Transphobic Attacker Slashes “IT” into Chest of Victim
Long Beach, CA – A Cal State Long Beach graduate student who identifies as a transgender man was forced into a campus toilet stall on April 15 and had the word “IT” carved into his chest with a sharp instrument. The mystery attacker, depicted to the left in a police composite sketch, approached his mark in a men’s toilet on the west side of the campus at around 9:30 pm. He somehow knew his victim’s name, asking if his name was “Colle.” When Colle Carpenter, a 27-year-old F to M graduate student, said yes, the attacker pushed his target into the stall, forcing him against the stall door. He grabbed Carpenter by the T-shirt, yanking it up over his head and exposing his bare chest, as reported by the Long Beach Press-Telegram. After slashing Carpenter, the assailant rushed form the scene, leaving his victim bleeding, shaken, and terrorized. The suspect, described as a 5-foot-10-inch, thin white male with light complexion and dark hair, has neither been identified nor apprehended as of this writing. He was wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt and dark khaki shorts, according to Rick Gloady, a spokesperson for CSULB. As the investigation has proceeded, some community organizations have criticized the university for not immediately releasing information about the attack to the press. Carpenter, however, defended the school’s actions to the L.A.Times blog, L.A.Now, “I’m aware the university has come under some criticisms regarding communications and response, in general,” he said. “But again, I feel that the administration’s response has been focused on the investigation and my wellbeing.” Scores of concerned students and townspeople gathered in support of Carpenter and all victims of transphobia on campus this past Thursday for a “Take Back the Night” march and rally. Carpenter, still recovering from his injuries and leaning on a cane, told the crowd that his attacker was motivated by hatred. The word carved into the flesh of his chest was chosen to demean him as a human being, trying to make him feel “less than human.” But his foe ultimately failed. “I am not less than human,” he told his supporters, “I am not more than or less than anyone standing here today.” Carpenter went on to say, “I know this did not just happen to me. This happened to every member of the community. Those of us who are visibly queer are scared. I have been terrified to come back to campus.” He concluded his remarks, “Thank you for helping me get through this.” Campus officials said that the slashing attack was a one-of-a-kind incident, and do not expect there to be another like it. Meanwhile, the manhunt continues for the transphobic suspect who signs his bigotry in the flesh and blood of his victims.
BB Gun Attackers Face Hate Crimes Charges in San Francisco
San Francisco, CA – Three cousins from Hayward are being charged with a hate crime for shooting a gay man in the face with a BB gun because they assumed he was a homosexual. The Oakland Tribune reports that Mohammad Habibzada, 24, Shafiq Hashemi, 21, and Sayed Bassam, 21, saw a man standing outside a gay bar around 10 p.m. on February 26th in the Mission District of San Francisco smoking a cigarette. They opened fire with a air rifle, hitting him in the face. BB shot struck the victim in the cheek. He was not seriously hurt, but as Assistant District Attorney Brian Buckelew noted to the Tribune, “Here we have a guy, shot in face with BB gun, who could have easily been shot in the eye.” The victim got a clear look at a silver Volvo and reported the attack to police, who arrested the suspects within 15 minutes of the crime thanks to the description of the vehicle. The alleged attackers had videoed the assault, and their handiwork is in the hands of police as evidence. According to Buckelew, the video also includes evidence of similar crimes that are now under investigation. Under police interrogation, the three suspects, all cousins with Hayward addresses, admitted that they chose their target because they thought he was gay. The trio are facing three felony counts including assault with a deadly weapon with a hate crime enhancement, discharge of a firearm with gross negligence, and attempted mayhem. They are also charged with a misdemeanor, violating the civil rights of their victim. As the Tribune reports, all three suspects are now out of custody, each having posted a $50,000 bond. They are scheduled to be arraigned Friday, when the district attorney will request bail be raised to $100,000 because of the severity of the charges against them. Other victims are in the video seized by police, representing several other crimes the trio may have committed. The Assistant District Attorney said that there could be other charges against the three cousins if victims seen on the video come forward.
