Why I Am Grateful There Is An Internet
Simply put, I can get news and information of concern to the gay community that I could not before. It isn’t merely that a lot of hate crime news never makes it beyond the local media. It isn’t merely that the mainstream news media often chooses not to even report hate crimes against us. It’s that more often then not you catch them actively downplaying it. In effect, hiding it from view.
For example…
Chicago police are investigating the shooting of six men at a party in a house on Chicago’s South Side in what may have been a homophobic hate crime.
Police say two masked men burst into an apartment in the house early Sunday morning, spraying semi-automatic gunfire throughout the living room hitting six men.
Residents in the area say the apartment was rented by two gay men and was the scene of frequent loud parties. One neighbor told the Chicago Sun-Times that the building was known as the "Gay House".
"We always be seeing them, and they always be looking at people," Kevin Carter, 18, told the paper.
"They give you that gay look, like you’re a female or something. That ain’t cute. People be ready to fight. … I knew something was going to happen to that house."
…
A man who said his brother lives in the apartment told the paper that his brother had complained for several months about being harassed by people in the neighborhood for being gay.
That’s from the story at 365Gay.Com. The gunmen didn’t use homophobic slurs, apparently didn’t say anything at all, just opened fire. They wore masks, and there have been as I write this, no arrests.
But 365Gay.Com does not field their own reporters. They mostly get their stories off the wire and serve as a news aggregate. That story was based on the reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times. So I went around looking for the story via Google News to see if there were any other takes on it. This is typical of what I found:
Six people were wounded, two of them critically, when masked gunmen opened fire early Sunday on a South Side party, authorities said.
About 100 people were at the party in the first-floor apartment of a two-story building in the 7900 block of South Woodlawn Avenue in the Grand Crossing neighborhood about 5:30 a.m. when two men–armed with semiautomatic handguns–kicked down the front door and starting shooting, said Chicago police spokeswoman Monique Bond.
"Because the gunmen who kicked in the door and opened fire were masked, we don’t have a good description," she said.
The men fled into a nearby gangway, Bond said. Detectives were still questioning witnesses and neighbors.
The victims were all men between the ages of 19 and 35, she said. None lived there.
…Neighbors said residents of the apartment often held loud parties that lasted into the morning and that police had been called there several times recently. Bond confirmed that officers had been called to the apartment several times since October, including some calls for complaints of aggravated battery.
Outside the apartment Sunday, blood still stained the front steps, porch and door. .
"All I want is for my friends to be OK and healthy," said a man in his 20s who spoke from a window but declined to give his name.
A neighbor who lives in the unit above the apartment, who also declined to give her name because the gunmen were still at large, said the party was going full force when she fell asleep about 2:30 a.m. Then, about 5:30 a.m., she heard shots from directly below her and tumbled out of bed.
…
She said the men who live there held raucous parties almost every weekend and many times on other nights of the week. Officers also had gone there several times responding to shouting and physical confrontations, she said.
"It’s not just on Friday or Saturday; the police have been here Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, when normal people have to work," the woman said.
Not a word, not a breath, about the fact that the victims were gay, and that the renters had been complaining about harassment from the neighbors. The only neighbor quoted complained about the parties and the noise they made (the landlord, also quoted in that article, said he’d only had one complaint and that was when they held a party after they moved in and the upstairs neighbor complained). This was from the Chicago Tribune. Yet another reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times had no trouble getting neighbors of the men to state that they thought the attack was motivated by the men’s sexual orientation. But that reporter, Mark Konkol, was apparently the only one at the scene who thought it was noteworthy.
And it was the Tribune’s take on the matter, that it was merely an attack on a loud party (and whoever heard of loud parties happening on New Year’s Eve), that made the wires. The story came up on google news and I went through one after the other, from papers in California to the Jerusalem Post, and none of them breathed a word to me that the victims were gay men, that they’d previously complained of harassment by their neighbors, and that there was the slightest bit of hostility toward them in the neighborhood where they lived. You saw none of that in the media reporting.
I constructed a google search string using that quote from the kid who said that the men were giving people "that gay look, like you’re a female or something". The only stories that popped up were from the online gay news organizations, and that one Chicago Sun-Times article. That was it.
Now…maybe this shooting wasn’t motivated by anti-gay hate. But there is at least a reasonable suspicion that it was. In the days before the Internet, all I’d have seen of this, perhaps, would have been the sanitized version set out by the Tribune, and accepted by most of the rest of the heterosexual news editors around the country, and in my local neck of the woods, who all decided that the gay angle on it wasn’t worth printing. Nobody outside of Chicago would ever have any inkling that there might be a hate crime here. And so the gay community wouldn’t have had any reason to pay attention to it, to how well it was being investigated, to question what was going on in that neighborhood, and whether hate had once again turned into bloodshed.
I can well remember a time when violence toward homosexuals just didn’t matter to the police, let alone the press. And we are not out of those woods as much as some would like to believe. Between covering that aspect of it up because you believe they had it coming, and not reporting on it because you just don’t give a good goddamn about the faggots anyway and can’t imagine why any normal person would, anti-gay violence would still be swept under the rug, even today. And even the most committed gay rights activists won’t make their voices heard, if they don’t even know what is happening. Silence equals death. What has made a difference now is the Internet. We are not many small and isolated ghettos anymore. The heterosexual majority can avert their eyes all they want, but now we can see what is happening to us as a people in this country. We can’t make the rest of the world pay attention too, if we ourselves don’t even know what is going on. That is why for so many decades, we believed it when they told us we had it coming. We endured the violence in silence and shame. Those days are over.
