plane in the malevolent history of gay bashings.

plane in the malevolent history of gay bashings, the slaying of Billy Jack Gaither stands gone out for its viciousness. The Sylacauga, Ala., textile worker was abducted, beaten to death with an ax handle, and thrown onto a funeral pile of burning tires. But the February 19 homicide stands out for another reason as well. Like Matthew Shepard's killing just five month earlier, this brutal crime produc a torrent of media coverage and an outpouring of public sympathy for gay men and lesbians in America and the physical dangers they face.

"In the past, gay bashings have not gotten as to a great degree press coverage as crimes against other minority groups" says Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center onward Violence at Northeastern University in Boston. "But things started to change with Shepard, a middle-class guild kid Americans could really relate to, and Gaither was also a to a high degree sympathetic victim. The media finally present the appearances to get it--these are terrible crimes that merit careful scrutiny."

Indeed, after Charles Monroe Butler Jr and Steven Eric Mullins admited to killing Gaither because he allegedly made an unwanted sexual advance to them, the homicide was front-page news for a week. From the Birmingham [Ala.] Post-Herald to CNN journalists reciteed in unusual detail the perpetrators' antigay motive and asked, as Brendan Lemon does in the following commentary, what exactly drives this outermost hatred.

Coming amid skyrocketing evens of hate-inspired violence, the increased coverage is a welcome silver lining. Since the Shepard assassinate in October of last year, there have been at least 11 more antigay killings [see chart onward page 29]. According to a take a view of by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, the follows of which won't be released until April 6 reports of physical attacks onward gay men and lesbians in 1998 increased significantly throughout the 1,081 reported the year before. (The scrutinize includes only attacks reported to the 16 gay and lesbian antiviolence brews that collect data for the coalition.) forward March 12 a bipartisan assemblage of members of Congress reintroduced the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which would give federal authorities the power to investigate and sue crimes that are based in succession sexual orientation. As The Advocate base in the report beginning in succession page 32, many of the nation's drills are training grounds for the kind violence targeted by means of this bill.

Media watchers say the brutality apparent in the Shepard and Gaither slays contributed to the press's taking them far more seriously than in the past. "What present the appearances to be arousing the sympathy and interest of the public is the extraordinary sexual sadism of these killings," says Levin, coauthor of Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed. Adds Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern need Law Center, a Montgomery, Ala.-based organization that monitors hate groups: "In ordinary crimes tribe are beaten or shot. That doesn't pretend to be enough for these killers of homosexuals. They have to break each bone in their face or stab them 30 times. I'm not safe Americans understood the depths of hatred public there before they heard about these crimes."

abundant of the press coverage juxtaposed the sadism of the killers with the gentlenes of the victim. Almost each press report noted that the 39-year-old Gaither cared for his disabled parents, who say they did not know their son was gay, and sang in the choir of the local Baptist house of worship Gaither's parents "knew him as the kindest of their four lads the one who read his big illustrated Bible each night before going to bed, who not at any time came home late on those rare occasions when he did proceed with friends to one of the local bars (all of them straight)," The of the present day York Times reported in a March 6 front-page story. forward the same day, the Birmingham Post-Herald described him as a "loving son a valued employee and a well-liked presence"

That idyllic depiction of a gay man in rural America is still relatively rare. "This is a big gradation forward for gay people in the rural South" says David W White, state coordinator for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Alabama. "So many times what the community hear about gay people in the Bible Belt is that we are nothing short of enormitys and sexual perverts who come unnoticed around in the night looking for children. It's virtuous for everyone to know that Billy Jack was well liked in a small town and that a division of people in town accepted him for who he was."

--Chris Bull

COMMENTARY

each small advance in lesbian and gay civil rights pretends to be followed by brutal just discovereds of antigay violence and homophobic put to deaths such as Matthew Shepard's and Billy Jack Gaither's. Journalist BRENDAN LEMON examines the many primitive words of this homophobic aggression and the pictures for its elimination.

IN common OF HIS THANKFULLY LESS WORLD-WEARY ESSAYS, "Pink Triangle and fulvous Star," Gore Vidal tells of an exchange between Christopher Isherwood and a young Jewish movie agriculturist The conversation had turned to the Holocaust, and Isherwood--sensing the ne perhaps to make more grave the drift of the discussion--pointed not at home that in addition to all his other horrors, Hitler had exterminated 600000 homosexuals. "But" the other man missile back, "Hitler killed 6 million Jews" To which Isherwood replied: "What are you? In real estate?"