• U.S.

Open Season on Gays

3 minute read
Laurence Zuckerman

When Jon Sugar came upon two men fighting on a San Francisco sidewalk last December, his reaction was typical of many city dwellers: he crossed to the other side of the street. But before the 38-year-old gay poet could get safely out of range, one of the men suddenly came after him.”Hey, you faggot bitch,” the man called out, “I’ll mess you up.” Running over, he knocked Sugar to the pavement and began kicking him in the back. As Sugar lay on the ground, another man ran over and stole his wallet.

^ For the more than 11 million homosexuals nationwide, such random attacks are increasingly commonplace. According to gay-rights groups, hate-motivated assaults have nearly tripled in recent years. In New York City, reported attacks on gays, probably a tiny fraction of the total, jumped from 176 in 1984 to 517 last year. While homosexuals have always been a target of abuse, gay activists attribute the rising violence to the AIDS epidemic and a conservative backlash. “AIDS has provided a green light to the bashers and the bigots,” says Kevin Berrill of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “It’s a convenient excuse for those who hate us.”

Many attacks go far beyond a beating. In New York City’s West Village last summer, a young tough wielding a golf club from a speeding car knocked a gay man unconscious, leaving him permanently brain damaged. In Fort Lauderdale, a pickup truck swerved onto the sidewalk outside a popular gay bar, killing a 33-year-old man. Randy Schell, a client advocate at Community United Against Violence, a San Francisco social-service agency, reports cases of men being beaten with logging chains and sliced with razors. “Anything you could imagine being used to desecrate another human being has been used,” he says.

Victims who go to the police often find them insensitive or even hostile. When Raleigh, N.C., Bar Owner Warren Kilby was stabbed during a tryst with another man in 1986, police warned him that if he insisted on pressing charges, he could go to prison for admitting that he had committed sodomy. In January, University of Illinois Music Professor Michael Cameron was kicked and beaten on a Chicago street by a man who repeatedly asked him if he was “straight.” When Cameron tried to report the incident to two policemen, the officers drove away.

A report released by the National Institute of Justice last fall concluded that “homosexuals are probably the most frequent victims” of hate-motivated violence, but the “criminal-justice system — like the rest of society — has not recognized the seriousness” of the problem. Senator Alan Cranston of California has introduced a bill that would require the Justice Department to record all hate crimes against homosexuals. Once that information is in hand, Cranston says, he will move to make such crimes a violation of federal civil rights laws.

In the meantime, gay support groups are taking action. Last month Horizons Community Services, Inc., a Chicago gay organization, started an antiviolence program with a $27,000 federal crime-victim grant. Los Angeles’ Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center has instituted a telephone hot line for assault victims, and San Francisco’s Community United Against Violence offers free self-defense classes. But taking a stand means taking a risk. In Indianapolis, a few weeks after Kathleen Sarris appeared on radio and television talk shows as president of the gay-rights group Justice, Inc., she was raped at gunpoint and beaten unconscious by a man who insisted he would turn her into a heterosexual or kill her.

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