For those of you who have been following it (which is likely only those of you who read the gay news sites), the 72 year old gay man who was beaten with a pipe the other day, by a man on his bus who asked him if he was gay, has died…
Andrew Anthos died Friday of injuries sustained during an attack last week outside his downtown Detroit apartment building. Family members said he was a victim of an anti-gay hate crime.
Anthos was on a city bus Feb. 13 when a man asked him if he was gay. The man followed Anthos off the bus at the stop in front of his building and beat him with a metal pipe.
Anthos, whose family said he was gay, was taken to a hospital and later fell into a coma.
Local and national gay rights groups condemned the attack. Police told The Detroit News in story published Friday that the department was investigating whether the attack was a hate crime.
This is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin, looks like in practice, or as one of Bill Donohue’s nemesis, Shakespear’s Sister, points out…
This shit doesn’t happen in a void. Like the sexualization and objectification of women in the media being psychologically damaging to girls, the constant drumbeat of negative stereotypes and exploitative hatred issued by the GOP and social/religious conservative leaders is dangerous for members of the LGBT community. And the hatemongers’ faux-naïveté at the reality that you can’t continually put a target on someone’s back but expect no one to shoot at it is growing really goddamned old. The hate-the-gays schtick isn’t just infuriating and spiteful and wrong; it’s irresponsible.
But it’s effective. It keeps winning them elections. It keeps the cash flowing in. And it keeps the gays fearful. A fearful homosexual is a good homosexual. Not perhaps, as good as a dead one, but it will do.
The reference to "Dome Man" comes from Anthos’ campaign to light the Michigan Statehouse dome in red, white and blue colors one night a year…
Photo by Lansing State Journal file photo
So he loved his country, and he loved his state. Too bad they couldn’t have loved him back.
A San Diego judge has ruled there is enough evidence against a U.S. Marine for him to stand trial for murder with a hate crime enhancement in the slaying of a gay man in 2006.
…
Following his arrest, Hardy told San Diego police homicide detectives that he passed out at Catolico’s apartment and later awoke later to find Catolico trying to sexually assault him.
According to Hardy he felt violated and that “one thing led to another and I ended up choking him.”
One thing led to another…
Hardy’s attorney told the court that the murder was not a hate crime – but rather self defense – and that [the district attorny] had not established that Catolico’s sexuality had anything to do with the killing.
But, [the district attorny] countered that Hardy knew full well that Catolico was gay and had agreed to share his bed.
"He had time to think about it, and he formed a plan in his mind for the victim to lay on his stomach, and that’s when he decided to choke him out"…
[the district attorny] also told the court that following the murder Hardy went out for fast food, and then brought it back to the apartment and ate it while playing video games on Catolico’s computer.
Presumably with the corpse of the man he claimed had sexually assaulted him still in the bedroom. How does any sane person look at his, and believe that there was an assault to begin with? But you see this kind of thing over and over again in gay panic defenses.
Apparently Ex-Gay-For-Pay Randy Thomas, membership director of Exodus, and staunch opponent of hate crime laws, is getting a bit tired of being harassed for what he is…
There is something to be said about having a public blog. I love to blog. I have made some amazing friends and had wonderful conversations over the years. I like posting pictures and artwork and discussing important topics (overcoming homosexuality only being one of millions of important topics.) Even so, having a personal "public" blog is also time intensive. Especially when you have so many people willing to harass you and your loved ones because they don’t agree with you. :) So, at this point, this blog is going to be completely private and posts will only be visible to my VOX neighborhood, friends and family…
Scott over at Reality Cubed has a pretty good retort up to all this, to which I can only add that it’s grotesque watching someone who played his part in a right wing propaganda offensive against hate crime laws, with gusto, bellyaching now about being harassed because, because, because they don’t agree with him. Honestly you pathetic gutter crawling maggot, I don’t give a flying fuck what your opinions are about homosexuals and homosexuality. Out of the lifestyle are you? Fine. Whatever. And for the record I don’t think people should be harassing you online, except I strongly suspect what you consider harassment is simply the kind of eminently expectable ill will people get in return when they keep spitting in their neighbor’s faces, and trashing their lives. Be nice if your kind would stop inciting religious passions against gay people, and then encouraging the police and the courts to keep looking the other way when they start taking it out on us violently though, wouldn’t it? Ask this Milwaukee Lesbian what being harassed feels like, you drooling moron.
