I moved to Portland two years ago for several reasons. First, of course, was to go to school. After spending a year and a half at UMA’s Thomaston Center watching ITV classes, I was ready to have some real-time interactions with teachers who were actually in the room with me. Besides school, however, I knew that Portland had a friendly attitude towards gay people, as the non-discrimination ordinance seemed to suggest. I wanted to be in a place where it was safe to be whoever I was, and Thomaston, Maine, was not that place.
So I had high hopes for Portland. For a while, it felt safe to me here, knowing that the law was on my side. I walked down Congress Street holding hands with my girlfriend, and I went to the gay bars without worrying about someone seeing me leave them. But then I started to notice things that made me feel a little less safe.
The Plexiglas covering the windows at all the gay bars, for example. Why have Plexiglas over the windows? So rocks thrown at the windows just bounce off, of course.
Or the physical assault against Jerry Boivin this past June, on Congress Street in broad daylight, because of his perceived gayness.
Or the rumors I have recently heard about queer students’ dorm room doors being vandalized.
And of course I’ve had my own minor experiences with bashing. Although not involving a physical assault, the verbal assaults – people in cars driving by and telling me I “look like a dyke,” mainly – are disturbing.
The university and city have policies and laws that are supposed to help all kinds of people feel safe here. But laws and policies do not necessarily affect the attitudes of the people living under them. They can only prescribe a way of dealing with the people who break them.
And that doesn’t make me feel safe.