Unfinished Lives

Remembering LGBT Hate Crime Victims

“A-List” Gay Celebrity Assaulted in Dallas

A-List Dallas View; Taylor Garrett on far left (!)

Dallas, Texas – Gay Republican consultant Taylor Garrett was decked with a hard blow to the left eye last week, according to various press reports.  A cast member on the gay reality television show, LOGO’s “A-List Dallas,” Garrett is closely associated with high-profile human rights opponent, Ann Coulter.  Returning to his car from a birthday party on the entertainment strip along Cedar Springs Road in Dallas, Garrett says he was shocked to find the words, “F-ck Coulter,” keyed into his car door.  A large man appeared out of the shadows where he was squatting, and knocked Garrett to the ground, cutting his brow and bloodying him.  He also fell on broken glass beside the car, scraping his body.

Garrett is convinced gay Democrats are behind the bias against him and other gay “conservative Republican Christians.”  In an interview with the Daily Caller, he said, “I would’ve thought people would have been a little more tolerant considering that our community advocates for tolerance, but it has been nothing but mean spirited attacks, especially after the Ann Coulter scene,” referring to his well-publicized luncheon recently with Coulter.  Using racist plantation language, Garrett said that gay Democrats want him to “stay on the plantation,” but he is having none of it. Shaken by the incident, he says another season for him on the popular LOGO series is in doubt.

An ambulance was called to the scene, but the paramedics did not elect to transport him to the hospital, since his injuries did not warrant it. Some members of the LGBTQ community and media have suggested that Garrett is using this incident and another in October when a rock was thrown through his window to gin up publicity for himself.  Garrett denies the allegations. Dallas Police have not designated the assault as a hate crime at this point.

In an exclusive interview with Huffington Post, Garrett continued the theme of gay hypocrisy over politics.  “This goes to show you,” he said, “that the gay community advocates for diversity and is against bullying, but in our own community we discriminate based upon if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or if you don’t necessarily fit within the mold of the political views of the gay community.”

November 15, 2011 Posted by | Anglo Americans, Beatings and battery, gay men, GLBTQ, Law and Order, LGBTQ, Media Issues, Slurs and epithets, Texas, Unsolved LGBT Crimes, vandalism | , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on “A-List” Gay Celebrity Assaulted in Dallas

Gay Men and Trans People in the Cross Hairs: Behind the FBI’s 2010 Hate Crimes Statistics

Washington, D.C. –  Hate crimes statistics for 2010 are out from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  The good news is that, overall, the numbers of reported hate crimes last year held steady.  The FBI report, accessible here, documents 6,624 single-bias incidents, which range from acts of vandalism to cold blooded murder. Four more incidents encompassed multiple-biases, making for a grand total of 6,628 incidents reflecting 7,699 offenses as reported voluntarily by law enforcement agencies around the nation.  These data represent a serious undercount of the actual number of hate crimes perpetrated against Americans during the last year, since 1) reportage by local law enforcement is sheerly voluntary with no funding from the federal government to aid small jurisdictions to report, and 2) local law enforcement officials are often loathe to classify an incident as a hate crime because of a variety of reasons, such as how the community regards social groups and racial/sexual minorities.

Behind the statistics are the stories of flesh-and-blood victims and their families, and the news here is disturbing. 1,528 victims were targeted because of animus against sexual orientation.  Of these, 57.3 percent of victims were gay males, and 11.9 percent were lesbians. The numbers of violent attacks against transgender people are fragmentary at this point, since statistics of this particularly vulnerable group have only been recorded by the FBI since the Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was signed into law by President Obama in October 2009.  But the news of brutalities against transgender people, especially transgender women of color, is alarming.  GLAAD reports that, of the people murdered for sexual orientation and gender identity and expression bias, 70 percent were persons of color, and 44 percent were transgender women [NCAVP figures]. Though suicides of LGBTQ teens due to homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools have captured the headlines repeatedly since 2010 began, no separate FBI statistical category yet exists for the collection of these data.

In the recent Civil Rights Conference on Hate Crimes at the University of Texas at Arlington, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez declared in his keynote address, “We are experiencing a headwind of hatred and intolerance in the United States.” FBI Special Agents appealed to local law enforcement, U.S. Attorney officials, and leaders from the North Texas LGBTQ community to co-operate in the reporting of hate crimes, underlining the difficulty feds are experiencing amassing accurate data.   In its 2010 report, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), widely held to offer more accurate statistics on anti-LGBT hate crimes than the FBI, noted a 13 percent rise in homophobic and transphobic violence from 2009 to 2010, and a 23 percent rise in the murders of LGBTQ people.

November 15, 2011 Posted by | Bullying in schools, FBI, gay men, gay teens, Gender Variant Youth, GLBTQ, Hate Crime Statistics, Hate Crimes, hate crimes prevention, Heterosexism and homophobia, Law and Order, Lesbian women, LGBT teen suicide prevention, LGBTQ, Matthew Shepard Act, National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), Social Justice Advocacy, Texas, transgender persons, transphobia, U.S. Justice Department, Washington, D.C. | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Gay Men and Trans People in the Cross Hairs: Behind the FBI’s 2010 Hate Crimes Statistics