Randy’s the guy on the…er…far right…in the ad below, produced by Exodus in their offensive in late 2005 against hate crime laws protecting gay people from what happened to Angela Emanule above, and countless others, like James Maestas, who was beaten so badly in Santa Fe earlier in the same year Exodus produced this ad, that his lungs were burned by his own stomach acid.
Here’s Randy hobnobbing with Karl Rove…
And, just to remind everyone, here’s how Rove likes winning elections in swing states…
The gay kid wasn’t there, but the man managed to kill his 17 year old friend who was. And republicans sure do seem like they’re perfectly willing to live with the consequences of demonizing homosexuals for votes, so long as it keeps winning them elections. And you’ll keep helping them do it won’t you Randy? Like…by spreading the damnable lie that we think our lives are more valuable then anyone else’s. All that ad did was generate more hate toward gay people. But…that’s what it was for. You know what Randy? Your name was on the knife that killed Kristofer King.
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.
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.
A gay couple holding hands as they left a Scottsdale restaurant were attacked by as many as seven men leaving the pair badly beaten.
Andrew Frost and Jean Rolland say the attack took place just feet from the restaurant’s front doors.
Frost, 19, needed numerous stitches to close wounds on his head and face. Rolland, 28, suffered many bumps and bruises.
"I had blood pouring out of me and I actually blacked out at one point," Frost told the Arizona Republic.
He said that as he and Rolland exited the restaurant he heard someone yell "fag". He said he turned and saw two men. Frost said that he replied to the slur and one of the men punched him. He said that at least five others rushed from the restaurant and joined the attack.
Frost and Rolland have filed a police report, but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything. The couple said they had never seen their attackers before.
Tempers boiled over at an anti-gay marriage rally yesterday when the executive director of the Boston-based Catholic Citizenship emerged from behind a lectern outside City Hall, rushed toward a female counter-demonstrator, and pushed her to the ground.
Sarah Loy, 27, of Worcester was holding a sign in defense of same-sex marriage amid a sea of green “Let the People Vote” signs when Larry Cirignano of Canton, who heads the Catholic Citizenship group, ran into the crowd, grabbed her by both shoulders and told her, “You need to get out. You need to get out of here right now.” Mr. Cirignano then pushed her to the ground, her head slamming against the concrete sidewalk.
"It was definitely assault and battery,” said Ronal C. Madnick, director of the Worcester County Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. Police interviewed Mr. Madnick and several others moments after the incident.
As Ms. Loy lay motionless on the ground, crying, Mr. Cirignano ran back behind the lectern, where moments before he had opened the afternoon rally by leading a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Emphasising the words "under God" and Leaving out "indivisible", no doubt…
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been asked to help with the investigation into two attacks on women Ada Oklahoma where homophobic epithets were marked on their bodies.
But apart from helping develop a profile of suspects in the case there is little the FBI can do. Gays and lesbians are not protected under federal hate crime legislation.
Sara Kaspereit, 20, said she was grabbed by two men as she got out of her car in front of her home on Monday. One of the men carved the word lesbian into her forearm.
Earlier this month a second woman said she was blindfolded, bound to a tree and the word "Hellbound” was written in marker pen across her chest.
…
In previous homophobic attacks where the FBI has been asked for assistance there is little the bureau could do.
Last July the FBI was called for help in investigating an incident involving a burning cross in front of the home of a gay man in Athens, Tennessee. After determining the incident was homophobic rather than race related the bureau declined to help. (story)
Federal investigators examined evidence but said that even if the people responsible are caught they cannot be prosecuted under federal law. (story)
Legislation that would have included crimes against gays and lesbians in federal hate crime laws was dropped in the Senate in May. (story)
Washington) New statistics show that hate crimes against gays and lesbians accounted for the third largest number of bias crimes in the country last year sparking a new push from LGBT rights groups for federal hate laws.
Overall the number of reported hate crimes was down by six percent. Crimes against people based on their race accounted for more than half of the incidents. Crimes based on religious bias were reported in 17 percent of the cases and attacks on members of the LGBT community came in third at 14.2 percent according to the FBI statistics.
The numbers are considered by many LGBT rights groups as low because not all gay victims report attacks on them for fearing of being outed publicly and because not all areas of the country track LGBT bias crimes.
In fact, whenever the issue of tracking these kinds of crimes comes up in the legislatures, it is reliably attacked by republicans and their religious right rubes as a prelude to an attack on their religious freedoms. You know…like the god given right to walk up to a gay teenager and just punch them right in the face while they’re sitting peacefully on a trolley…
(San Diego, California) A 50 year old man who came to the aid of a teenager being gay bashed on a San Diego Trolley was slashed with a knife.
