by Oscar Raymundo // Northwestern University

Erin Davies had been out of the closet for 12 years but, growing up in liberal Phoenix, N.Y. and working with GLBT youth in Baltimore, Md,. she hadn’t had many encounters with prejudice. So she was shocked to find the words “***” and “u r gay” scrawled in red spray paint on her gray VW bug last April. But Davies, a 29-year-old art education student at Sage Graduate School, jumped right back in the driver’s seat with the homophobic taggings still tarnishing the window. “Most people expected me to erase the wording right away...but I couldn’t,” Davies says. Instead, she spent the past summer trekking across the country in what she dubbed her “fagbug,” raising awareness of homophobia and documenting her experiences.

Fifty-eight days, 300 interviews, 100 hours worth of footage and countless gas stations, pride parades, memorials and marches later, Davies is planning to take a year off from graduate school to compile her road trip experiences into a documentary. “I wanted to confront people with my car and get their reactions,” Davies says. “Some of the people I interviewed had no concept of the severity of hate crimes. Some had never even talked to a gay person before.”

Davies’ quest is already getting attention: Volkswagen contacted her after learning about her activist trip and offered to reimburse her gas expenses, which came to about $2,000.  

By embracing the hateful graffiti as a way to spread a message, Monson says, Davies makes a powerful statement about victimhood: “We can turn around that hate and that violence into something positive, into education.”