“sitting around like last year’s Christmas trees” during one such meeting—at which point the mayor instructed the police to escort my grandfather out of the council chambers.
Convinced that the city would persist in its idleness, Gramps decided that we would take to the streets and demand that it take action.
In hindsight, our protests were bound to elicit an intensely negative reaction—especially because our message went far beyond calls for the cleanup of Gage Park. Gramps was an “Old School Baptist,” he said, and was determined to represent the Scriptural position on homosexuality. He leapt immediately into attacks on the gay community as a whole, blaming them for the AIDS epidemic and proclaiming that they deserved the death penalty. The Topeka Capital Journal published many Westboro letters, including one signed by one of my aunts comparing the United States to Sodom and Gomorrah, cities destroyed by God “[b]ecause of their sin regarding homosexuality.” She declared AIDS to be “a disease for which the homosexual must take the sole blame” and insisted that the blood of straight AIDS victims “should be avenged upon those guilty of introducing and gleefully spreading this deadly disease: the homosexual.” Even during an era in which disapproval of LGBT people was more common and socially acceptable, it took only four short sentences for my aunt to make claims scandalous enough to outrage most readers—and our signs managed to do the same with even greater economy. MILITANT GAYS SPREAD AIDS. EXPOSE GAY-AIDS PLOY. GAYS ARE WORTHY OF DEATH (ROM. 1:32) = AIDS. And soon enough, what would become our most infamous message: GOD HATES FAGS.
The community response to our protests would mystify me for years, thanks to an ignorance borne both of youth and of the religious education I was receiving at home. I was five years old when the picketing began, and I didn’t understand why anyone would reject our message, let alone why our protests would draw counterprotesters—“counters.” They came every week in the beginning, and I was scared of them at first. “Young punks” and “diseased, probably got AIDS,” Gramps would say. The Bible forbade girls to cut our hair, but some of their women came out with cropped manes colored bright reds and blues and purples—“Kool-Aid hair”—and with metal in their faces. There were boys with mullets, others with half their heads shaved and the other half covered by long black hair that hung in greasy strands across ugly faces. Some looked like my dad, tall and skinny in tank tops and the awfully short running shorts in style at the time, and some were fat and bearded, combat boots on their feet and flannel shirts tied around their waists. They’d come out in angry mobs—fifty, a hundred, more and less—and try to surround our group of about thirty, starting fistfights with the Westboro dads who made a human barrier between us and them. Sometimes there were cops and sometimes there were handcuffs and sometimes we were in them—which wasn’t fair, I thought, because we were just trying to protect ourselves from those “ruffians.” I held my breath whenever I walked by them, so I wouldn’t catch whatever it was that was making them such awful people.
The counters would urge drivers to honk and yell and flip us off, which they did en masse. “Hatemongers!” “Nazis!” “Go home!” “Get a job!” “What the fuck is wrong with you?” “I’m gonna kick the shit outta you!” They threw eggs and beer and big plastic Pepsi bottles filled with urine as they sped off down the road. Drivers and passengers would sometimes abandon their vehicles in the middle of the street, car doors hanging wide open, and cross lanes of traffic to come after us on foot. My cousins and I would scuttle away, back behind Mom or an aunt who stepped between us and them. From behind my sign, I watched them approach us to hit and threaten and shove and bellow and spit and grab for our signs, our bodies, our hair. The police rarely seemed to help, but my parents kept us safe. Still, I was alarmed and angry. How dare they, I raged. That’s my mom! What made them think they could do this to us? Why weren’t the cops stopping them?
But my grandfather had a different perspective on the opposition and scorn we faced: it was proof that God was with us. He would quote Jesus, who warned his disciples to expect the hatred of the world: If the world hate