Police say that the Trolley was traveling ;through the Encanto neighborhood when a man in his mid 30’s began making homophobic remarks to the teen. The man then punched the young man in the face.
…not to mention that god given right to take a knife to anyone who interferes…
When the older passenger attempted to intervene and prevent the teenager from further attack the assailant pulled a knife and slashed the 50 year old.
The attacker escaped when the Trolley made its next stop.
…or that god given right to prowl the gay ghettos looking for gay men to beat the crap out of, then rob, then rape.
San Francisco, California) A meeting Monday night between police and residents of San Francisco’s mostly LGBT Castro neighborhood brought a commitment that street patrols would be stepped up following a series of attacks.
About 100 residents attended the meeting, several telling personal stories.
Mark Welsh said he was attacked as he walked from work to his car
"I was attacked from behind and hit in the back, neck and shoulder, which knocked me to the ground … As I fell to the ground, they proceeded to kick and punch throughout most of my body."
Throughout the beating and robbery Welsh said his attackers "kept calling me a faggot, many a time."
When they finished robbing him they sexually assaulted him.
Two other attacks fit the same pattern – beatings, robberies and then rapes.
And who but a satanist would want to deny the faithful and righteous the right to chase gay men into oncoming traffic and to their death…?
(New York City) The charges against two of the men accused of driving a gay Brooklyn man onto a busy highway where he was struck and killed have been formally upgraded to murder. A third man is expected to face the same charge.
…
Police allege that Fox and Shurov posed as gay men, cruising an Internet chat room looking for a mark to rob. They met Sandy online.
Chat messages between Sandy and the men were reportedly found on his home computer and a printout from his computer showing directions to Plum Beach, a popular cruising area, were found in his car.
Police allege that Sandy arranged to meet Fox on a street corner in Sheepshead Bay. The two then drove the short distance to the beach where the other three were waiting.
When the gang began beating him Sandy bolted for the nearby Belt Parkway with his attackers in close pursuit.
They caught up with him in one lane of the highway and as Sandy broke free he was struck by a car, sustaining massive injuries.
The attackers were last seen rifling through Sandy’s pockets before fleeing.
For gay people to stand up and demand a stop to anti-gay violence, is to attack religious freedom. At least, that’s what the Bush base is claiming. Hate crime laws they insist, punish thought. But if that’s the case then so do laws that protect anyone from discrimination on the basis of race or religion, because you can’t say it’s either one if the thinking is irrelevant. Yes I said I wouldn’t serve them at my lunch counter…yes I’m a racist…but to enact laws against that is to punish me for what I think of people like that and that’s thought control… No. The problem isn’t that hate crime laws or anti-discrimination laws punish thought, but that they protect people who bigots believe down in their bones they have every right to beat the living crap out of whenever they damn well please. It isn’t Who the hell are you to tell me what to think, but Who the hell are you to treat those people as if they’re my equals.
If we don’t bleed, they’re not righteous. And so, we have to bleed.
Via Steve Gilliard… If the Russian mob joined in the fight against gay rights, Randy Thomasson would applaud them as "shining models for the rest of us in terms of faith, family, work ethic, patriotism and community" too…
Sacramento’s large enclave of immigrant Slavic evangelicals is becoming a force on social issues. Their actions shock many.
SACRAMENTO — Organizers of the annual Rainbow Festival were prepared for trouble.
The Q Crew, a local "queer/straight alliance," distributed cards telling people what to do if approached by hostile demonstrators. Sympathetic local church groups formed a protective buffer along the festival ground’s cyclone fence. Mounted police were on patrol.
Jerry Sloan manned a table for Stand Up for Sacramento, a recently formed gay self-defense organization.
"So far, so good," he said. "No Russians."
The festival, held last month amid the gay bars, restaurants and shops of midtown’s "Lavender Heights" neighborhood, went off without conflict. But the elaborate security preparations reflected growing tensions between Sacramento gays and the city’s large and vociferous community of fundamentalist Christians from the former Soviet Union.
Over the last 18 months, Sacramento Russian-language church members have picketed gay pride events, jammed into legislative committee meetings when gay issues were on the agenda and demonstrated at school board meetings.
Incited by firebrand Russian Pentacostal pastors and polemical Russian-language newspapers, the fundamentalists turn out en masse for state Capitol protest rallies.
