When I hear people use gay slurs, I usually just ignore them. The one time I didn’t, I paid for it.
In 2015, Pennsylvania hate crimes laws didn’t cover LGBTQ people like me, and so my attacker got off with a slap on the wrist — then went on to hurt someone else. Now, in 2023, Pennsylvania hate crimes laws still don’t protect LGBTQ people. It’s time to change that.
One day eight Octobers ago, while I was a sophomore at Queens College in New York, I grabbed the cheapest Greyhound ticket I could find to visit a good friend at Penn State.
That night, I found myself alone on the side of the enormous Sigma Nu frat house smoking a cigarette, seeking a moment of peace and quiet. But suddenly a side door swung open, and out stumbled a young man. Then a group followed him, yelling anti-gay slurs at him as they apparently ejected him from the house.
I don’t know why, this time of all times, I decided to say something. On the dark side of a fraternity house on a campus hundreds of miles from home probably wasn’t the best time or place to make a statement. And a bunch of drunk college students probably weren’t the right people to make it to. But something about this gang yelling such an ugly word repeatedly at this guy made my stomach turn.
I cleared my throat and started to speak. The men turned and looked at me. They hadn’t even realized I was there.
“You could never really know! What if someone was gay and heard you guys?”
This only confused them more, so I skipped right to the point.
“I am gay. That word is offensive. Please stop it.”
Unsurprisingly, one of the men pointed at me and blurted out, “You get out of here too!”
That should have been the end of that. I flicked my cigarette to the concrete and began walking off the property. I didn’t feel the need to stay somewhere I wasn’t welcome.
As I began to walk away from the property, however, the noise of intoxicated arguing behind me suddenly stopped. In its place, I could hear angry footsteps approaching. I turned around, and standing there was the guy who had been kicked out of the fraternity house, the target of the slurs.
“Why are you following me?” I asked the tall, lanky man as he stared through me. Then, without any ambiguity or nuance, and without any room for interpretation, he said, “You’re gay? I hate gays!”
Maybe he was trying to impress the men who had just thrown him out of the frat. Maybe he was just looking for a gay man to bash. Maybe it was some of both. What I do know is that I’d never seen hate in someone’s eyes like that before, and I hope never to see it again.
Without time to process what was just said to me, almost as if my vision were a skipping vinyl, I saw Matthew Chandlee’s expression of rage and then his fist making contact with the side of my face. There was a loud ringing in my ears, and my vision went black.
As I hit the ground, I felt what I believe was a kick to my face, but I couldn’t see it. When the State College police looked into the incident after a social media frenzy, they seized on that uncertainty, and on my mistaken assumption that my assailant was a Sigma Nu member, to question my account — despite the presence of corroborating witnesses. (Chandlee turned out to be a Penn State Altoona student.) They eventually filed charges for simple assault.
By that time, the attack had become a sensation. Following my assault, with my face covered in blood, I snapped photos of myself and posted them to Twitter. I captioned the tweet, “Don’t let a frat guy know that your gay” — you’ll forgive the spelling mistake under the circumstances — and the images began to circulate rapidly online.
The images went viral, and as love and support rolled in, so did more hate and skepticism.
“He was probably trying to touch him!”
“Don’t flirt with straight guys if you don’t want to get hit. It’s simple.”
“He just wants attention!”
“#fratlivesmatter”
You name it, I heard it. Some people even said that if they were in Chandlee’s shoes, they would have beat me, too.
Why? For existing? For daring to say that slurs aren’t ok?
And yet a law that might deter people from this hate, and that would show that it has no place in Pennsylvania, was not on the books. Adding sexual orientation to the state’s hate law statute had been proposed in 2008, but it never made it out of the legislature.
After Chandlee’s arrest a few months later, a reporter asked Lieutenant Keith Robb of the State College Police Department about the lack of a hate crime charge.
After the officer stated that Pennsylvania doesn’t cover sexual orientation under hate crime protection, the reporter asked a critical follow-up question: “Do you believe this was driven by hate?”
Lieutenant Robb didn’t hesitate: “There were derogatory comments made prior to and during the assault.”
Matthew Ryan Chandlee, 18, of Washington Crossing, Bucks County, was charged with simple assault — a misdemeanor. After his conviction, he was fined $100 and sentenced to 30 days in the Centre County Correctional Facility.
Here’s where the story gets darker. A year after being released from jail, Matthew Ryan Chandlee was arrested in Philadelphia for a rape committed in February of that year. He was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.
Some will always ask if hate crimes statutes really matter. After all, assault is assault, and murder is murder. But in cases like mine, the enhanced sentences provided for in hate crimes laws would have made a big difference.
If Chandlee had been sentenced to the proposed hate-crime minimum of one year for what he did to me, instead of one month, he still would have been in jail in February 2017. Instead he committed a sexual assault.
Hate crimes laws don’t just tell the world the government disapproves of hate; they understand that hate-filled people are simply more dangerous.
Intentions matter, and hate crimes laws recognize that. And anti-LGBTQ hatred is just as real and dangerous and poisonous as any other kind that’s already covered in Pennsylvania law.
This is a pivotal moment in the fight against hatred in Pennsylvania. Once again, legislators led by Rep. Dan Frankel, D-Squirrel Hill, are proposing to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the state’s hate crimes law. It’s past time for Pennsylvania to protect people like me, and all of us, from those whose hatred blinds them to humanity.
John Mateer is a musician living in Manhattan.
First Published: May 28, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
