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The other 'longtime companion"
by Arlene Levinson
Associated Press Writer
It happens all the time in Ron Cayot’s neigh
borhood in Chicago, a gay enclave called Lake
View. A car full of kids pulls up and asks directions.
Their unwary victim bends down to answer.
“And all of a sudden somebody’s fist will
come out and hit the guy in the face, and they’ll
drive away laughing,” said Cayot, a disabled 39-
year-old carpenter whose voice is a choked rasp.
The threat of violence is the other longtime
companion of gay men and women. Widely as
sumed to be underreported, the casebook of anti
gay killings and assaults is a numbing descent into,
cruelty.
It happened to Cayot. Three young men just
pulled up beside him and a friend one night, and
yelled “Faggot!” and, after a scuffle, “Aiming!”
Then the gun spoke, three times, tearing open
his neck, piercing his abdomen and lodging a
bullet in his shoulder.
It would be months after the March 31,1992,
attack before Cayot could speak again, even eat
again on his own. He still can’t work and his left]
arm, the one he writes with, is numb. A series ofl
operations has left him with more than a million
dollars in hospital bills he can’t pay.
His assailants remain at large.
“They think that gay people are weak, they
think that we’re all ‘pansies’ and that it’s a real easy
target,” said Cayot.
So they target them, again and agaia
On Feb. 9, a mugging in Hartford, Conn.,
turned into a rape when two brothers asked a man
if he was gay and he said yes. That same night, in
Madison, Wis., a gay man was punched, choked
and kicked while an assailant screamed: “I hate
faggots!"
The list of the victims is unending: Allen
Schindler, his skull smashed against a toilet in
Japan until the gay American sailor’s body was
unrecognizable to his mother, Ana Maria Rosales,
shot in the face on Jan. 7 in Washington, D.C., as
she left a bar holding hands with another woman.
A witness told police Rosales’ assailant de
manded: “What’s wrong with you, girl?” then said
he intended to have sex with her, and then killed
her. A grand jury decided hatred of lesbians was at
least a partial motive for defendant Gregory White,
now awaiting trial.
Anti-gay violence is markedly demeaning and
vicious; some say it’s the last permitted hate crime,
and it is happening more and more often.
“We’re in a period of increased acceptance
and empowerment (of gays) on the one hand, and
increased backlash on the other,” said Kevin Berrill,
a consultant in Washington, D.C., who 11 yeais
ago began the first systematic recording of anti-gay
violence for the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force.
“Anytime a persecuted, disempowered group
agitates for equality, there is a backlash, we’ve seen
that over and over again in our nation’s history.”
Once self-concealed, afraid of scandal and
rejection, homosexuals suddenly seem to be all
over the place.
They hold gay pride picnics in city parks.
They march on Washington. They demand repre
sentation on city councils and in Congress. They go
on talk shows and hold hands in public. They let it
be known that the person they keep house with is
not of the opposite sex.
They become the subject of scrutiny, whether
the topic is AIDS, gay rights, cries of evil from
conservatives or the welcome of the Clinton ad
ministration — which installed lesbian Roberta
Achtenberg as an assistant secretary in the Depart
ment of Housing and Urban Development while
pushing to lift the ban on gays in the military.
Tying this directly to violence is only a hunch,
however. The figures are meager.
It’s widely assumed, by people who work
with victims of such violence and those who track
it, that much more occurs than gets reported.
Victims fear hostile or disinterested police. They
may encounter prosecutors wary of the vagueries
of hate crime that make it hard to prove. And they
shy away from public exposure of their homosexu
ality.
So what gets most notice is the bloodiest street
violence, the worst attacks outside gay bars or in
neighborhoods or other areas frequented by gays.
“We end up talking about street violence
(because) it’s the only place where we have data. It
looks more like a crime," said Gregory Herek, a
social psychologist at the University of California at
Davis widely considered the pre-eminent researcher
into anti-gay prejudice and violence.
“We have evidence there is an iceberg
out there,” Herek added. “We see the tip of that
iceberg in lesbian and gay street youth who fre
quently flee to large cities to escape violence in their
homes and in their schools."
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force,
seeking a consistent measure of a little reported
crime, takes a five-city survey of agencies that aid
victims of anti-gay violence. It toted up 817 inci
dents of anti-gay assaults in 1992, up from 775 the
year before. Slayings attributed to homophobia
jumped from eight in 1991 to 12 last year, the task
force said.
“The continuing rise, particularly in cit
ies with long-established victims services, indi
cates to us it is not just increasing awareness, but
increasing incidence of hate violence," said Martin
Hiraga, director of the task force’s Anti-Violence
Project.
A particular feature of anti-gay assaults, ac
cording to Hiraga, is that it commonly begins with
insults that rapidly escalate.
“Usually the victims don’t have an opportu
nity to think about what’s happening to them
before the attacks actually begin," he said. “And
then it’s anything from being punched to being
raped with objects to being beaten. Many times, it
is not the intention of the perpetrator to kill the
person, but it happens, the attack is so ferocious.”
Until recently, gay bashing wasn’t even a
specific crime. In many places it’s still not officially
a motive for assault; only 21 states and the District
of Columbia include sexual orientation in their
hate crimes laws.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in its
encyclopedic accounting of crimes reported by the
nation’s police forces does not classify anti-gay
violence as such. It lumps it with other hate crime,
a category added only since passage of the federal
Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990.
By any name or category, gay bashing is a
' .. Fall 1993