next in upcoming posts.

comment question: Would you drive around in a vehicle that had been spray painted with the words “fag” and “u r gay?”

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