On 18 April this year, 29-year-old student Erin Davies from Albany in the state of New York found herself a victim of hate crime.
Erin, who had been out as a lesbian for 12 years, believes because she had a rainbow sticker on her VW Beetle, her car was vandalised, left with the words in red spray paint, ‘u r gay’ on the bonnet and ‘fAg’ on the driver side of her car.
Funnily enough this particular day was the 11th annual National Day of Silence, a time to remember and acknowledge discrimination against GLBTIQ people.
Erin was on her way to work at a part-time job when she first saw the graffiti on her car. “It stopped me dead in my tracks. I was shocked,” she recalls.
She just thought someone had seen her and her girlfriend holding hands. After checking out the damage she became aware of the time and noticed she’d be late for work, so she hopped in the car and took off. “I only made it a half a block up the street, and was bombarded with pedestrians laughing and pointing at me, and their reactions sent me back to the parking spot where it happened. I got out of my car, ran home and got another ride to work that day.”
Despite her initial shock and embarrassment, Erin decided “to embrace what happened” and to keep driving her car with the graffiti on it. Before this happened, Erin had felt supported by the queer community in Albany, but once she made the choice to keep driving her car, she was “boycotted and ostracised” by many of her friends and others.
When her friend Cory Magin phoned the next day to see how she was, he encouraged her to drive the car around the country and document the reactions. It was then he said he was buying her the website ‘fagbug.com’. “Writing the word ‘fag’ on my car made me realise this was just a random act of hate because fag is a derogatory word used to put down gay men or men who are perceived as gay or weak,” Erin says. “It's not typically used to describe a woman. The word ‘gay’ isn't as negative a word in our society as the word fag.” By calling her car ‘fagbug’, it “opens up the dialogue about the word fag, its implications, and place in our society”.
The decision to drive the fagbug has made a difference to almost everything in Erin’s life. She has taken a year off grad school to edit a documentary of her experience, to write a book, and go on a college speaking tour.
When the crime happened Erin was living with her girlfriend of a year and a half but when she left on what was to be 58-day cross-country fagbug tour, within10 days her girlfriend broke off the relationship. Erin now lives with a woman who she met through fagbug.
While travelling across the country she got so much support from many people and that the positive response was far greater than the negative. She received sponsorship from the makers of her car, even having strangers offer to pay for petrol, accommodation and food.
Erin wants people to realise that these acts happen frequently, every day. By continuing to drive her fagbug she is forcing people to confront homophobia. “I am making it not just my problem, but everyone's problem,” she says. “I think we all need to come together to first of all realise and acknowledge that it is a problem, and secondly to come up with a solution.”
She’s of the belief that queer people must be accepted in society rather than merely tolerated. “If we just tolerate one another we will still run into problems, but if we truly accept and understand each other then we will have progress,” she argues.
Erin’s efforts to promote acceptance of the GLBTIQ community have not gone unnoticed. She received the ‘Most Outstanding Individual’ award in the Vancouver Pride Parade after having driven around the USA and Canada for 110 days. “I was really proud of myself for making it as far as I had, and for being recognised for the work I was doing,” she says.
Now what Erin needs is to get as many people to go online and check out her website www.fagbug.com so that she can achieve her goal of getting 1 million people (both gay and straight) to add rainbow fagbug stickers to their cars.
On 18 April this year, 29-year-old student Erin Davies from Albany in the state of New York found herself a victim of hate crime.
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