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There was no cross behind the pulpit in this church. Instead, a sign hung. It read, “Have I therefore become your enemy, because I speak the truth?” I sat in the last pew, beside a woman who would later tell me I deserve God’s wrath. She shared her Bible with me. We followed along as the pastor slammed his fist down on the pulpit, shouting, “You must have no fellowship with the ungodly. No fellowship. No fellowship!”
I am a queer woman. My knee bounced beneath her Bible. I had come for fellowship.
Last October, I visited three of the 52 organizations identified as anti-LGBT hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. I had just returned from a year abroad to my hometown of Gulf Breeze, Florida, where LGBTQ slurs had been spray painted on an old rail bridge and a friend who is gay and Latino told me he’d experienced hate speech at a grocery store. Recent hate crime statistics from the FBI had showed that the number of reported hate crimes due to sexual orientation was increasing nationally, specifically targeting trans people of color. I am white, cisgender, female, small, more inclined to listen than to talk—privileged, in other words, and protected. I wanted to combat the prejudice of my home, to prove to myself I was part of the solution.
I had read about combating hate through short conversations and contact, promoting acceptance by “reaching out to people beyond your own group,”“establishing personal relationships with conflicting parties,” “connect[ing] with those who think differently, even if they are hateful.” I had a sleeping bag, money for gasoline, and a book on nonviolent communication. I decided to take a road trip.
The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies its anti-LGBT hate groups, which run the gamut from churches and think tanks to firms that promote anti-LGBTQ litigation and laws, in part by their use of “dehumanizing language…to portray LGBT people as, for example, sick, evil, perverted, and a danger to children and society.”
Through personal contact with these groups, I wanted to see if I could combat this dehumanizing language, which enables hate crime. Psychologist Dominic Parrott, director of the Center for Research on Interpersonal Violence, supported this understanding. “Research literature clearly shows that intergroup contact reduces prejudice (including anti-LGBT prejudice),” he wrote me. “Most scholars agree that intergroup contact is the #1 way to combat prejudice and, by extension, dehumanization that leads to violence and discrimination.”
Heidi Burgess, co-director of the Conflict Information Consortium, which promotes constructive approaches to conflict through online resources and seminars, agreed. “Hate crimes become acceptable psychologically,” she told me, “because the victim is seen as non- or less than human. Once a connection is made, and the ‘enemy’ is found to be human—even similar to oneself in some way—then the hate crime becomes more difficult to do and, hence, unlikely. Thus, your visit was…likely a very effective action.”
I’m not sure it was.
I connected with people I met. I found similarities, experienced kindness and generosity. I received garden-fresh tomatoes and an invitation to a potluck lunch. A Christian proselytizer gave my car battery a jump. I met a woman who had worked in manatee conservation, as I had, and a woman who worried about hurricanes as I do, because we both have family on the Gulf Coast.
I also experienced anti-LGBTQ prejudice. I was told that homosexuality is abhorrent, depraved, a “society-murdering plague.” Someone told me that homosexuals “should even be put to death, so strongly does God oppose this.”
These expressions of prejudice most often came from the very same people with whom I’d established connection, found similarities, and engaged in dialogue.