Graffiti Attack Sprays Hate at UC Davis: Students Rally
University of California at Davis – Vandalism swept UC Davis last week as LGBT and Jewish students reported being targeted by acts of hate on campus. San Diego Gay and Lesbian News reports that homophobic slurs were spray painted on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resource Center building late in the night on Friday or early Saturday morning. A Jewish student found a swastika carved into her dorm room door last week, as well. The campus went into uproar, rallying to offer support to the victimized communities among them, and to let the unidentified perpetrators know that their actions will not pass without protest. LGBT students and supporters went to work immediately to erase the slurs from the walls of the Resource Center. KCRA News 3 reports that the anti-LGBT graffiti incident fits a pattern of other expressions of hate on a number of University of California system campuses recently. At UC Irvine, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States was heckled with hate speech, disrupting his talk. At UC San Diego, a fraternity weekend was punctuated with racial slurs surrounding the “Compton Cookout,” and a noose was found hanging from the campus library. Two hundred UC Davis students met to frame responses to the incident on their campus. Faculty and staff are meeting with the students to frame “actions steps” to address what is becoming a growing problem throughout collegiate populations in the Golden State. The FBI has begun investigations into the rising climate of campus hate.
Threatening Postcards to Gay Profs Ignite Investigations
San Marcos, CA – Authorities for the county, state, and federal governments launched a co-ordinated investigation last week into menacing postcards being sent to three gay Palomar College professors. Since mid-2008, 20 postcards threatening murder have been sent to the trio, with 1o of these targeting Dr. Fergal O’Doherty, an open and out gay man who teaches English at the San Marcos campus. O’Doherty said that FBI agents had contacted him on January 21, informing him that they are carrying out an investigation. Sending threats through the U.S. Mail is an automatic federal offense. O’Doherty told Morgan Cook, staff writer for the North County Times, that the cards sent to him have included images of sexual violence and death, the most disturbing of which showed skeletons engaged in sex acts with a repetitive caption reading “I’m glad I’m not dead” 10 times. The tenth caption omitted the word “dead.” One of the most recent cards Professor O’Doherty received shows a collage of pop culture images, a Nazi swastika, and a drawing of Elvis Presley sporting devil’s horns. The caption on this postcard reads, “I want to go to Hell like Elvis.” Authorities have not yet determined that these cards constitute a hate crime, but colleagues on the Palomar College campus are not waiting for such a determination. They have founded a group to raise awareness of hate crimes and combat them before they are acted out, called the Palomar College Committee to Combat Hate. Members of the group are committed to the human rights of LGBT people on the campus. O’Doherty says that since he is one of the few openly homosexual professors at the 30,000 student community college, located 30 miles north of San Diego, his sexual orientation is probably the magnet for the hate mail. From the variety of academic and pop culture icons incorporated into the cards, some as eminent as singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen and author Ernest Hemingway, but also including relatively obscure philosophers, O’Doherty speculates that the person creating them is intelligent, well-read, and dangerous. “[The card-creator] mentions works by writers and philosophers that aren’t even assigned in undergrad classes,” he told the North County Times. While this is not the first time O’Doherty and other gay faculty have been harassed for their sexual orientation, this is the first time officials have taken the threat seriously. Even then, when the postcards started appearing, campus police refused to act, apparently believing that they were written by a harmless crank. With over 13,000 documented violent crimes perpetrated against LGBT people throughout the nation in the decade prior to the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in October 2009, and spiking numbers of anti-LGBT hate crimes in California where Proposition 8 and Marriage Equality are such hotly contested issues, the decision to launch an investigation is more than prudent on the part of law enforcement. Prevention is possible only when the menace is taken seriously. That is exactly what Professor O’Doherty knows to be true, as he shows his most recent death threat by mail to the press.
Indiana University Breaks Silence on Black Gay Professor’s Murder
Bloomington, IN – After a long silence, the Provost of Indiana University at Bloomington issued an official statement January 11 on the suspected hate killing of black gay professor, Dr. Don Belton, whose body was found stabbed multiple times in the kitchen of his home on December 27. Critics of the university administration suggested that stony silence about the circumstances of Dr. Belton’s murder was damaging his reputation in an already sensationalized media atmosphere. An ex-Marine, Michael J. Griffin, 25, has confessed to the crime as revenge for two sexual assaults allegedly perpetrated on him by the 53-year-old African American professor at a Christmas party. Friends and colleagues of Dr. Belton are working diligently to overthrow this suspicious “gay panic” motive on the grounds that Dr. Belton was never the sort of man to assault anyone. Griffin is being held without bail in the Monroe County jail awaiting trial. Dr. Belton’s murder is part of an emerging pattern of hate killings of black gay academics in the United States. Dr. Lindon Barrett, 46-year-old professor of English and African American Studies at the University of California – Irvine, was strangled to death in 2008. Dr. Barrett’s alleged killer, Marlon Martinez, 22, was to stand trial in early 2010 for the murder, but was found dead in his Los Angeles County jail cell on Christmas Day. The Long Beach Press Telegram reports that the cause of Martinez’s death is as yet undetermined. The statement of the provost of IUB is printed here in full:
Dear Faculty, Staff, and Students,
As the campus begins the new semester, we must acknowledge a terrible loss. Some of you may just now be returning to campus after the holidays, and I am very sad to inform you that the Indiana University community lost a dear colleague during the semester break.