Last June, urging readers to attend a massive rally, the Russian newspaper the Speaker told them:
"Make a choice. It’s your decision. Homosexuality is knocking on your doors and asking: ‘Can I make your son gay and your daughter lesbian?’ "
In most instances, the Russian-speaking demonstrators far outnumber representatives from all other anti-gay groups combined. Anti-homosexual rallies that a few years ago attracted a few dozen participants now regularly draw hundreds and sometimes thousands, many with a heavy Russian accent.
It’s worth noting, and the L.A. Times article does note, that not all Russian communities in this country are as crazy bigoted as the one in Sacramento. But this one community is different. How?
The Sacramento community, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly evangelical — Baptist and Pentecostalist. The charismatic Pentacostal church, introduced in the Ukraine in the 1920s by missionary and martyr Ivan Efimovich Vornaev, includes speaking in tongues and washing of feet. The churches’ social views are based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.
And I’ll just bet, relentlessly antisemite too. Russia has had a problem with that for untold generations…the Protocols of the Elders of Zion originated in Russia…and my understanding is that it is among precicely these fervent religious types in Russia, the kind that like their Christianity loud and gilded and glittering and all controlling, that the hatred of jews is the most vehement.
Well…hating jews doesn’t gain you a lot of traction here in the United States, no matter how proudly you wear Christ around your neck…just ask Mel Gibson. But you can still hate homosexuals and demand respect for your sincere religiosity…
Many credit the Slavic Christian immigrant community with filling a void left by the traditional American church and providing reinforcements in the ongoing culture wars over what should define family, acceptable sexual relationships and marriage.
"Russian Christians bring a fresh faith and uncorrupted family values to this country. They are a shining model for the rest of us in terms of faith, family, work ethic, patriotism and community," said Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families.
Behold a shining model…
Gay civil rights activists, meanwhile, accuse the demonstrators of hateful and aggressive tactics that they say sometimes lean dangerously toward violence.
Signs displayed by the demonstrators often equate homosexuality with pedophilia and describe the AIDS epidemic as a message from God. One of the common tactics of the demonstrators is to tap gays forcefully on the head and announce that they have been "saved."
"They’ve declared war on us for some reason," said Stand Up for Sacramento founder Nathan Feldman, a jewelry store clerk. "They got it into their heads that California is the land of sin and that it is their duty to cleanse the state, starting with homosexuals."
What Thomasson means is that they are more aggressive and willing to physically attack gay people then even Fred Phelps’ group. Thomasson is a well known opponent of gay rights in California. What he sees and values in the ethnic Russian community around Sacramento isn’t faith, it’s their willingness to bring fear into the lives of gay people. Because of his new allies in the war on homosexuals, Sacramento Pride Days now require heightened security. This is what brings Randy hope. Or at least, satisfaction.
Warning…the site I’m linking to here has a really obnoxious streaming video ad that comes up right over the news story after a couple seconds, and may bog down your computer severely. Turn off Javascript before clicking on the link below.
It comes to this: If the victim was killed because his killer wanted to rob him, it’s first degree murder and the killer gets life in prison. But if the victim was gay and made a pass at his killer, then it’s manslaughter and a slap on the wrist…
Gonzalez says back in 2003, he met Trevino on the street and went to his Central Fresno apartment to drink beer. But, he says he was shocked when Trevino made a pass at him and reacted by stabbing Trevino to death.
Michael Idiart, Defense Attorney, said "If you believe that pass, that sexual advance was made then I believe it’s going to come down to two choices– murder-two or voluntary manslaughter." Idiart says both men were drunk and his client killed Trevino in the heat of the moment.
The prosecution says Gonzalez only wanted to Rob Trevino, a factor that would make him guilty of first degree murder…
Dig it. The robbery makes it first degree murder. But the victim’s sexuality makes it voluntary manslaughter. And drooling morons like Richard Cohen wonder why we’re fighting for hate crime laws.
A hard-fought football battle between Melrose and Malden high schools was marred by post-game events Friday night, when an altercation near the field left two Malden students in the hospital.
Following the game, the Malden cheerleading squad exited through the crowd towards the team bus, according to Pat Ruggiero, Melrose director of health, physical education and athletics. According to police reports, a 17-year-old, male cheerleader from Malden alleged that an unidentified female teen from Melrose began harassing him with homosexual slurs.
When the cheerleader ignored the taunts, a male teen accompanying the female, described as a 17-year-old, white male with a lip piercing and wearing a black hat, allegedly punched the cheerleader in the face and several times in the chest.
