Coming Out Week hosts Erin Davies

Oct. 08, 2007

WAVERLY, Iowa — Wartburg College will host an address by a woman who uses her vandalized Volkswagen Beetle to raise awareness about homophobia.

Erin Davies will speak at 11 a.m. Friday, Oct. 12, in McCaskey Lyceum of Saemann Student Center. The event is free and open to the community.

The event is part of “Coming Out Week,” which is sponsored by Alliance, a Wartburg network of allies for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons.

In April, Davies’ car was spray painted with the words “fAg (sic)” and “u r gay (sic),” apparently because she had affixed a rainbow sticker to one of its windows. (Rainbow stickers and flags have come to be associated with gay pride and gay rights.)

Davies chose not to remove the red spray paint. Instead, she launched “Fagbug,” a project in which she travels across the United States to learn about intolerance and gather footage for a documentary. She funds the trip through a personal loan, fundraisers, merchandise sales and sponsorships. Among her sponsors are Volkswagen, girlpunch.com, gaywheels.com, “stop the f word,” puzzleboxmedia.com and www.glee.com, as well as private individuals.

The goal of Fagbug is to take the vandalized car to as many diverse communities as possible. Davies has also driven the car in gay pride parades throughout the country. Her goal is to get at least 1 million people to affix Fagbug rainbow stickers to their cars in an effort to stop such acts of vandalism. Until she accomplishes her goal, Davies said she won’t have the spray paint removed.

“I (have) collected over 80 hours of footage and interviewed over 250 people along the way (for my documentary),” said Davies at www.fagbug.com. “Along the way, lots of people tried to remove the graffiti on my car, told me ways to fix it (and) asked me to move out of hotel parking lots for creating a ‘problem.’ … Because my car says the word ‘fag’ on it, I am particularly interested in learning about what would motivate someone to write that, or more seriously do something worse.”

Davies’ goal is to complete her documentary by April 18, the one year anniversary of the vandalism.