TIME TO WAKE UP

"Is this some type of gay marriage thing?" asked a perplexed West Village bystander as a colorful wave of boisterous protesters passed by.  "This is New York City, bitch. Don't try and fuck with us!" they chanted.  

The march and ensuing rally at Christopher Street Park last Saturday was hastily organized in defiant response to three separate assaults on gay men that occurred last week in New York City. All three have been classified as hate crimes but do not appear to be related.  

In Astoria, eight men attacked a group of three friends yelling anti-gay slurs and brutally bashing one man's head with a baseball bat. Another incident in the same Queens neighborhood involved a gay man who was followed off an N train, pushed down a flight of steps and kicked in the face. The incident that captured the most media attention, however, involves Kevin Aviance, the Billboard chart-topping dance artist and gender-bending performer.

Early Saturday morning, June 10, Aviance was brutally attacked after leaving the popular gay watering hole, Phoenix, in the East Village. Six young men aged between 16 and 20, and purported to be members of a street gang, allegedly followed Aviance, taunting him and throwing trash at him. After a near miss with a bottle, they surrounded him near a busy corner of 14th Street and 1st Avenue and proceeded to pummel him on the ground.

"The attackers took away his pride and pulled out his soul," said Aviance's publicist Len Evans, speaking for the performer who had his jaw wired. "'Is this the way I'm gonna go?' he thought to himself while it was happening."

Aviance made an appearance at the rally hobbling around with a large knee brace and spoke briefly in a rasp that was squeezed through his broken, wired jaw.  

"You can't keep a good queen down," he said, speaking on behalf of the embattled LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) community in an unfortunate and tragic kick-off to the city's weeklong Gay Pride celebration. As the local community rallies against the recent violence, many are blaming the hate crimes on increasingly hostile national politics. The city has been busy patting itself on the back for reducing the overall crime rate, but not everyone is feeling quite so secure. 

"We've continued to make America's safest big city even safer," said Mayor Bloomberg in a press release posted on the city's Office of the Mayor website. "Last year, we reduced crime in nearly every category across New York City and our reductions in overall crime outpace the nation by nearly three times."

This statement was in response to an FBI crime statistic report issued on June 12. The report indicated that violent crime had risen 2.5 percent nationwide during 2005, the highest rate increase in 15 years. New York, however, was a rare exception.  This year, violent crime overall continues to decline, but murder and rape are up 12 and 8 percent respectively compared to last year. 

Specifically, hate crimes against members of the LGBT community also declined in 2005 according to a press release issued in May by the Anti-Violence Project, a group founded in 1980 that offers a wide-range of support for the community. Still, according to AVP, an anti-gay incident is reported every 12 hours and assaults are reported every 36 hours. It is also believed that many hate crimes go unreported or are officially misidentified.

June is typically the most turbulent month for hate crimes against homosexuals due to the higher visibility of Pride festivities; thus a spike in hate crimes is an established trend.   While the amplified media attention already makes this particular June stand out, many fear that the situation could get even worse.  

"Already, it appears that in 2006 reports of violence are on the rise," said Clarence Patton, the AVP's executive director in a press release about 2005 hate-crime incidents. "In many ways, we're fortunate here in New York to be in an extraordinarily tolerant and diverse city, however our tolerance and diversity does not protect us from the waves of political, cultural and physical hatred and violence sweeping across our community and families nationwide." 

Numerous signs at Saturday's rally, such as "Bush Bashes Fags," reflected the immense frustration that many members of the community feel towards the country's current political climate. Relentless anti-gay crusades waged by the Republican party and the religious right are responsible for inciting much of the harassment and violence, which many feel creates a virtual culture of trickle-down homophobia.    

"After the 2004 election season was over and LGBT people had been used successfully in some places as grist for the right-wing mill, the hateful, anti-LGBT rhetoric died down a bit in many places," Patton said. "We are clearly once again in the sights of those acting to marginalize us and incite violence against us." 

Members of the LGBT community feel that the rising tide of anti-gay rhetoric and legislative agenda, such as the Federal Marriage Amendment, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that President Bush backed earlier this month, will only fuel the hatred. The bill was basically dead on arrival, receiving nowhere near the two-thirds vote it needed to advance. Even today, 45 states have a state constitutional amendment or statute that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. And the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Clinton in 1996, achieves much the same on a federal level while allowing each state to deny Constitutional marital rights between persons of the same sex that have been recognized in another state.

"With the president going on the air and talking about passing a constitutional amendment, he's saying it's alright to kill or beat us up," said well-known drag performer and unofficial leader of Saturday's march, Hedda Lettuce. 

Politicians ranging from Mayor Bloomberg and Speaker Christine Quinn have condemned the recent hate crimes, but a discussion of what to do in order to curb further violence was conspicuously absent on Saturday. Although New York State Senator Tom Duane, the Senate's first openly gay and HIV-positive member, did vow to do everything in his power to stop the attacks. "These are our streets and they are going to be safe to walk down any time during the day or night," the Senator pledged.  "The LBGT community will never be afraid."

Aviance also offered his own advice on how to deal with the perpetrators of hate crimes.

"We have to fight these people with love," he pleaded. "Love, love, love."

Matt Kalkhoff contributed to the reporting of this story.