A candlelight vigil was held in the front of the school in mid-December, where 250 attended; even the TV news was there. Guest speakers included two representatives of a local LGBT organization called Spectrum and a woman from the office of the local San Francisco state Sen. Carole Migden, herself openly lesbian. The winter sun descended early and candles flickered. The event ended with a junior on a guitar leading the crowd in a tearful rendition of “Let It Be.”
“That place was packed. Absolutely packed,” Candace Curtis recalls....
...This wasn’t surprising, given the moment: Earlier that year, and 20 minutes away, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom began marrying same-sex couples at City Hall. A month later, Gov. Schwarzenegger and the State Supreme Court stopped them, and those 4,000 couples who were married, some of whom had kids at Tam, found themselves in a legal gray area that wouldn’t be resolved in their favor until the landmark Supreme Court decision that defeated Prop 8 last summer.
Inspired by what Newsom had done, a group of drama students had been developing a Laramie Project–style oral documentary play called Are We Married Yet?: How the Rainbow Reached Marin. “This has taken on special resonance as anti-gay incidents have recently surfaced on the Tam campus itself,” director John Warren stated in the play’s pink playbill.
After a quiet winter break, the crimes erupted again. The GSA had put up fliers that included statistics about the frequency of LGBT teen suicide. One was found on Mary’s car, alongside blocky words in column, instructing “SO DO IT.” “DIE ***” was written in dry-erase pen on another teacher’s classroom door...
...Then one afternoon, Nina Hirten recalls, she and Mary walked out to Mary’s car, which was parked by the football field. After they got in, Mary slammed her fists into the steering wheel and swore loudly. Hirten asked what was happening. “The door,” Mary said, indicating to the passenger door. Hirten got out and saw another slur written there in big black letters. She was confused as to how Mary had seen it, but more confused that she’d missed it. She sat with her friend as she called the police, as they filed a report...
...One night in mid-February, the police found Mary on campus drunk and sent her home. At least once, her mother called the sheriff, worried that her daughter had run away, or worse. One comment Mary made about wanting to drive off a cliff worried investigators so much they put a GPS unit on her car and kept a laptop with them at all times so they could keep track of her. Mary didn’t know about this. Neither she nor her mom were aware that the retired couple across the street had allowed a camera to be installed on their property, either....
...Right before the big spring multicultural assembly, which this year would have a big LGBT component, the school’s main office received a threatening letter. “I remember having the police there in force, all over the place,” recalls Curtis, “for fear that there was going to be some horrible thing that some perpetrator was going to try and pull off.”...
...It came out on Sunday, May 8, Mother’s Day. It was above the fold, next to an infographic about Marin’s unsolved murders. It declared: “Tam High Anti-Gay Attacks a Hoax.”
“She did admit to police that she basically did it all for attention,” Superintendent Bob Ferguson stated in the story. The police and the story did not name her. It was picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. The internet was smaller then, and social media more or less nonexistent. A couple of right-wing bloggers — including Michelle Malkin — reveled in it, asserting that odd, hyper-bigoted point that the occasional fake hate crime somehow disproves the existence of real bigotry.
That Monday, that week, we stood around in hallways and on lawns just asking one another what just happened and mostly why. People were confused, people were furious. I remember a particularly hotheaded peer kicking at a chain-link fence. In a subsequent IJ story, the Perry twins expressed “outrage” at their prior arrest. They demanded Mary be punished. “It’s still a hate crime,” Clayton Andrew Perry said, “She did it to a teacher.” She was never seen from again; we heard she was expelled, that her athletic scholarship to a state school had been rescinded....
Cost of Colorado Medicaid initiative for immigrant families 600% over the estimate
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