When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. So when a stranger vandalized Sage College graduate student Erin Davies’s Volkswagen Beetle with the graffiti “u R gay” and “fAg” in 2007, she embarked on a campaign against homophobia. After the hate crime, she took the car now dubbed Fagbug across all 50 states, booked hundreds of speaking engagements and directed two documentaries capturing her experiences.
The Fagbug attack occurred only a block away from the New York State Museum. Nineteen years after the incident, Fagbug is on display at the museum. The New York State Museum’s “Revolutionary New York” exhibit opens Wednesday, which showcases Fagbug for the first time since the museum acquired it in 2018.
Ashley Hopkins-Benton, the museum’s curator of social history, thought Fagbug was a good fit for this exhibit because it “talks about the danger that LGBTQ+ people face in the world.”
From crime to conversation
Davies’ first reaction upon seeing her car vandalized was bewilderment. She was openly gay and had been since she was 17. “Thank you for saying the obvious,” she mocked in remembering the moment…