…
The cheerleader was taken to Melrose-Wakefield Hospital. Another 17-year-old from Malden began hyperventilating during the incident, and was also transported to the hospital.
Pretty obvious what happened…right? Hahahahaha! You must be living on another planet then…
Administrators from both schools conducted an investigation of the incident and had a meeting Wednesday morning to discuss how to proceed. Following the meeting, administrators released the following statement: "It was mutually decided that this is an opportunity for a teachable moment," a press release states. "A diversity rally is being planned for Friday, Sept. 28 to take place concurrently at both schools to speak out against ignorance and promote diversity."
Melrose Superintendent Joe Casey said that five students were interviewed during investigations, and only three or four teens were involved in the actual altercation. He said the students would be disciplined, but no punishment had been determined as of press time Wednesday.
"Neither school feels this rises to the level of being a hate crime," Casey said. "I think what took place was a lot of bad judgment, with a scuffle that followed."
[Emphasis mine] Okay…what the fuck?! A student, perceived to be gay, was beaten badly enough to be taken to the hospital after being repeatedly fag baited by the girl friend of his attacker. Another student who witnessed the attack also had to be taken to the hospital. And this isn’t a hate crime? Ah…no. It’s a Teachable Moment. Right. Let’s teach the gay students of both our schools that we don’t think beating the living crap out of them amounts to a crime. Just…bad judgment.
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.
We saw small town gay bar, a documentary by Malcolm Ingram (it was exec produced by Kevin Smith, yes, the director of Clerks). It was a wonderful look at what social life is like for gays in the rural South. I mean really rural — the two Mississippi bars profiled were in Shannon (pop. 1,657) and Meridian (39,968). Durham, for comparison’s sake has an estimated pop. of 204,845.
Watching this film is like going back in time if you live in a progressive area or large city; the closet is a necessity here, as you might imagine. Being out can be a death sentence for these people. The bar is their only refuge, their only time to let their hair down, be themselves and feel safe to be who they are, as gays, lesbians, trans, black, white — all that matters is that you know you aren’t alone. Drag queens had a home to perform out and proud at Rumors and Crossroads (now called Different Seasons).
The audience howled as Ingram interviewed the unhinged Rotting CryptkeeperTMFred Phelps. Fred was his animated self, talking about "fanning the flames of fag lust" and it was clear he’s energized and surprised by "all the fags that come out to protest him."
The Phelps Klan picketed the funeral of Scotty Joe Weaver, who was killed right next door in Alabama. The 18-year-old out gay teen, known to many at the Mississippi bars, was murdered by a trio of backwoods homobigots; he was tied to a chair in his trailer, beaten, stabbed, and partially decapitated. His body was dumped in the woods and then set on fire. No wonder these people remain closeted.
And since this is Mississippi, Ingram had to stop by the HQ and nexus of homohate, Don and Tim Wildmon’s American Family Association, which is in Tupelo. Tim sat on camera and dutifully told the story about how it was a good thing for the community to have his local minions stand on a nearby bridge and take down the tag numbers of people who were going over the bridge to go to the gay bar.
The next day on his radio show, Don would read the tag numbers on the air. This, he said, "would keep people accountable."…
Right. Like Christopher Gaines, Nichole Kelsay and Robert Porter held Scotty Joe Weaver accountable. Love the sinner, hate the sin, tie the sinner to a chair, torture them to death and then burn their body.
Reading this article from Gay.Com, about a raid on a New Mexican gay gym, was like reading a history book about gay life before Stonewall…except that only one person was arrested…
New Mexico state police and the Albuquerque fire marshal’s office entered and secured the men-only gym about 10 p.m. Saturday and arrested club manager Ron Cordova on suspicion of selling and dispensing alcohol without a liquor license, said New Mexico Department of Public Safety spokesman Peter Olson.
But gym patrons — who were forced to lie on the floor, handcuffed, with semi-automatic rifles pointed at them — say that if the raid was about an alcohol infraction, it was, at least, overkill.
Ronald, a 57-year-old gay man from Miami Beach who requested that his last name not be used, said he was visiting New Mexico looking for real estate opportunities when he heard about a "social event" at Pride Gym on Saturday evening.
"There were about 35 of us there, and most were older men, some in their 70s, eating tacos and chatting," Ronald said. "Most of us were fully dressed, because it’s a legitimate gym with a sauna, but not a bathhouse."
