Lawrence.com

As a sort of gruesome milestone, Project Resistance symbolically began nearly six years ago with the beating of Jeffrey Medis outside of a Lawrence bar. Although a full accounting of the incident has never been provided, Medis-a gay man who was then 28 years old-was assaulted while leaving the Replay Lounge in the early morning of December 6, 2002. Among numerous other injuries, he suffered a broken nose, broken jaw, and fractured eye socket. While he lay unconscious and bleeding, a friend of Medis came upon the scene and was involved in an altercation with the four alleged attackers. The response of authorities to this attack proved nearly as galling to the gay community as the attack itself.

"So Jeffrey is laying on the ground in blood, knocked unconscious," recalls Ailecia Ruscin, who was at the time a KU student and acquaintance of Medis (and is currently a lawrence.com photographer). "His friend came to his aid and got in the face, and maybe punched, one of the guys who had just beaten his friend to a bloody pulp, and that's the person who served time in jail and paid fines. The guys who did the attack against Jeffrey testified against the guy who was helping Jeffrey out and got immunity. Jeffrey gets beaten up badly-his jaw was broken and his eye socket was crushed-and the people that do it don't end up paying for it."

Ruscin was frustrated enough to help organize a candlelight vigil as an act of solidarity and defiance in the face of what many, if not the Lawrence Police Department, saw as a crime motivated by hatred of homosexuals. It seemed among the GLBTQ community that if the existing institutions of law and order wouldn't help them, then they would have to respond by themselves. In retrospect, that vigil was the germination of what in 2008 would become the anti-violence organization Project Resistance.

A confluence of violent events earlier this year-including the death of Jana Mackey, a double homicide in East Lawrence, and unconfirmed stories of another bias-based attack in front of the Replay-spurred a more concerted response from the same organizers of the Medis vigil. "All of these violent incidents happened in quick succession. Says Ruscin, "When I heard about the queer attack in front of Replay, that's what prompted me to action. It resonated that it had happened again five years later. I thought there should be an organization that looks into violence downtown."

Ruscin, along with Sonja Heath, Lydia Krebs, Jennifer Hellwig and Amy Wilhelm, forged Project Resistance with the goal or eradicating homophobia-fueled violence. They're working on establishing a network of activists to raise and foster visibility, awareness, education, and prevention. Although still in an incipient stage, Project Resistance plans to start a hotline devoted to reporting assaults both physical and verbal, form a service to escort people home late at night, and offer self-defense classes.

"I think, beyond that, we just want a clear message to go out to the community that we're here and that we're not going to stand for what's going on," says Krebs. "I don't want people in the community to think that we're going to sit back and say, 'Oh, did you hear about that gay bashing?' and not do anything about it."

Meeting for the first time last week in a public library conference room filled to capacity, with some attendees coming from as far as Topeka and Kansas City, the founders of Project Resistance were heartened by the evident enthusiasm. Molly Easley was one of those concerned citizens at the initial gathering. "As somebody who's not a member of the gay community, but somebody who's been a member of the Lawrence community for a really long time, I know that there are a lot of people who are in support of equality and open-mindedness," she said. "I think we need to say, 'Hey, here we are and we want to show support for people who are being victimized.' The gay community is not separate from the rest of Lawrence. It's all one community."

Project Resistance hopes to harness this sense of outreach, not only for their actionable efforts such as providing support and services, but to reshape perceptions about Lawrence. "I want Lawrence to become the San Francisco of the Midwest. The joke is 'Gay U,'" offers Ruscin with a smile. "It should be, 'Yeah, f*ckin' right it's Gay U!' We have queers at KU and we have tons of allies. Queers are here and we love them, they're awesome, they're fabulous and you're a f*cking douchebag if you can't see that." »

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