Gay Rights Media
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"You and you and you.. gotta give 'em hope!" ~Harvey Milk

Written by Patrick Yaeger
Published in The Letter
August 2005 Issue

In the Fall of 1987, Chuck Rosenfield and his boyfriend, both in their twenties, bought and moved into what they considered their share of the American dream. Theirs was a cape cod style four bedroom on a street sandwiched between, what was then, the separate cities of Shivley and Louisville in Jefferson County, Kentucky. They were thrilled with their new home together and began readying it for visiting friends and family.

But when school let out for the Summer in 1988, a neighborhood gang of juveniles began trespassing through their property, sometimes looking in the windows. When the couple spoke up and asked the youth to stop, the intrusions only grew worse. Fences locked were climbed and damaged, a rock was thrown through the front window, and one youth even mentioned using a Molotov cocktail to ‘burn them out’. Chuck and his partner began keeping a shotgun near the bed at night.

When the Jefferson County Police were called regarding the vandalism, the officer who responded didn’t seem sympathetic. “Well, you are two men living in a house together…,” Chuck recalls him saying. There was no investigation. They sold their dream home in the Spring of 1989.

If it had been the year 1992, Chuck’s call might have brought a somewhat different response from the police, for in that year Kentucky passed its first piece of hate crime (also called bias crime) legislation. The statute, KRS 15.331, mandated that officers be trained to recognize hate crime. At the very least, officers in 1992 Kentucky might have been more aware that crime, when motivated by bias against homosexuals, was no less serious.

The first federal hate crime statute, the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, mandated the collection and reporting of hate crime data. Logically, Kentucky’s 1992 statute (KRS 15.331), in addition to mandating hate crime training for officers, required the collection and reporting of hate crime to the various state and national crime databases. Therefore, in 1992, it was intended that officers, unlike the one who responded to Chuck Rosenfield’s call back in 1988, would be more capable and more likely to recognize and report hate crime.

In fact, hate crime legislation has arisen due to the growing consensus that the apathy shown by Chuck’s responding officer back in 1988 should no longer be acceptable and that crimes motivated solely by a victim’s perceived race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin are fundamentally more egregious than conventional crimes. These types of bias crime, it is thought, target entire communities of citizens (i.e. black, jewish, gay) and not just the individual victimized.

Though in 1992, KRS 15.331 added no penalty enhancements to this new quality of crime, it nonetheless marked a growing understanding, at the state level, of their seriousness and need for further study.

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