White Girl Bleed a Lot (35 page)

Amazing how often the victims feel they need to apologize.

Even the
Chicago Sun-Times
is getting religion. Kind of. After a series of violent episodes in Boystown, some on video, the outcry against black mob-on-gay violence is rising even above the fear of being called a racist.

The police and politicians don’t talk about it, but drug dealing, gang activity, prostitution and muggings are not uncommon. They also don’t want to talk about the fact that many of the perpetrators are people of color.
¹⁴

Although even the bravest in this crowd tap dances around the obvious truth—this is racial violence from groups of black people on gay people—they did admit that the “stabbing incident
was instigated by a dangerous mob of
black
youths” (of course I added the emphasis). But they had to quickly make a defense saying that “many more innocents are being unfairly stereotyped and vilified by the haters.”
¹⁵

Some in Boystown have even set up their own Facebook page to fight the violence. It’s called Take Back Boystown. It includes an exhaustive list of criminal activity and statistics and maps and charts. They’ve done their homework. Apparently robberies in Boystown were up 23 percent from 2011 to 2012 and 118 percent since 2010. And page members do not try to cover up who is responsible for the epidemic of criminal activity.

In October 2012 a group of black people approached high school senior Terence Wright to rob him. Terrance, a gay teen, had been the victim of bullying for years at his Chicago High School. Maybe this time he finally had enough because he chose to fight back. According to a news report “the men shot him in the chest. He later died.” Terrance’s younger brother believes the men “only did that to him because he was gay.” Police said it was a robbery. And the fact that Wright was perceived as weak and vulnerable had nothing to do with it.
¹⁶

Down the road in Normal, Illinois, in April 2012 Eric Unger was walking the bucolic campus of Illinois State University when six to eight black people unleashed a torrent of gay slurs and attacked him. He was “beaten so badly, his jaw had to be wired shut.” The police department was curiously unwilling to call this a hate crime on racial or sexual grounds. Unger asks a provoking question: “if there was a group of white guys, you know, attacking a black guy, saying [discriminatory] words to him, that would be a hate crime, wouldn’t it?”
¹⁷

In spring 2011 in Brooklyn, Barrie Shortell walked through a group of six black teenagers wearing hoodies. They called him some anti-gay names, followed him, and then beat him, breaking
his jaw, nose, and eye sockets. “I looked horrible. Blood was everywhere,” said Shortell. He underwent nearly ten hours of reconstructive surgery. The doctors said it was like he was hit by a car. The story didn’t say who did it. But the commenters did. They were not happy.
¹⁸

In June 2012 a few blocks away, a seventh grade student named Kardin Ulysse was in the cafeteria when he was taunted by two classmates. They called him a transvestite and said he was gay. One of the boys held Ulysse’s arms down while the other one punched Uylsse in the face and head. He is now blind in one eye. Doctors don’t know if it’s from the blows or from a shard of Ulysse’s broken glasses. Despite the fact that those who assaulted him were black, one of the posters to the website was adamant that race had nothing to do with it: “These are the types of trumped up unprovoked attacks that racist trolls on this site are attempting to instigate.”
¹⁹

They were referring to a series of stories in WND on racial violence that someone had posted on TheGrio.com, which were later removed.

Here’s a two-fer: Two crimes on one video. The title of this New York_state video says it all: Homophobic African-Americans charged with hate crimes. Early on a Sunday morning in October 2010 in Nassau, two victims were jumped and pummeled by three black men. Across the state a gang of black people targeted a gay man at an upscale mall in western New York. They followed him around the mall and then out into the parking lot. That’s where they attacked and robbed him. Like many attacks of this nature, the two people charged were just a fraction of the total number present.

In 2012 there were several examples of black mob-on-gay violence in the nation’s capital.

In June three black people were accused of hurling anti-gay slurs at a gay teenager and then assaulting him. Two of them
held the teenager while the third stabbed him three times before the victim was able to unleash a stream of pepper spray on them. It got heated in the comments section when Debra Winfield asked, “I can’t understand why they are angry – did the guy ask them for sex?” said black commenter Debra Winfield. “Stupid people do stupid things.”
²⁰

Over at the
Washington Post
in a report on the same story, one commenter summed it up and said what the paper would not:

Stop being so politically correct. Black homophobia is celebrated in the black community and no longer does the LGBT community have to stand for it.
²¹

If only talking was the same as doing.

In July in northeast DC, a yoga instructor and his boyfriend were ambushed while on their way home after being out one Saturday night. The attack on these two men came four months after the Shortell incident. “Four or five kids just came out of nowhere. … They just came out swinging and hitting,” said Michael Roike. They broke Michael’s boyfriend’s jaw and cheekbone. Roike suspected that it was because they are gay.
²²

A few months later, not too far away, four or five black people followed the victim from the bus stop and “shouted anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs at him before one of the men assaulted him and knocked him unconscious.” The attackers didn’t even take the victim’s cell phone or wallet.
²³

Up the road a bit in Boston in April 2012, two black men attacked a forty-eight-year-old guy while riding on the local trolley. Yes, there were all the requisite racial and homophobic slurs. They even
tried to pull him off the trolley to continue the beating.
²⁴

Austin Head is a well-known DJ in Phoenix and a former Clubs Editor for
The New Times
. He is a gay activist and now is the victim of a hate crime beating at the hands of a group of black men. On November 9, 2012:

Two men harassed and physically attacked Head and an unspecified friend, shouting homophobic slurs, attacking Head, and rendering him unconscious. … Doctors have yet to determine the extent of his facial injuries and if he will require reconstructive surgery.
²⁵

Fortunately he lived. Others are not so lucky.

