The Silence Is Killing Us: Hate Crimes, Criminal Justice, and the Gay Rights Movement in Texas, 1990–1995

Dallas judge Jack Hampton’s disparaging remarks—and frustration with what many felt was a light sentence in a murder trial over which he presided—inspired the December 1988 protest advertised by this flyer. In the years that followed, anti-gay violence in Texas sparked sustained protest and political action. Resource Center LGBT Collection of the UNT Libraries (AR0756), UNT Libraries Special Collections.

In 1994, in the throes of what the media, academia, and gay advocacy organizations called a hate crime “epidemic,” the Houston Chronicle published an atypical story about gay agency in Tyler, Texas. According to the article, Jay Gage found himself the target of a gay-basher in a Tyler park. Refusing to play the part of the prey, Gage fought back against his attacker, leaving him in a bloody heap on the ground. Looking upon what he had done, Gage added a final insult before walking into the night unscathed: “Now, go home and tell your mama you got whupped by a faggot.”¹ The story is uncorroborated by the official record and may well be embellished, but it suggests an important point: East Texans like Gage, previously unorganized, were stirred into defiance and action by the specter of anti-gay violence. Following the incident, Gage’s mother started an East Texas chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Gay activists and their allies everywhere were set on combating the threat of anti-gay bigotry and violence.

Public rallies and displays of outrage following specific hate crimes were one part of this activism. However, the organized movement against anti-gay violence, in Texas and nationwide, was a lobbying campaign for hate crime legislation inclusive of sexual orientation. The legislation varied from state to state but was generally modeled after language championed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) calling for penalty enhancements for bias-motivated crimes.² The proposed bill in Texas, which built on a vague 1993 hate crime law providing for sentence enhancements but not protected categories, sought to add the explicit categories of race, color, disability, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation. The inclusion of sexual orientation made the measure especially controversial, and conservatives such as State Representative Warren Chisum, a West Texan Democrat-turned-Republican who claimed gay men brought attacks upon themselves by “go[ing] to the parks and pick[ing] up men,” torpedoed the bill.³ The Lesbian and Gay Rights Lobby of Texas (LGRL), led by Dianne Hardy-García, spearheaded the efforts to push the bill through the Legislature during the 1990s. The proposed law became a centerpiece of gay lobbying efforts in Texas, perhaps because activists saw a crime bill as the most viable piece of gay civil rights legislation.

In 1995, following the high-profile deaths of several gay Texas men, the LGRL organized a march on the state capitol that drew more than five thousand people. Democratic State Representative Glen Maxey of Austin, the first and at the time only openly gay legislator in Texas, invoked the state’s torrid racial history, drawing a line from the lynching tradition to gay-bashing: “Some 70 years ago, the Ku Klux Klan roamed the Piney Woods and North Texas Plains beating, robbing, and murdering Texans simply because of the color of their skin. In the nineties, it is gay men and lesbians who are the victims of the new Saturday-night pastime: fag bashing.”⁴ Following the tactics of early twentieth-century lynching activists, the march revolved around the murders of specific gay Texans, and hate crime activists saw themselves in a civil rights framework. For many in the crowd, it was also a deeply personal march as they carried photographs of murdered loved ones. Daniel Saldana, the father of a man killed in Austin, told the crowd he wanted to protect other families from losing loved ones to violence. Bill Hogan of Lubbock, the brother of a man who committed suicide after being outed in...