Claudia Brenner stepped up to the microphone, took a deep breath, and calmly began the story of how she almost died on May 13, 1988.
"When the first bullet hit me, my arm exploded. My brain could not make the connection fast enough to realize I had been shot. I saw a lot of blood on the green tarp on which we lay and thought for a split second about earthquakes and volcanoes. But they don't make you bleed. Rebecca knew. She asked me where I had been shot."
The audience - about 60 members and supporters of the Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Task Force - sat, rapt, as Brenner continued the story.
"When the second bullet hit me I started screaming." Then the third bullet hit her neck again, and the fourth bullet her face, and the fifth the top of her head.
The sixth bullet hit Brenner's lover Rebecca Wight in the back of her head. The seventh bullet hit her back. "It exploded her liver and caused her to die." The eighth bullet missed.
Brenner was 31 at the time of the attack, and Wight was 28. They were graduate students, and they were hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania's Adams County. That morning, they'd encountered Stephen Roy Carr, a drifter and a criminal who was living in the woods. He'd asked them for cigarettes. They didn't have any. They passed him on their way out to the trail, exchanging "See you laters."
They didn't know that Carr would stalk them for the rest of the day, and that he would spy on them as they set up their tent fly, as they hugged and kissed and started to make love.
They didn't know he had a gun, and a grudge against "women kissing women." They didn't know until he started shooting.
Claudia Brenner bundled her lover in a sleeping bag, left her at their campsite and walked out of the woods: four miles with five bullet wounds. She was air-lifted to the Hershey Medical Center, and survived.
Rebecca Wight died at the campsite.
Brenner, who spoke in Philadelphia on Monday, wrote a book about her experience called Eight Bullets: One Woman's Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence (Firebrand Books). Instead of giving readings, she said she prefers to tell her story at events sponsored by gay and lesbian advocacy groups.
Monday's event was a perfect fit. Brenner was the keynote speaker at a press conference to launch a task-force sponsored study on anti-gay discrimination and violence in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.
