:: When lesbians are targets Attacks against women are often triggered by rejection By Lisa Neff From The Advocate, September 12, 2000 In May 1988

Rebecca Wight and Claudia Brenner embarked on a three-day hike along a Pennsylvania stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Only Brenner returned. Wight died on the trail, the victim of a gunman who watched the women make love in a secluded wooded area, then opened fire, discharging eight bullets, one of them fatal.

Brenner survived five wounds to see her partner's killer, Stephen Roy Carr, sent to prison for life without parole. Eight years later, in May 1996, Julianne Williams and Lollie Winans began a five-day hike on a Virginia portion of the same trail. Neither Williams nor Winans returned. They died on the trail-their throats slit in an attack still unsolved.

Antiviolence advocates identified a trend when they compared the trail murders with the December 1995 slayings of Michelle Abdill and Roxanne Ellis in Medford, Ore. Suspect profiles indicate the assailant in each crime coolly killed after seeing two women comfortably and affectionately in love with each other. A sense of rejection turned to repulsion and hate. Robert James Acremant, who abducted Ellis and Abdill, then shot them execution-style in the back of their pickup truck, said his motivation was robbery but added that it was easier to kill the women because they were lesbians. He called the women "sick."

In the first trail slaying, Carr's defense attorney claimed that witnessing a lesbian sex act provoked his client to kill. "These are men who seem to think they are going to teach lesbians how not to be lesbians," says Jeffrey Montgomery, executive director of Michigan's Triangle Foundation and a founding member of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects. Montgomery and other antiviolence advocates have generally had less to say regarding bias-related slayings of lesbians than of gay men, in part because, statistics suggest, they occur less frequently.

For 1998 the FBI reported 1,439 crimes motivated by victims' sexual orientation-972 of them committed specifically against gay men and 265 against lesbians. The agency reported three anti-gay male slayings that year, but no anti-lesbian homicides. The NCAVP, in its annual report on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender bias crime, reported 1,830 crimes against gay men and 700 crimes against lesbians in 1998. Last year the group reported 1,379 anti-gay male crimes and 548 anti-lesbian crimes.

Though the group logged 33 murders in 1998 and 29 in 1999, neither report detailed an antilesbian killing. "There are far fewer antigay murders of lesbians [reported] than of gay males or transgender/transitioning individuals," says Shirley Lesser of Virginians for Justice. The Richmond-based antiviolence project assisted law enforcement authorities in investigating the deaths of Winans and Williams. But the number of crimes reported is not always indicative of those committed, Lesser says, adding that a large number of antilesbian incidents may go unreported because authorities mask them as domestic violence crimes.

Such was the case in the 1998 shotgun slayings of Jaqueline J. Anderson and Barbara J. Gilpin in front of nearly 20 people in Portland, Ore. Eric Walter Running shot the women because Anderson broke up with him to return to Gilpin, with whom she had had a ten-year relationship. "I suspect there have been many other antilesbian murders in the past decade," Lesser says. "I suspect these were murders by associates, not strangers.

A husband or boyfriend kills an ex-girlfriend, and the woman's lesbianism did not come out. This would mirror our findings that most of the more physical violence against lesbians is caused by associates and family, not strangers." Lesser and Montgomery agree that the assailants in these crimes are almost exclusively males. "The instances of women perpetrating antilesbian homicides-and antigay homicides, for that matter-are virtually nonexistent," Montgomery says. "These are male crimes." The motive, Montgomery says, is the flip side of "gay panic." Instead of becoming enraged by an alleged come-on, the assailants are enraged by an apparent rejection. "That's the reason behind killing them," he says. "The killer sees that not only is the woman not attracted to him, she's attracted to another woman."

*Neff is managing editor at the Chicago Free Press.

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