Don Belton, a faculty member in the English Department, was slain at his home in Bloomington on December 27. (An arrest has been made in the case.)
In his relatively brief time at IUB, Professor Belton earned the admiration and affection of his colleagues and students.
He was a gifted writer and a highly-valued member of the faculty of our distinguished Creative Writing Program, in the Department of English. He was very well liked and very well-respected. His death is a loss not just to his family and friends, and our academic community, but also to the extended world of arts and letters and to all who value the humanistic traditions. His absence will be profoundly felt.
The murder of Professor Belton has evoked strong emotions throughout the community and indeed the nation. I trust that all members of our community will exhibit tolerance, compassion, and respect in the wake of the loss of a valued
colleague. Let us also show respect for one another and for the many and varied ways in which we express our grief over such a tragedy.
A memorial service to celebrate the life of Professor Belton will take place on Friday January 15, at 5 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Fee Lane in Bloomington.
Our heartfelt sympathies go out to Professor Belton’s family, friends, and colleagues.
Karen Hanson
Provost and Executive Vice President
“Jane Doe” Lesbian Rape Hearing Set A Year After the Crime
Contra Costa County, California – According to The Bay Area Reporter, an out lesbian known only to the public as “Jane Doe” was brutally raped by four men who attacked her because of her sexual orientation. The first preliminary hearing on the case is scheduled to be held in January 2010, over a year after the savage rape incident that nearly took her life. On December 13, 2008 at about 9:30 p.m., “Jane,” 28 at the time of the attack according to an AP wire service report, was sexually assaulted by the men who watched her get out of her car in Richmond’s Belding-Woods neighborhood. They had noticed a rainbow pride sticker on the car window, which police allege aided them in targeting the lesbian. They forced her back into her car after being disturbed by someone approaching the scene of the crime, and drove her seven blocks to another location near an apartment complex on Burbeck Avenue where she was repeatedly sexually assaulted and beaten with a blunt object. During the assault, the rapists allegedly taunted her for being a lesbian. They stole her wallet, dumped her naked on the street, and drove away in her car, which was later identified by a rainbow sticker on the windshield. Wounded and bleeding, “Jane” crawled to one of the apartments, and found help from the residents, who called the Richmond police. She was transported to the hospital where her injuries were treated, and evidence of the rapes was collected with a rape kit. “Jane’s” car was located in Richmond the next day. Four suspects were arrested two weeks later, Humberto Hernandez Salvador, 32; Josue Gonzalez, 22; Darrell Albert Hodges, 16; and Robert James Ortiz, 16. Salvador, Gonzalez, and Hodges pleaded not guilty earlier this year to felony kidnapping, carjacking, forcible rape, and forcible oral copulation. Ortiz will enter a plea on similar charges January 7, according to documents of the court. Bail for Ortiz is $3.5 million, bail for Salvador is $2.2 million, and bail for Gonzalez and Hodges is $1.9 million. The Contra Costa County Deputy District Attorney, Danielle Douglas told BAR reporters that the victim, who is partnered and has an eight year old child, is “coping” the best she can. “That’s really all I can say,” Douglas said. “She’s doing her best to try to move forward.” Richmond Police spokesman Lieutenant Mark Gagan commented to the BAR on the brutality of the crime: “What’s difficult in this case is the level of aggression that the suspects showed was so immediate and over the top I don’t think that there was anything that our victim could have done to avoid being victimized,” said Gagan. “From what I understand, it was an immediate, extremely aggressive attack without provocation and without really any warning.” District Attorney Office spokespeople say that the complexity of this case makes it move so slowly through the court system. Since serious jail time is involved for all the suspects if proven guilty, each one of them has secured separate counsel, and all the defense attorneys are asking for maximum time to prepare for the trials, which will probably be split among the defendants rather being done as a single trial for all four men. “Jane Doe’s” legal counsel, Gloria Allred, who represented the mother of slain transgender woman Gwen Araujo, is not pressing the court dates, given the level of trauma her client sustained from the multiple rapes and the viciousness of the attack. A preliminary hearing is set for early January 2010, a usual legal procedure in California law in rape cases. If the preliminary hearing uncovers evidence enough for a trial in the case, then the wheels of justice will turn toward days in court for the four defendants and the victim of one of Richmond’s most brutal anti-LGBT hate crimes.
