[owen] Colson

[Arne & Athena Kildegaard]

Dan,
Colson's article is filled with hogwash. He cites the work of Patrick 
Letellier. Here's an article by Letellier that should indicate just how 
deep the hogwash is.

*Hate Crimes, Domestic Violence, and the Extreme-Right: * *Setting the 
Record Straight*

By Patrick Letellier

My name is Patrick Letellier, and I am one of two "prominent homosexual 
activists and researchers" whose work on same-sex domestic violence has 
been widely sited - and, I hasten to add, grossly distorted - by Gary 
Glenn, President of the Michigan American Family Association (AFA). I 
write today to set the record straight, so to speak.

In March of this year, Mr. Glenn issued a press release with this 
confusing headline: "Homosexual 'love crimes' pose a 50,000% higher risk 
of violence than 'hate crimes.'"

In the story that follows, Glenn claims that "love crimes" (what I would 
call incidents of domestic violence among same-sex couples), are a far 
greater threat to the health and safety of lesbians and gay men than 
hate crimes. Therefore, he argues, the citizens of Michigan, and 
presumably the rest of the nation, should not support hate crimes 
legislation that includes protections based on sexual orientation.

Confused? So was I. I had to read the release a couple times to grasp 
the circuitous logic of Glenn's argument. I'll return to the "logic" 
later, but first I want to clear up Glenn's distortions of my work on 
domestic violence, work that he employs to bolster his case.

That said, there are so many errors in Glenn's press release it's hard 
to know where to begin.

/Distorting information about domestic violence/

In 1991, I co-authored a book, Men Who Beat The Men Who Love Them: 
Battered Gay Men and Domestic Violence, with David Island, an 
educational psychologist. I had just fled a four-year relationship with 
an abusive partner, and Dr. Island and I set out to document gay male 
domestic violence as we understood it. Our book is part self-help, part 
theory, and part call-to-action for the gay community.

At that time, no studies had been done on gay male domestic violence, 
minus one unpublished master's thesis, so much of our book is 
theoretical ("No literature exists about this problem. No research has 
been done," we wrote on page 1).

Thankfully, in the decade since our book's publication, some initial 
research on same-sex battering has been done. Three more books on the 
subject have been published, all of which are widely available and 
contain more up-to-date information on same-sex battering, including 
estimates about its prevalence.

When writing our book in the late 80s, Dr. Island and I conjectured that 
since the majority of domestic violence in heterosexual relationships is 
committed by men against women, gay male couples might actually see 
twice the rate of heterosexual domestic abuse - since both members of 
the couple are men. This seemed like a logical possibility to us, and is 
clearly a point Glenn has seized on, as it constitutes the main thrust 
of his argument. But research has proven us wrong.

Had he wanted to present accurate information, Glenn could have cited 
studies demonstrating that lesbians and gay men batter their partners at 
approximately the same rate as heterosexual men. That means about one 
couple in four, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, will be 
rocked by domestic violence.

Instead of making use of current literature or statistics, Glenn selects 
two passages from our book, from pages 12 and 50, and links them 
together (I quote him verbatim here, the mis-use of quotation marks is 
his):

"Island and Letellier also estimate that 'domestic violence may effect 
and poison as many as 50 percent of gay couples, while 'we believe 
[heterosexual domestic abuse] is closer to 20 percent."

In fact, as we clearly state in our book, the 50% figure is an estimate 
provided to us by an anti-violence project, and in the paragraphs 
following our mention of that figure, Dr. Island and I refute it and 
come up with what we believe is a more reasonable - and significantly 
lower - estimate of about 21%.

Sometimes context really is everything. What Glenn also fails to mention 
is that the estimate of 20% that Dr. Island and I make (regarding 
heterosexual battering) was a challenge to other researchers who claimed 
that as many as 80% of heterosexual men batter their partners.

Here's the whole quote:

"We disagree. No body of data supports their contentions. We believe 
that far too many husbands in America are violent, but their proportion 
is closer to 20% than 80%."

How ironic that in describing heterosexual men as less violent than 
other researchers suggested, our work is now being twisted to assert 
that gay men are more violent. Ironic, but not surprising.

The real issue is Glenn's anti-gay agenda

Of course, the numbers and statistics are all a smoke screen. Shifting 
the focus from hate crimes to domestic violence is simply Glenn's 
strategy to control the terms of the debate and deflect attention from 
the brutal reality of hate violence against gay people in Michigan and 
around the country.

Glenn is not at all concerned with the rates of gay domestic violence or 
hate crimes against gays, or with the health and safety of any gay 
person. As his political history demonstrates, he is interested only in 
building a name for himself as an anti-gay gadfly by de-railing all 
efforts to recognize the humanity of gay people, and by undermining the 
quest for gay equality.

Here's another quote from that same section of our book (p. 10) that 
Glenn chose not to cite, likely because it describes him so well:

"Some members of the gay community believe that information about gay 
male domestic violence, if widely known, would merely fuel the fires of 
anti-gay discrimination from the heterosexual world. Armed with such 
information, it is reasoned, gay-haters would have one more weapon to 
use to further degrade the public reputation of gay relationships."

In fact, Glenn and the Michigan AFA are not the first anti-gay forces to 
use or distort information about same-sex battering to attack gay rights 
and further their right-wing political goals, nor will they be the last. 
In fact, they are not even the most creative.

In 1992, our book was cited in the congressional debate about gays in 
the military. At the time the argument was that since some gay men are 
violent against their partners, they should all be kept out of the 
military, because the military is no place for violent men!

With the release of this years report on same-sex battering by the 
National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects, I expect further attempts 
by Glenn, Fred Phelps, and other extremists to undermine gay rights by 
distorting my work and the work of others who are determined to present 
the full complexities of what it is to be gay, including the experience 
of domestic violence.

As the great lesbian poet Adrienne Rich has written, "Everything we 
write will be used against us or against those we love."

While I am disappointed and even astounded by Glenn's deliberate 
distortion of my work on same-sex battering, I understand that the quest 
to deny equal citizenship to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender 
people knows no bounds.

Patrick Letellier is Assistant Editor of The Slant, a newspaper serving 
the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities of the San 
Francisco Bay Area. Since the publication of Men Who Beat the Men Who 
Love Them, he has published numerous book chapters, articles and manuals 
about domestic violence, and has lectured on the topic all over the US, 
Canada and in Europe.