Leave the Light On

by Jennifer Storm

  Raye and I were getting serious and decided to get a house together. Raye was done being a resident assistant and wanted to get out of the dorms, so we started looking and found an adorable rental right behind the house of Joe Paterno, the head football coach at Penn State since 1966. I walked past his humble home every day and couldn’t believe someone who was so famous and made so much money lived in such a modest home. I loved our little home, and soon after we moved in we brought home a rat terrier/Jack Russell mix that we named Tanner. He and my cat got along very well, and suddenly Raye and I had a little family. I couldn’t imagine life being any better.

  And then the world came down around me and everyone else. I was sitting in my anthropology class at 8:45 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001, when a couple of minutes later my professor came in to announce that there was some accident at the World Trade Center. He didn’t go into details, and as all the students began to pour out of his classroom, I saw a look on his face that disturbed me. I walked briskly to the student union building where my organization’s office was, which was only about a minute away from my class. I could feel the energy shift on campus. As I walked, I heard people buzzing with words like “plane” and “New York City,” and as I approached the student union building there was a sea of students sitting on the floor in front of the massive flat-screen TV in the center of the building. I saw the image of a smoking World Trade Center, where a plane had apparently crashed into the upper part of the building.

  I listened for less than a minute to the commentary and surveyed the crowd around me. Some students were quietly talking on cell phones; most just looked on in confusion, as I did. I gathered myself and rushed to the elevator that went to the third floor where my office was. I felt uneasy, but had no clue what was happening. It was very odd that a commercial jet would hit a building, I thought. As the door opened to the third floor, I stepped out just in time to look up at the TV set that hung right outside my office and see a plane hit the south side of the second tower. I gasped as white, fluffy clouds of smoke emerged from the building, but the plane never did. There was a rush of reporters beginning to talk of “terrorist attack” on TV. I pulled my chair out of my office and sat down to watch the coverage. My whole body was frozen as I watched this massive commercial plane smack into the side of a building and disappear, replayed over and over again. It was haunting, and impossible to look away from. Moments later, there were reports of a plane hitting the Pentagon. A panic rose in me, and I was glued to the TV. I sat in silence, listening to the scrambling reporters try to confirm information coming into the station as they continued to replay the footage of the second plane crash. After about fifteen minutes, a reporter said there were reports that another plane went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and my entire insides went numb. I didn’t know where Shanksville was; all I heard was Pennsylvania and all I could think of was my family. I thought I might puke as I ran to the phone in my office and immediately dialed my parents. I reached my stepmother, who was at work. By this time I was sobbing uncontrollably, asking if they were okay and screaming hysterically about this being the next world war. My stepmother was also in tears, and she tried to reassure me that everyone was okay. I spoke to my father. Then I called Raye, who was working at the time as a security officer on campus. She was leaving work and coming over to my office right away. She got there just as the first tower collapsed, and as it did, I collapsed into her arms.

  Raye and I held vigil in front of our television, as did the entire nation, for what seemed like days. The images were being played and replayed. It was as though the whole world was on a broken record that no one could fix, and we all kept reliving the trauma over and over again. I just sat, crying. I cried myself to sleep that night and had a fear inside me that I had never known before. Could this be the end of the world? Was it over? Would more things happen? If I closed my eyes and allowed myself to sleep, would I wake up? And if so, what would I awake to? I didn’t sleep that night. Instead I just watched the news. I was obsessed with the coverage. I couldn’t take my eyes off the TV because I was afraid I would miss something else happening.

  Tensions on campus were heating up as acts of hate were being played out everywhere. It started with an Asian female who went missing one night—simply vanished into thin air. Her name was Cindy Song, and many students organized to try to find her, but the University seemed more interested in trying to explain it away. My organization was working closely with the Black Caucus at the time, and the leaders of that organization had been receiving death threats— black football players, and then even the board of trustees started receiving them as well. There were swastikas drawn on dorms outside of a Jewish boy’s room. A gay boy was attacked outside his dorm. It seemed like every week something hateful was happening to minority students. Every incident made the paper, and there was energy on campus that was making everyone’s skin crawl, except for the apathetic students who weren’t affected or simply didn’t care or, worse, who were involved. It seems that people just had a license to hate after the attacks. No one was safe, unless of course you were a white male.

  With each incident, the threats to student leaders were becoming worse. Notes threatened that the body of a black student would be found. The university, in an attempt to respond, decided to plan a unity march to stop the hate. University officials sent a mass e-mail to the entire student body about the march. The student leaders who had received the death threats felt like it was a poor way to respond to threats being made on lives, which it was. Thousands of people gathered for the march, but instead of having it, the students took it over and demanded that the university president take an actual stand against what was happening by meeting with the students and talking about a much-needed change in culture on campus. The university president refused, so instead of the march hundreds of us went to the student union and held a ten-day sit-in protest, demanding protection as well as more diversity programs at the university.

