WORDS: Live, and let live

A Weekender reader recently sent our office an 'improved' version of an article.

by Nikki M. Mascali
Weekender Editor

The letter looked like every other letter addressed to the Weekender in my mail basket. It was postmarked from Scranton and had a dashing Seabiscuit stamp.

I assumed it was an event to be listed in our Agenda section, so I left the envelope unopened in the basket for our listings contributor to type up over the weekend. The following Monday, I came in to find a note on my desk from her that said, “I wish I didn’t open this.”

Thinking it had to be a severed head or something gory like that, I opened the envelope. It was far from an events listing, and it was much worse than a severed head. It was a piece of hate mail.

Sure, we’ve received hate mail before here at the Weekender — as most newspapers do — but for us it’s usually people disagreeing with our concert reviews, so it’s not real, actual hate.

This letter, however, was hate of the most hateful kind: Bigotry. In the envelope were clippings of recent Weekender articles about the fourth annual PrideFest. The daylong event held Sunday, Aug. 8 featured music, vendors and drag shows. It brought together more than 2,000 of Northeastern Pennsylvania’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community with supporters and allies from all over the area.

The person sent in the clippings without a name or return address. Our little pen pal wrote notes in black marker on the articles. One headline, which originally read “Celebrating diversity one vendor at a time,” was changed to “Repulsive and abhorring diversity one disease-carrying vendor at a time.” The person called the contributor who wrote the article a “less-being” for writing it. A picture of a T-shirt from last year’s festival that stated “Smile if you’re gay!” was now “Suffer, die and rot in hell if you’re gay! Let AIDS be your birth rite!” And those weren’t even the worst comments.

As a person who is not gay, but human, these doctored clippings angered me. I thought of my best friend, Johnny, who is gay. I thought of other friends who are gay and of all those people who attended PrideFest in support of their own gay friends — or themselves. I thought of all gay people or anyone who has been discriminated against.

It angered me that in 2010 people just can’t be themselves without hate. It angered me that the writer was brave enough to spew the other F-word — an unfortunately still common slur toward gay people — but wasn’t brave enough to sign a name. That’s something that didn’t shock John Dawe, executive director of the NEPA Rainbow Alliance, which presents PrideFest.

“Never, knock on wood, we haven’t had any hateful anything,” Dawe answered when asked if the Alliance receives hate mail. “The only way we’ve gotten stuff is through the media when they run stories (and people comment anonymously online). Again, very few people sign their real name. We’ve got a lot more positive comments than negative.”

Dawe shared that most of the event protesters are from out of town, and while they are allowed to be at Kirby Park, they are not allowed to be near the festival itself.

“We have such great security that (the amount of protesters) actually has dropped each year because they know they can certainly come and shout at people, but they’re going to not be allowed out of their area,” Dawe said. “We’ve had people yell, ‘Your daddy’s f--king another man’ at children in the parking lot, but they’re not allowed on festival grounds.”

Who the hell would yell something like that to a child? Who the hell cares what another human being does or who they do it with? Do you honestly have that much time and energy in your life to take the time to send in a clipping like that or make a nasty comment on a local newspaper’s website or protest outside an event that celebrates a part of our community?

Have we all forgotten that we’re all on this planet together, and in the end, we will all meet the same fate at the end of our lives — death — no matter what you believe, what you believe in or what you do?

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