In Asheville, North Carolina, three black men and a woman were accused of taunting a man, calling him gay. And the guy was not even gay. “One of the men punched him in the face.” Later after he was taken to the hospital “doctors discovered he had multiple fractures in his face.” And somehow the officer failed to file a report. Nothing to see here, folks.
²⁶

The list lengthens. Openly gay Matthew McLeod was on his way to his job as a hair dresser in St. Louis when five black people started screaming “faggot” before the Knockout Game began. (Remember that from
chapter 2
?) “McLeod said the teens cursed him for his sexual orientation before striking him.” He got off with a broken nose and a black eye. The teens were charged with second degree robbery.
²⁷

In January 2012 Nihan Thai was walking through his “eclectic” Seattle neighborhood when several black people assaulted him. Earlier this year, he talked to KING5, a local TV news station about the crime. He was walking home from the light rail station, (there’s that bus thing again):

I was literally ten steps away from the house. And I felt a hit on my right face and another hit on the back of my neck and on my lower back, and so as I was falling forward I felt hands grabbing my jacket and my bag,” said Thai.

Two months later, not far from where Thai was attacked, another man was grabbed from behind, robbed and beaten. His name was Danny Vega, and he died.
²⁸

Thai, like Vega, is Asian and openly gay. Before he died, Vega told police he’d been “attacked by three African-American males, all around 18 years of age.” It was the tenth such attack in that area in two months, all near the corner of Martin Luther King Way and Othello Street.
²⁹

After the attack, Thai went door to door to find out how widespread the problem was. He was conducting his own crime survey.

Thai knocked on 49 doors. 32 people were home. How many of them had been victims of a crime since moving to the neighborhood? All but three.

Many victims told Thai they’d never reported the crimes to police.

“It happens to them so often that after 2 or 3 times they stopped reporting because they didn’t see any progress,” said Thai.

Thai’s survey was clearly unscientific, but it does raise the question--is crime going unreported in the south end?
³⁰

All of the suspects in all of the crimes are black.

Let’s finish up in Dallas. Starting with the police report:

On March 13, 2012, at about 2:00 a.m. two citizens were walking near the corner of Audelia Road and Forest Lane. A dark colored 4 door vehicle (possibly a Buick) with tinted windows and 24 inch rims approached the two individuals and suspects from within the vehicle began to shout slurs that were disparaging and derogatory toward sexual orientation.

There were believed to be 5 black male suspects in their 20’s inside the vehicle. Some of the suspects exited the vehicle, and two of them were brandishing baseball bats. The suspects attacked the two victims causing multiple injuries requiring medical treatment.
³¹

They called them sissies and faggots. While trying to defend themselves, one of the victims got caught in the car door. The car dragged him until he found a way to free himself.

No one died.

In researching this part of the book I sent an email to 350 reporters who were self-identified as gay or as covering gay issues. I told them about the story of black mob-on-gay violence and sent them a link as an example. I asked them if they knew of any black-on-gay violence.

I received some indignant notes, some complicated ones, and some angry ones. But not one gay reporter said he knew of even one example, or even thought it was a problem.

Mobs hate victims with guns because they are not victims anymore.

B
ack in 2011 Jeremy Schenkel was enjoying an early evening in Center City Philadelphia. He felt safe, right up to the moment he came face to face with one of the dozens of violent black mobs that terrorized Philadelphia that year. Schenkel told the local CBS affiliate:

The kids were laughing as they beat and kicked [me], and not only was there the attacking mob, there was also a group of kids cheering them on.

Almost like an admiring group that was following them, just kind of ragging on people, and one of those guys said, ‘It’s not our fault you can’t fight.
¹

Jeremy considers himself lucky. He survived the ensuing assault with no major broken bones. A few minutes later, the mob’s next victim was not so fortunate. They left him beaten, bloody and unconscious. Many of the commenters to the CBS article suggested the residents of Center City Philadelphia get a gun to protect themselves. Caps said: “People of Philadelphia listen to me! You do
have the right to bear arms! Buy a Gun and carry it. This will stop when you start to defend yourself. Don’t be stupid.”
²

That is exactly what Roger and Lulu did.

Roger McBride and Lulu Campbell did not want to depend on luck. They are just two of the more than one hundred thousand people who last year defended themselves with guns when luck was not enough. Lulu is not a big woman. This Atlanta grandmother is just over five feet tall. But she is a fighter, and she can shoot -- as several black carjackers discovered. In April 2012 Lulu took her grandson back to her daughter’s house. When she got in her car to leave she was approached by armed men. They mistakenly identified her as easy prey: