Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 23:13:12 -0700 (PDT) From: Rex Wockner Subject: NC3853: Shocking harassment of gay hotline FORWARDED Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 02:02:33 -0400 (EDT) From:DaytonBear@aol.com Serious Help Needed for the Dayton Lesbian and Gay Center Dear gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and supporters, For 21 years the Dayton Lesbian and Gay Center has operated a hotline for people to call to talk to someone about their sexuality. It has been of great help many times for people who had no where else to turn and some that were contemplating suicide. Now, because of constant, unending harassment from a hate group, they are seriously considering shutting it down. In the last several months a well organized extreme right-wing hate group has been flooding the "Center" hotline number by having a computer call all the pager numbers in the State of Ohio and leave messages to call the DLGC hotline. Two surgeons have been called out of surgery to receive urgent pages. Police have been paged. Politicians have been paged. Churches are being paged. Pilots flying planes are being paged. Everyone with a pager is being paged. You can imagine how upset some of these people are to be interrupted for bogus pages. The hate group has found out who operates the hotline in his house and they are sending him orders (for example) of 15 pizzas or 30 specially designed ice cream cakes. Plus having literally hundreds of other people call him at all hours of the day and night. He needs his phone for business reasons and changing the number would only hurt him financially. Churches are being called and told to "expect a van load of people from the Lesbian and Gay Center for a party in their church. They had better have the doors open or they will be broken down!" At times people from the hate group have called and said that they have been asked to deliver something to the "Center" and asked for its location or the location of the person answering the phone. The Dayton police have been contacted and they referred "Center" representatives to the FBI. The FBI said that they are not involved and the Dayton police should be called. The police and the FBI agents think that the calls are funny. The telephone company (Ameritech) representatives by their attitudes show that they think that it is funny also and say that there is nothing that they can do. This constant harassment is also happening to the Cincinnati Lesbian and Gay Center. They are at a loss to solve the problem also. We need help to solve this problem. We are asking for any technical or legal advice from anyone who may be able to help us figure out who is harassing us. Then we can report them to the police or the phone company. Second, we need as many people as possible to call and complain to the Dayton Police Dept at 937-222-9511 and e-mail complaints to Ameritech at: share.owners@ameritech.com OR rita.t.ullrich@att.com OR mpruyn@attmail.com. If you know any politicians that you could lean on for help, please do that also. It seems that noone is really set up to help our community with this type of harassment problem. If you have any advice for the D.L.G.C. please e-mail it to me at DaytonBear@aol.com. Thank you, With Pride, Stephen Bickford