It has been an interesting week in Fabulous Portland.

As we ready ourselves for what seems like refreshing but relentless waves of Pride Celebrations (Latino! Bear! Black! Everyone!) fear – or perhaps “phobia” – poked its gnarly hand in the air and said “don’t forget about me!”

Humans create an unsteady marriage between the terms “hate” and “fear.” In the fabulous community, we decry “hate crimes,” which we all agree are based on homophobia – “fear” of us.

The week began with the arrival of one of the most blatantly homophobic organizations since free speech began – the Westboro Baptist Church. With no soldier funerals scheduled in the area, they weakly protested a puzzling collection of Jewish community centers and two high schools. It’s like they just threw darts at a map of Portland. Clearly, they did not visit FabulousPDX.com to find out where we all would be!

Hundreds of well-meaning people organized counter protests at the two high schools, ignoring the requests of both school principals to stay away. Still, the counter protests were deemed a success, thus completing the circle that gets repeated everywhere Westboro goes: their hate-filled protests trigger responses that unify.

Then fear and hate once again combined in a series of alleged “gay bashings” in Portland. Only one was reported to the Police, but that one resulted in a community meeting at the Q-Center where many ideas were considered but only one strong conclusion emerged: we have to report hate crimes.

The reported incident involved drag queens being stopped, verbally harassed and then beaten by a group of men late at night near a gay bar. The fear/hate mixture is the only logical explanation for the bashers’ behavior. One of the drag queens reports that she responded verbally, in order to show that she and her group were not afraid – when they really were. The assailants all fled, a report was filed early the next week and the Police are doing the best they can to try to apprehend the assailants. So, now we have people who acted in fear-turned-hate who have sent shivers through the very community of people they fear. It worked!

And this kind of thing continues to work until we deploy better methods to combat it. Ignore the idiots who are not actually hurting us – the Westboro Clowns – and immediately report the fearmongers who do hurt us. Even if it was a few days late, I am so proud that the gay bashing victims did file the report. Their actions – and the fabulous communication network in Portland – led to a well-attended meeting where one strong message emerged: The Portland Police MUST know about these incidents in order to stop them.

When I first got involved in the Pride Festival, various “trainings” occurred to help all of us deal with the inevitable protesters. The training was short: ignore them. Each year there are fewer and fewer protesters and lately it appears that the content of their protests is not even appropriate to the festival: pro-life. It’s like they got directions to the wrong place.

Maybe they have the same organizer as the Westboro people.

Tags: Westboro Baptist Church