Slain LGBT Icon Harvey Milk Inducted into California Hall of Fame
The Associated Press reports that Harvey Milk was inducted on Tuesday into the California Hall of Fame, along with 12 other notables from the Golden State. Thirty-one years after Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by former San Francisco City Supervisor Dan White, Milk will be featured for the next year in the California Hall of Fame section of the California Museum in Sacramento. Milk, who had served as a San Franciso City Supervisor for 11 months, was 48 at the time of his murder. According to the Bay Area Reporter, Milk’s nephew, Stuart Milk, received the commendatory Spirit of California medal marking his uncle’s induction from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver. Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, read the citation. Interviewed at the induction event, former campaign manager for Milk’s historic 1977 election campaign, Ann Kronenburg, called the honor, “definitely long past due.” Smiling, she told reporters, “Harvey’s up there right now dancing.” When asked about the importance of Harvey Milk to the LGBT community of California, Kronenburg quickly corrected the reporter, “To the world’s. Since the movie [Milk] came out I have continually received letters from around the world about what Harvey’s story means,” she explained. “And what it means is there’s hope. There’s so much hope.” Milk’s Hall of Fame exhibit features a recently-opened urn containing a lock of his hair, a letter in his handwriting, a campaign button, and a rainbow flag. The memorabilia were held by the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. until transported back to California for the exhibit. Some 50,000 school children are expected to visit the exhibition during the coming year. Though there were 12 other inductees honored at the ceremony, the greatest interest by the public and the press was clearly focused on the choice of Milk. Protesters criticized the selection of the famed gay-rights pioneer for the Hall of Fame. A group from San Leandro’s American Warrior Evangelical Ministry marched outside the ceremony venue carrying signs reading, “Harvey Milk was a pervert.” The Bay Area Reporter quotes one of the demonstrators, Ken Arras, as saying, “We just believe that [Milk] is undeserving of this honor. He may have been a nice guy outside of his immoral lifestyle, but what has he done? This award is all about his lifestyle. It’s just about him being a homosexual.” Another of the San Leandro protestors, Don Grundmann, admitted that Milk’s murder was “a fantastic tragedy,” but argued that an assassination is insufficient reason for public recognition, referring to both the Hall of Fame induction and to Harvey Milk Day, which he claimed was a direct assault on children. Grundmann went to to assert that no LGBT person should ever be inducted in the state’s Hall of Fame since “it would lead to acceptance” of immorality by impressionable youth. Earlier in the year, Governor Schwarzenegger signed a bill sponsored by San Francisco’s openly-gay State Senator, Mark Leno, creating May 22 “Harvey Milk Day,” a day of special significance throughout California. The Hall of Fame’s Class of 2009 included other stellar Californians, such as football coaching legend, John Madden, actor Carol Burnett, Chuck Yeager, the first test pilot to break the sound barrier, filmmaker George Lucas, and author Danielle Steele.







Summer 2009 – Dr. Sprinkle responded to the Fort Worth Police Department and Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Raid on the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth’s newest gay bar, on June 28, 2009, the exact 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Dr. Sprinkle was invited to speak at three protest events sponsored by Queer LiberAction of Dallas. Here, he is keynoting the Rainbow Lounge Protest at the Tarrant County Courthouse on July 12, 2009. 


Harvey Milk, Slain Gay Rights Pioneer, Honored Across the USA
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May 21, 2010 Posted by unfinishedlives | anti-LGBT hate crime murder, California, Harvey Milk Day, Politics, Popular Culture, Remembrances, Social Justice Advocacy, Special Comments, Uncategorized | anti-LGBT hate crime murder, California, Harvey Milk Day, Politics, Remembrances, Social Justice Advocacy | 1 Comment