This past weekend, police arrested eight of the nine suspects who allegedly carried out what is certainly one of the worse hate crimes in recent memory. On Oct. 3, nine members of the Latin King Goonies gang (a Latin-American gang from the Bronx) abducted and tortured three men because they were gay.
The first victim was a 17-year-old the gang initially thought of as a potential recruit. They supposedly discovered the boy was gay and lured him to an abandoned apartment before severely beating and torturing him for hours.
Following this initial savagery, the gang members lured a 30-year-old man and his 17-year-old lover into the building and tortured them in a similar fashion.
Along with being beaten, slashed with box cutters and other atrocious acts, the gang members forced the 17-year-old to punch and burn the older man with cigarettes. As their bigoted cruelty wore off, the gang moved to the apartment of the older man’s brother, where they beat him, stole a TV, and took more than $1,000 in cash and debit
cards.
What makes this senseless tragedy all the more terrifying is its proximity to the suicide of a homosexual Rutgers student in late September.
Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers freshman, plunged to his death off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate posted a video of him engaged in a sexual encounter.
This is, however, merely another example in a recent wave of suicides of gay children that has being sweeping across the country.
Seth Walsh and Asher Brown, both 13-year-olds, hung and shot themselves following brutal harassment by classmates for their homosexuality.
In a similar fashion, high school freshman Billy Lucas reportedly hanged himself in his grandmother’s barn following savage harassment by classmates questioning his sexual orientation.
As these cases indicate, hate crimes targeting gays are becoming a more noticeable element of the criminal activity in the United States.
The level of brutality people are able to execute against their fellow men never ceases to amaze me. We consistently reflect on the crimes of our fathers, looking into the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the slave quarters of the U.S., and we quietly state to ourselves “never again.”
We praise ourselves for our own progression and evolvement, stating pompously how far we have advanced or how tolerant of a society we now live in.
These arrogant claims crash into oblivion, however, when our society is able to produce such a level of hatred as to propel college, high school and middle school students to kill themselves because of harassment, or when three innocent men are savagely tortured because of their sexual orientation.
A version of this article appeared in the Oct 14 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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A couple of points, first bravo for addressing hate crimes across color lines. The media today will not accuse minorities of committing hate crimes, good for you bringing this to everyone's attention. Secondly you can't really compare the Holocaust to slavery in the us. Certainly they're both unacceptable by today's standards but the Holocaust is such a vile act that it's on it's own level of evil way beyond anything slavery did. I understand that you want to relate it back to American history but our treatment of the Native Americans is a much better comparison than slavery.
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I agree with and applaud your story for its focus on an important issue facing the LGBT community, their allies, and frankly anyone following the recent spike in LGBT related suicides. You are right to point to larger issues of intolerance in our society that create a climate where gay-bashing, either physically or verbally, has become so embedded in certain rights of passage, conflated, in fact, with what it means to be a “real man†in some circles.
However, I find it ironic that although you are pointing directly to issues of discrimination and intolerance, you seem very comfortable referring to the whole of humanity with male pronouns, even as half (more or less) of “the human species†is, in fact, female. Oppressive attitudes are interconnected…for instance, rampant homophobia in our society serves to keep many men from participating in parts of the human experience we have decided to label as feminine, such as nurturing, showing affection and other forms of emotional labor. Sexism and homophobia are linked. I hope you will consider using gender neutral language to refer to humanity in the future, it’s not asking all that much.
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You need to get some perspective. All of the incidents to which you refer are isolated incidents carried out by degenerate individuals. They are indefensible. Where you go awry is when you compare these acts to the Holocaust and to slaver in America. The Holocost was the attempted systematic extermination of an entire race by a government. Slavery in America was legal and an accepted institution in the majority of the population for a very long time. Torturing gay people, however, is neither legal nor acceptable by they vast majority of Americans. To say American society has not progressed since the 1860s is ignorant and calls into question everything else you have written.
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