"Suddenly, a SWAT team carrying semi-automatic weapons, plastic shields and late gloves burst through the door and told us to get on the ground. They kept saying, ‘We’re not here for you,’ but still they handcuffed us and kept us on the ground until they could run background checks on all of us. This took about an hour."
At least one elderly man suffered a panic attack and was taken away by paramedics, Ronald said. A few of the patrons were in the sauna when the raid occurred, and, when their towels fell, they were forced to lie on the floor naked, he said.
Ronald claimed that police officers led one man into a separate room and took pictures of him.
"The guy was wearing a leather harness and a jockstrap. A female officer with a digital camera took him into a room; we saw about 15 or 20 flashes coming from there and heard lots of laughter. They (the officers) were having a good old time. It was like the gay Abu Ghraib."
The ACLU is looking into it, but this is George Bush’s America, and I honestly can’t see any court case against police treatment of citizens like this, let alone homosexuals, going anywhere. The Bush supreme court gives the police pretty much carte blanche these days, and it seems sometimes reading the news accounts of police behavior that made it past the courts, that they can cuff you and strip search you and do a cavity search of you during a routine traffic stop, so long as in their "judgment" they needed to do that.
"The officers were serving a search warrant and the fire marshal was there to inspect the building," Olson said. "Any time there is a situation with a large number of people, officers will employ whatever tactics they need to maintain control of the situation."
The warrant, he said, arose from tips from locals that alcohol was being served at Pride Gym. "Any time agents find someone serving alcohol without a license, it causes concern because those proprietors are operating outside of the law." He said it’s inaccurate to characterize Saturday night’s event as a ‘raid,’ and maintained that officers were not out of bounds.
…
"We were committing no crimes, and not one of us treated the police with any disrespect," Ronald said. "If they (the police) were trying to prevent drunk driving, why didn’t they target the art gallery where I went earlier that night? They were serving wine."
Olson said art galleries serving alcohol had been the focus of similar enforcement in the past, and now employ professional bartenders to serve wine.
However, he said he was not aware of incidents where gallery patrons were forced to lie on the ground at gunpoint.
Does anyone really need to explain why art gallery patrons are treated more like human beings by the police then the patrons of a gym that caters to the gay community? The only difference here from the way cops treated gay people pre Stonewall is that everyone inside wasn’t led in handcuffs to police vans stationed outside, but that’s only because sodomy isn’t a crime anymore. One more Bush appointee to the supreme court, and that will change, and the vans will be back.
Via Pam’s House Blend, via Muskrat Hunt… Here’s what unleashing religious passions against a minority accomplishes, in case you missed hearing about the Holocaust, and were wondering…
Note the death threat side by side with the statement of religious belief. And we have an election coming up…don’t we? Time for another round of…this perhaps…?
Who on the republican side of the isle, wants to step up to the plate and take responsibility for the dead homosexuals later this year? Nobody, of course.
Uhm…How About We Take A Cruse Off The Coast Of Somalia Instead?
Some months ago my brother and I were on the phone brainstorming vacation times and places. I live on one coast, he on the other. It would be neat, says he, if we could all meet somewhere, like the Bahamas, or the Florida Keys…or say, how about Jamaica?
(Kingston) Students at University of the West Indies rioted as police attempted to protect a gay student and escort him from the campus.
The Daily Gleaner reports that the student had been chased across the Mona campus by another student who claimed the gay man had attempted to proposition him in a washroom.
Dozens of students joined in the case and the student sought protection in a university building.
The mob demanded that campus security turn the student over. With security guards badly outnumbered college authorities called in police fearing the gay man would be killed.
The Gleaner reports that a contingent of police in full riot gear battled with students in an effort to protect the gay man.
Students threw objects from all directions at the officers. At one point the gay man was stabbed by another student, although the injuries are reportedly superficial.
The crowd only began to disperse when one officer drew his gun and fired a shot in the air.
This is far from the first story I’ve heard in a year, of Jamaican mobs chasing down gays (or more to the point, people only suspected of being gay) with the intention of killing them. Last January a mob chased a young man through the streets and off a pier to his death, shouting homophobic epithets at him all the while. And in December the man who who ran Jamaica AIDS Support for Life, Lenford Harvey, was shot to death on the eve of World AIDS Day. Three men broke into his house, tied up two of his housemates and then forced Harvey into their car. His body was found two hours later.
The Jamaica tourism web site says of the island country that it is a place of "sweet fragrances, shimmering sunsets, spicy flavors. No wonder hearts beat faster in Jamaica." Especially when they’re being chased through the streets by bloodthirsty mobs no doubt.
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