  The threatening letters had spanned about two years. In November 1999, more than sixty students had received racist e-mail messages signed by “The Patriot.” Those e-mails were traced to a site about 200 miles from campus. The threatening letters intensified as black student leaders pressed the university to enhance its diversity programs. I joined the black student leaders and, for the first time in Penn State’s history, unified the gay organization with the Black Caucus. We became a tight-knit group that worked hard to create much-needed change on campus. I became closer to some of these people than I had to anyone I had ever known in my life. The shared conviction and passion we all had for creating this change brought us together as family.

  Sleeping bags and students littered the student union building’s floor as we camped there for days without leaving. We had entertainment and speeches, and we gathered daily to encourage each other to keep up the fight. We named ourselves “The Village,” and another student leader and I published a daily newsletter to let the rest of the student body know exactly what we were fighting for. It was the closest thing to being alive during the seventies era that I felt. We ate together at various downtown businesses that donated food for us as soon as they realized what we were fighting for. Midway through the sit-in, the body of a young black man was found in a wooded area near Mount Nittany. The university tried to cover it up—they tried to play it off like it was not the body of a student and not connected to the threats in any way. Soon CNN showed up and interviewed students. It inserted a different type of energy into our building revolution. This stuff was real. It was serious. We were fighting for our lives. We were all over the news.

  The student leader who had received the threats was wearing a bulletproof vest. We were informed that the FBI was on campus and conducting interviews. I was interviewed for Rolling Stone magazine about our campus climate.

  One night when Raye and I were leaving the student union to grab something from home, a male student approached us and began screaming horrible things at us. I was terrif
ied as he spewed hate all over us, calling us dykes and saying we were going to hell. We ran away from him and filed a police report about it, but he was never caught because we didn’t know who he was, and on a campus of more than 40,000 students, it wasn’t like we would have an opportunity to catch him. It was a scary time, and every time Raye and I would walk on campus we were emotionally guarded, our senses sharp to every sound around us. The thought that someone might actually harm us felt possible. I didn’t let the fear get to me, and I was determined not only to not be affected by it, but to try to use it to create change on the campus and possibly in the world.

  After the ten-day sit-in, university officials came around to meet our requests. The “Plan to Enhance Diversity at Penn State” established an African Studies Research Center in 2001–2002 and committed $900,000 in funding for the center over the following five-year period. The plan also required the university to have at least ten full-time faculty members in the African and African-American Studies department. We fought for the inclusion of an actual LGBT resource center, because at the time all we had was Dr. Rankin’s tiny office. Two years later, they opened the doors to a beautiful center for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. I was the first intern at the center.

  We made history at Penn State and proved that students do have power at a university. Protest worked, and a more diverse Penn State was the legacy that we created for the students who followed us.

  I hadn’t been to a meeting in the ten days that I had spent on campus, and that was the longest I had gone without a meeting in my entire recovery. I felt slightly out of touch and disjointed. I walked into a meeting after having gone through this major emotional upheaval, and everything everyone shared seemed so trivial compared to what I had just experienced. I went to open my mouth up to share, but I couldn’t find the words to express myself. Where did I begin? How did I even begin to verbalize my feelings? For the first time in my recovery, I couldn’t share my feelings in the meeting.

  I went home that night feeling more confused than ever. I hadn’t felt blocked in recovery before. I had always been able to explain my feelings; after all, it was recovery that enabled me to get in touch with them again. I knew I had to get this out of me—whatever it was—all the confusion, anger, frustration, and sadness that I felt over everything that had occurred. An idea began to form inside my head, one that would enable me to creatively express the emotions I felt during that time. And in a few moments, I began to write down what would become an art project called the Family Flag Project. It consisted of rainbow flags made up of individually colored panels that people would make, and then the panels would be sewn together to make up the flags. The exhibit depicted acts of violence and discrimination toward queer people, and I began traveling all across the East Coast to conferences and universities, doing workshops on hate crime and discrimination. The goal of the project was to give victims a method of healing using art—much like the AIDS Quilt or Clothesline Project—that would also serve as a visual awareness piece. I did this for more than two years and ended up with almost seven flags—over 250 individual panels created. It was my response to everything that had happened on campus. It was then that I realized I could utilize other tools to help me process my feelings in recovery. Maybe I couldn’t always articulate what was happening to me and what I was feeling, but I still knew at a core level that I had to process it in order to stay healthy and maintain my recovery.

  41

  THREATS AND INSTANT MESSAGES

  SUMMER CAME AND WENT, AND THE TENSIONS AND acts of hate seemed to dissipate a little bit. Raye, who was majoring in education to become a teacher, was required to do an internship at a school for the entire semester. She was placed at a school about four hours outside of Philadelphia. She came home every weekend, but it was hard to have her away. Over the summer we had managed to get a car with some money we had both saved from working. It was an older model black Mazda, and it got us where we needed to be. I made sure I surrounded myself with my college friends and went to meetings with my brother as much as possible.

  Things were quieting down on campus, but I still wasn’t thrilled being alone in our home, and I found myself once again sleeping with the light on.

