Concordiensis

Issue date: 5/31/07 Section: News

Media Credit: www.fagbug.com Erin Davies will speak at Union about her experiences with hate crime.

Erin Davies, a graduate student at Sage College, is on a mission: "to drive [her] fagbug on a cross country trip and take it to as many diverse communities as possible." Her goal: "to get at least one million people to add fagbug rainbow stickers to their cars so that no one else will be targeted" in acts of hate crime.

Davies, a recent victim of hate crime, will speak at Union on Thursday, June 7 at 5pm in Reamer Auditorium.

On April 18, as Davies returned to her car, a VW Beetle, she found the words "fag" and "u r gay" spray-painted in red on the car's window and hood.

Davies wrote on her blog, on fagbug.com, "I felt immediate shock. It wasn't registering right away because I didn't think something like this could ever happen to me. My first thoughts were, did someone in my neighborhood see my girlfriend, Sue, and [me] walking around? And after I got out of my shock, I remembered that I had a rainbow sticker on the back of my car and put two and two together."

After some deliberation, Davies decided not to remove the words on her car. She wrote, "in a sense I want the world to see and feel, that same feelings I saw and felt when I saw it."

Davies wants to use her "fagbug" to raise awareness about her situation. As she wrote, "I made a decision to keep it on and to make it visible to the world and to turn the tables around and show something that doesn't get shown due to humiliation and guilt and shame, and allow it to be seen, recognized, acknowledged and dealt with. I thought things like this didn't happen anymore, and now I know that isn't the case."

The response has been very positive towards the "fagbug." Davies has given speeches at schools, done radio interviews, and written blogs for websites. She has received countless letters from her supporters as well.

"I just can't believe this actually happened to my car, and now that I'm getting all this support for driving it, I can't believe how huge it has gotten. Like, I didn't wake up that day and say to myself, I'm going to start a movement. It just happened and now here I am about to embark on this very intense cross-country trip. It's crazy to look back at it all," Davies wrote.

Sophomore John Francis, the head of Spectrum, Union's gay-straight alliance, said that when he heard of Erin Davies, he thought she would be a perfect speaker to bring to Union.

Continued...

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