In February, 17-year-old student Adam Colton was badly beaten and the word "fag" scratched into his arms and stomach with a pen. Moments after, Colton walked into a classroom and passed out. Colton has publicly stated that he does not remember the beating, and it is still unclear whether it took place on or off the school grounds. Nearly two months later, his assailants still remain unknown, but city officials in Novato are calling the attack a hate crime.

It wasn't the first time Colton had been jumped. Last September, three young men, also unidentified, beat him up outside a downtown supermarket in early evening, just hours after obscene comments were written in catsup on his car in the school parking lot. Two weeks later, an unidentified party wrote anti-gay slurs in lighter fluid on the family's driveway and tried to ignite it. Colton has stayed out of school since the latest incident, and his father has said the student will probably finish high school from home. Colton's family, which is offering a $7,000 reward for information about the attacks, declined to speak to Salon Mothers Who Think; Colton's mother said only, "We're just quite anxious for the whole thing to go away."

In fact, since the media descent on this small bedroom community north of San Francisco, the Coltons aren't the only ones in town who are anxious for the whole thing to go away. With the horrific death of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who was beaten and left to die in rural Wyoming, still fresh in the nation's consciousness, the incident in Novato got widespread national coverage. And just as the town came under the media glare, the parents of four black students from Tamalpais High School, in nearby Mill Valley, filed a class-action lawsuit against the Novato Unified School District and San Marin High administrators over racial slurs made by San Marin students at a basketball game last February. The suit charges both the school and the district with allowing a "climate of intolerance" to persist at San Marin.

Next page | Did the media scrutiny help or hurt Novato?