  I spent the fall semester staying as busy as I could working on my internship in the center and going to more meetings than I had the previous semester. It was hard for me to walk into a meeting and listen to everyday issues when I felt that much heavier issues were occurring in my own life and on campus. Many of the student leaders I grew so close to had moved on and graduated, and it was becoming clear that I, too, would soon be moving on. I was excited and ready, but also unsure and sad. I had made such amazing strides in this small town; I had really grown up and built my recovery foundation here. My brother was now here, and the thought of staying did enter my mind, but I wasn’t sure what I would be able to do for work.

  The semester went by quickly, and before I knew it, Christmas break had come and Raye was home. Spring semester started with the realization that this would be my last semester as a college student. It was exciting and sad, and just when I thought things were quiet on campus—something happened that knocked the wind out of me.

  In April of 2002, I came home from school one day to find the message light blinking on my answering machine. The message went something like this: “Hello, my name is Bill and I work for the Anti-Defamation League in Philadelphia. I came across some disturbing information about you today on a nationally known hate group’s web page, and I am concerned for your safety. I need you to call me back right away.” I just stared at the machine in shock. I was home alone and it was dark out, and I started to panic a bit. I called him back immediately, and he explained that it was his job to track online hate group activity for this organization and that he had come across a web page dedicated to me. My full name, my address, my home phone number, and the words “queen dyke at Penn State” were on the page. It went on to say that I was a sodomite who held gay pride rallies on campus and that I should be dealt with accordingly.

  Apparently this particular hate group (that I will not name so as not to give any credence to their status in this world) was famously known for creating what was commonly referred to as the “lone wolf activity.” This group, which was led by an attorney and knew the law well, would provide basic information about people they didn’t like to anyone who came upon their web page and insinuate that someone should do something violent to these people. This group hated anyone who wasn’t a white Christian. People would surf onto the web page to find the targets, and then, on their own accord, commit a hate crime against the people listed on the page. It was a clever way to initiate hate activity; the owner of the group was never able to be held accountable because all he did was provide what was considered public information about people and express his feelings toward them—which, of course, was his First Amendment right.

  So here I sat, on the phone with a guy telling me all this information and saying that I would most likely start receiving hate mail or death threats. He told me to report anything I received immediately to the police and to call him back if I did in fact get anything. Sure enough, as I hung up the phone and sat down at my computer to check my e-mail, there was an e-mail that read, “Death to all queers, you shall die by my hand,” from an AOL address I had never seen before. I immediately picked up the phone and called Raye who told me to call the police, which I did as she made her way home. I told the police what happened and they asked me to come downtown to file a report. I told them I would be down as soon as Raye arrived home. I was shaking as I waited for Raye. I went to the web site the guy told me about and saw the page about me and noticed that it also listed three of my friends. There was a chat room at the bottom of the page, and I saw the same AOL address that sent the death threat to me via e-mail. The person had a profile on the page that simply said, “On a perch with my rifle waiting.” I instant-messaged my friend, who was also listed on the web site, and she
also had received an e-mail. I called the other two friends, and they had the same message waiting for them. I told them to meet me at the police station.

  I spent the next three hours at the police station with my friends as we all filed our complaints. The police said they would try to contact AOL and track the message. I thought it was pretty stupid for someone to send a death threat via AOL, but given the mentality of anyone who would expound such hate toward another, I guess it didn’t surprise me. The police reported the incident to university officials, and I found myself on the phone with the vice provost, who said the university president was deeply concerned about this incident and would do whatever it took to get to the bottom of it. In the meantime, they would check in with me periodically and the campus police would do wellness checks by our house.

  After we finished up at the police station, Raye and I went to a computer lab on campus because we both had work to do and neither of us wanted to go home just yet. We were freaked out that our home address was now listed on a web page for any hate monger to find. We sat down and logged onto the computers and, as AOL Instant Messenger popped up, as it always did when I logged on to the computer—I had an idea. I thought if this person was dumb enough to e-mail me using an AOL account, he or she probably also used Instant Messenger. I decided to place the person’s screen name on my buddy list—since the e-mail was an AOL account, I knew the screen name would be the e-mail address. Sure enough, as soon as I added the screen name to my buddy list, the name showed up as actively online. I froze, but instead of letting my fear get the best of me, I got pissed off. I decided to send the person a message asking them why they had sent me the e-mail. I typed, “Hi, this is the girl you sent a death threat to earlier today and I am just wondering why” and I hit send. I sat there waiting, and as I noticed the person was typing back, I called Raye over. I told her to call the police station right away and let them know what I was doing. The person, who never identified him- or herself, began a rant that lasted over fifteen minutes, describing in vivid detail the method that would be used to kill me. I kept responding with what I thought were rational questions, like “You don’t even know me, why would you want to hurt me?” The person went on about how all gays were sinners and deserved to die. Raye was relaying everything to the police, who were on the other line with AOL trying to pinpoint the location of the individual I was speaking to. They needed me to keep this person on the computer as long as I could, which was getting harder to do as my hands were shaking. The person told me they would beat me to a bloody pulp and tie me to a fence like Matthew Shepard for the world to watch me die. At this point I was crying, and I no longer had any words to respond. The person wrote, “I’m getting angry and I’m going to come and find you,” and then signed off.