Stephen Grant: Giving voice
to the voiceless

Nawaar Farooq

Giving voice to the voiceless has helped Stephen Grant (MAP candidate, Iowa City, Iowa) find his own voice.

Grant works for Iowa Public Radio as a graduate intern, where he has worked for about four and a half years. In addition to his graduate studies, he is a teaching assistant at The University of Iowa. He taught First-Year Russian for two years and now leads discussions for Media and Consumers, a class taught by Professor Venise Berry.

This school year will be his last, as he completes his master’s project--a documentary about hate crimes and violence directed toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

A classical pianist, Grant holds two degrees: one in music and the other in Russian language, in which he graduated with honors in the top five percent of his class. He attended Roosevelt University in Chicago and later transferred to the UI.

When Grant entered the graduate program, he had no prior experience in journalism.

"If someone had asked me five years ago if I would ever consider being a journalist, I may have well laughed at the idea," Grant said. "I would say I have been ‘becoming’ a journalist and that I have days where I question whether or not I actually am a journalist."

Visibility is a theme present in much of his life and work as a graduate student. It is at the core of his master’s project.

"Becoming visible is its own birthing process and not always comfortable," Grant said. "I frequently question my decisions and choices: ‘Is this the right place for me? Am I cut out for this?’ I’ve had to learn to overcome several of my own inhibitions: lack of confidence, or fear of failure and success, for example. I’ve become more visible now, more integrated into the social spectrum of things, but still, the future is not clear."

The tentative title of Grant’s master’s project is "Invisible" or "The Invisible." It is a comprehensive radio documentary on anti-gay hate crimes that he has been working on for nearly two and a half years. Instead of focusing on the victim’s point of view, Grant shines light on the perpetrators and the systemic social and cultural components that feed hate directed toward the gay community.

The decision to produce a radio documentary was based on Grant’s belief that radio is more creative in the sense of how stories are told.

"Although television is the master of images, radio has the magic of triggering the mind to create images of its own," Grant said. "When you listen to a radio documentary or in-depth news story, the sounds and voices transport you to another place. With radio, it’s incredibly intimate, as though the person speaking or the story being told is for your ears only."

When he started his project, Associate Professor Gigi Durham, who specializes in gender and sexuality in the media, saw the potential in the story and took on the position of being his committee chairwoman. Durham, Professor Julie Andsager and Assistant Professor Jeff Porter of the UI English department are on Grant’s MAP committee.

"Violence against gays and lesbians is a terrible and frequent occurrence in the US and elsewhere, and LGBT people have very little legal protection against these attacks." Durham said. "Stephen’s project is unique in that it really explores the cultural and social reasons behind these tragic events and the implications, both for gay and lesbian people and for our society as a whole."

Grant hopes the documentary will offer an inside view of the impact of anti-gay hate crimes on individuals and the gay community as a whole. He mentions that gay bashing and hate crimes include verbal assault, discrimination, harassment and murder.

As a sub-theme, the documentary also looks at mainstream media’s failure to cover LGBT hate crimes.

"That’s puzzling, because you would think that someone who is kidnapped, taken to a trailer and beaten repeatedly, partially decapitated, dragged outside and then set on fire would receive national attention," Grant said. "But, this isn’t the case."

Grant has been to Laramie, Wyo., twice, which he said plays a key role in the documentary because Matthew Shepard is the face of anti-gay hate crimes and his murder woke the nation up to the fact that these crimes occur. He interviewed Dave O’Malley, the lead investigator in the case, and Judy Shepard, Matthew Shepard’s mother.

He has also interviewed Gregory Herek, a scholar at University of California-Davis who studies heterosexism and social issues surrounding hate crimes; Michael Kimmel, an expert on masculinities; and cultural constructions of masculinity and Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church and Fred Phelps notoriety, who advocate the religious condemnation of homosexuality.

The goals of his project are to reach more mainstream audiences and educate people about the severity and ubiquity of these crimes and reveal some of the larger cultural factors that make these crimes possible, such as heterosexism and masculinity. He wants people to realize hate crimes are the result of numerous complex issues.

"This work is about giving a voice to the voiceless," Grant said. "If listeners are able to walk away with a better understanding of anti-gay hate crimes, and can, to some degree, experience the impact through the storytelling, then maybe we will get one step closer in reducing the number of deaths in our country that result from hatred toward the gay community."