Psychologist Anthony D'Augelli, PhD, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, is one psychologist studying the extent of harassment of young gay people and its impact on their mental health.

In a national study, D'Augelli surveyed 194 lesbian, gay male and bisexual youths between ages 15 and 21. The research, he said, provides evidence that victimization-verbal abuse, threats of attack and assaults-has deleterious effects on mental health.

'The more people get put upon, the worse they do in terms of mental health,' he said. But victimization, he said, did not seem to be directly linked to suicide attempts.

Family support and self-esteem are two major variables determining how much antigay hate crimes impact mental health, D'Augelli said. Family support, defined as positive reactions to a youth's sexual orientation, 'buffered the adolescent against the harmful effects of victimization on mental health,' D'Augelli said.

But family support, he found, only seemed to help people ward off the effects of 'low-level' victimization, such as name-calling. If the victimization is moderate-such as property destruction-or high-physical attacks-family support does not appear to buffer the individual against the mental health problems engendered by victimization, according to a paper D'Augelli wrote with psychologist Scott Hershberger, PhD, of Pennsylvania State University. These problems include tension, anxiety, depression, stress, fear for safety and distrust of society, D'Augelli said. Similarly, self-esteem-which included how comfortable a youth is with being a gay male or lesbian-also appears to 'provide something of a buffer' in the face of a verbal assault, D'Augelli says.

In two surveys at Penn State in 1987 and 1990, D'Augelli found extensive verbal, property and physical victimization among 121 lesbian, gay male and bisexual undergraduates he studied. Eighty percent had experienced verbal insults, one third had objects thrown at them, 31 percent reported being chased or followed, 13 percent reported being spat upon and nearly one-fifth said they had been physically assaulted-punched, hit or kicked-because of their sexual orientation; 22 percent of the sample also reported a sexual assault as a result of their sexual orientation. Most harassers were fellow students.

Such violence, says D'Augelli, leads victims as well as more closeted gays to conceal their sexual orientation from heterosexual counterparts on campus.

'The costs associated with hiding and fear,' he says, 'are likely high, leading to emotional stresses, social difficulties and academic problems.'

Gregory Herek, PhD, a research psychologist at the University of California at Davis and nationally recognized authority on antigay bias crimes, found similar evidence of the impact of hate crimes. In his pilot study of 147 Sacramento-area gay people, he found that about 29 percent had experienced a bias-related crime against their person. Compared to other respondents who had experienced no hate crimes against their person, these victims showed significantly higher levels of depression, anxiety, anger and symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. These preliminary results, Herek says, will be tested in a much larger study of 2,200 lesbians and gay men.

Counseling the victims

This 'crisis work,' Hanson says, is primarily advocacy-helping victims report crimes to police, obtaining medical attention and following the case through the courts. When therapy is requested, it is usually short-term. But some victims do need long-term therapy. Psychologist Linda Garnets, PhD, a Santa Monica clinician, says the principal risk is that the survivor may feel 'there's something wrong with me that caused me to be targeted as a gay person,'' she said. The psychologist's main task is to help the survivor reaffirm the positive value of a gay or lesbian identity, and help them feel the anger rather than blame themselves.

Psychologist Glenda Russell, PhD, a Boulder, Colo., clinician, says an antigay hate crime starts the victim not only questioning 'the safety of the world but the goodness of being gay. ' It feeds into what society tells us about lesbians and gays all the time, which is that lesbians and gays are bad,' says Russell.

That's why, Russell says, the psychologist needs to separate out the external event from the person's internal feelings.

'You can't just tend to how it feels to the person to have been bashed, and you can't just tend to the homophobia out there that caused the bashing,' Russell said. 'The therapist really has to work with both the internal and external aspects.'

That also applies to the causes of antigay violence, says Herek. While research needs to be done on assailants' attitudes, he says, 'it's not always the case that you can cite individual homophobia as the motivation in these attacks.'

Many factors, including the need for acceptance by friends and society's attitudes towards gays, influence the mostly young male perpetrators. 'It's very complicated,' says Herek, 'but I do think?that it's society's homophobia, or heterosexism, that fosters these attacks because they set up gay people as targets.'

So when a group of young men is hanging around looking for a target, says Herek, gay people are more likely victims because gays are 'not valued greatly and [are] somewhat acceptable to attack' because of society's antipathy towards them.

Peter Freiberg is a freelance writer in Hudson, N.Y.