News
2007-05-02
"Fag Bug" vandal
victim plans road trip
Out Albany,
N.Y., graduate student Erin Davies, whose Volkswagen
Beetle was spray-painted with hate slogans on April
18, t
Out Albany,
N.Y., graduate student Erin Davies, whose Volkswagen
Beetle was spray-painted with hate slogans on April
18, the Day of Silence, plans to drive the
vandalized "Fag Bug" on a cross-country tour to
promote tolerance.
Davies, 29, who
came out as a lesbian 12 years ago, got many messages of
support after the vandalism incident, which she figures was
triggered by a rainbow sticker on the car.
At first, Davies
said, she was mortified. She reported the crime to
Albany police, who are investigating but say they have heard
of no similar incidents. An insurance company claims
adjuster—one of many people who advised her to
remove the slurs from the
car—estimated the cost of repairing cosmetic
damages at $350.
"But even as I
drove through my neighborhood in the rental car, I was
stopped by friends and acquaintances and asked what I
planned to do next," she told the Troy Record
newspaper.
"I'm gonna
rainbow my whole car out!" Davies, an arts education
student at Russell Sage College, told Gay.com.
She decided to
keep the slurs on the car to raise awareness. When people
see it around town, she writes on her site, FagBug.com, they
often leave letters of support on the dash.
In July, Davies
plans to drive the 2002 Beetle across the country as a
way to protest hate crimes. Along the way, she wants to get
1 million people—gay and
straight—to put rainbow stickers on their own
cars, figuring that if the symbol proliferates, its bearers
will no longer be targeted as weak. She hopes to get
coverage from MTV.
On Monday, Sage
students and faculty staged a rally to support her.
"She is a very
strong individual, for her to turn such a negative
into a positive thing," Cheryl VanDemark, coordinator of
education programs at Sage and Davies's adviser, told
Albany's Metroland weekly.
"If it had
happened to any typical individual, they would have been
hesitant to drive it, but Erin is strong enough to know how
other people think, to know how this might affect
other people," VanDemark said.
Davies is not new
to activism. After her undergraduate years in
Baltimore, the Syracuse, N.Y., native worked with LGBT
youths, working on a documentary about the Living
Proof theater group.
"The kids each
made a vision statement: 'I'm living proof
that'...they had not committed suicide, or whatever. That
they were still strong.
"This is the same
response, but to a situation of mine," Davies said.
The Volkswagen
vandalism was not the only backlash to this year's Day of
Silence, an annual demonstration at schools and
colleges nationwide to dramatize the
discrimination and suffering young gays endure.
High schoolers in
South San Francisco, Calif., held their Day of Silence
on a campus that had been blanketed with hate graffiti over
spring break. Rumors of violence forced a lockdown at
a participating high school in New Castle, Ind., and
in Jonesborough, Tenn., the gay teen organizer of a
high school Day of Silence event was sent home, allegedly
for his own safety. (Barbara Wilcox, The
Advocate)
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