The usual retort by gay bashers is that the victim made a pass at them, or something akin to a pass.  This is the essence of the "gay panic" defense, that the victim provoked them by in some way attacking their masculinity or their heterosexuality.  What heterosexuals don’t realize, is that they get to play too, by merely being thought to be gay by their assailants, or by having gay friends, and now, apparently, just going to a concert given by a gay performer …

(London) Two men who beat a man and his young nephew as they left an Elton John concert were convicted Wednesday of assault causing bodily harm.

Graham Brydon had taken his nephew John to the concert at Watford football stadium in June last year.  Walking home Brydon put an official T-shirt he bought at the concert over his shirt.

Henry Peters, 31, and Neil Wattley, 30, spotted the T-shirt and began harassing Brydon and his nephew, yelling "Elton John is fucking gay."

Then without provocation the assailants began beating them.

Brydon, in his 50s, required hospitalization for a suspected broken cheekbone.

Peters and Wattley pleaded not guilty, and claimed that Brydon and his nephew had provoked the attack. 

But at trial police showed tape from a CCTV camera which had recorded the entire encounter.

The tape showed Wattley yelling the homophobic slur and then punching Brydon in the face.  Peters then joined in the attack.

Notice the reflex.  They provoked us!  Yes.  Because "Elton John is fucking gay."  It was provocation enough.  Were it not for the video tape, they might just have gotten away with it.  People would think to themselves, there must have been Some kind of provocation after all…nobody just walks up to complete strangers and starts beating them up without Some kind of provocation…  And so there was.  "Elton John is fucking gay."   That was the provocation.  Luckily for the victims in this case, there was a video tape to prove that was all there was to it.

Without a doubt this is the way it goes in nearly all gay bashings.  If you could watch a tape of the entire time Matthew Shepard was in the company of his killers the night he was tortured and murdered, you would, never doubt it, see something very similar to this.  Two adult thugs suddenly turning on a young five foot two 112 pound gay college student who had done absolutely nothing to them, beating him bloody, tying him to a fence, putting cigarettes put out on his skin, and then bashing his skull with a handgun, and then later telling the police, and then the world, that Shepard had provoked them.