By Tori Marlan
The coalition was formed after Horizons Community Services, an organization that had been providing services for gay men and lesbians since 1973, noticed a steady increase in domestic-violence calls to its Anti-Violence Project crisis line–which had been set up primarily to help victims of hate crimes. The project only began documenting the nature of the calls in 1991, but according to Jerri Lynn Fields, the project director, domestic-violence calls had been coming in since day one. “I think that a lot of people didn’t know that what they were calling about was domestic violence. So if a man was being battered by his lover he didn’t call to report domestic violence–he was calling to report getting beaten up. But most people who work in the Anti-Violence Project are pretty familiar with domestic violence, so the people here obviously recognized it as that.” According to Fields, 8 to 12 domestic-violence calls now come in each month–from callers who aren’t sure if they’re in an abusive relationship as well as from those who know their safety is in jeopardy.
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Understanding that the AIDS crisis slogan “silence equals death” could also pertain to the issue of domestic abuse, the coalition’s members came up with a series of recommendations that would make domestic abuse more visible and provide victims with services. As a consequence the state’s attorney’s office began conducting workshops for social-service providers, bar owners and staff, and religious organizations. Horizons began discussing the problem with police officers and battered women’s shelters.
Gray–who back in the late 60s and early 70s turned her home into a crash pad for gay people who’d left abusive lovers or had been rejected by their parents, which Gray considers another form of domestic abuse– works on all gay-related crimes, but her workload consists of mostly domestic-violence cases. And she gets new cases every week. She says she can promise that the police will be held accountable for any mistreatment of victims, that the victims won’t be laughed out of court, and that the state’s attorney’s office is committed to prosecuting abusers regardless of their sexual orientation, but she can’t promise that the abusers won’t out them. “I say, ‘If you do nothing, then you’ll continue to be victimized. And I really think you should go ahead with getting the order of protection, because this is just another threat and another issue of power and control.’ It may happen, it may not. I’ve had people whose abusers have called the job, written to clients–the whole nine yards.”
