SMITHFIELD - A new club at Johnston Community College hopes to end prejudices based on gender, race, religious belief and sexual preference.

Last week, the club, Bisexuals, Gays, Lesbians and Allies for Diversity, or BGLAD, held "Erasing Hate," two days of discussions aimed at replacing hate with understanding, compassion and acceptance.

"We're just regular people like everybody else," said sophomore Antoinette Schmidt, BGLAD's president.

With "Erasing Hate," she said, "we just wanted to make people a little more aware of how their hurtful words or actions impact people."

Thomas Howard of the Matthew Shepard Foundation led the four separate discussions. The foundation is named after a Wyoming college student who was murdered in an anti-gay hate crime in 1998. Howard cited thousands of recent hate crimes in the United States as cause for the need of civil conversations about tolerance.

His address, he said, was not meant to glorify any one lifestyle or idea over another, but to help build respect for others' values and prevent physical and verbal abuse.

"This is not a 'gay thing,'" Howard said. "It is not my desire to force my beliefs on you. This is about learning to have a conversation about what makes us different."

Howard used his experiences to frame the type of harassment that BGLAD and the Matthew Shepard Foundation try to prevent. As a sixth-grader in Texas, Howard said, his classmates cornered him, assaulted him and urinated on him in the boys' locker room because they said "the sissy deserved it."

"If one person had come up to me and said, 'I saw what happened to you, and it's not OK,' that would have made a difference," he said.

Such experiences are more common than most people realize, Howard said. And that's why BGLAD members started their club at Johnston Community College.

"We want this to be a safe place for people who have come out and are being picked on or bullied," Schmidt said. "It's nice to know that there are people out there who you can talk to and establish a support system with."

About 150 students attended the discussions. Some spoke of how they had been bullied or even bullied someone else in school.

"People tend to hate what they fear and don't understand," said Dawn Stancil, BGLAD's vice president. "But education will lead to eradication [of hate]."

BGLAD has about 15 members. In its first year, the group hopes to raise money, become more involved in the campus community and educate students about safe sex.

"We needed to start the conversation," said the group's adviser, Jocleen McCall, a religion instructor. "There are a lot who don't feel comfortable here for various reasons."