On Sky News last night, I realised how far some will go to ignore homophobia; Guardian, 6/13/16

Owen Jones, Guardian; On Sky News last night, I realised how far some will go to ignore homophobia:

"This isn’t about LGBT people taking ownership of the pain and anguish. People of all sexual orientations have wept over this massacre, and all communities should unite in grief. It is highly likely that straight people died in the atrocity. When the neo-Nazi terrorist David Copeland detonated a nail bomb in the Admiral Duncan gay pub in 1999, one of the fatalities was a straight pregnant woman, having a drink with her husband and her gay friends. LGBT people are part of the wider community, and LGBT people and their straight friends party together in LGBT venues. But this was a deliberate attack on a LGBT venue and LGBT people. According to Omar Mateen’s father, the reportedly Islamic State-supporting terrorist had expressed revulsion at the sight of two men kissing. His co-workers have described his anti-gay comments. Omar Mateen could have chosen many clubs, full of people laughing and living, but he chose a LGBT venue. This was homophobia as well as terrorism. It is not enough to simply condemn violence: we have to understand what it is and why it happened.

It wasn’t only Sky News at fault. In the New York Times’ original reporting, it didn’t even point out that a gay club had been targeted. The Daily Mail didn’t bother to put the atrocity – the worst terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 – on its front page, instead opting to stir up xenophobia over Turkish immigrants and publicising an offer of “free pearl and white sapphire earrings”. This is erasure of LGBT people – pure and simple – after their community was horrifically targeted.

LGBT people are varied, and have different experiences: the life experiences of a young working-class gay black woman and a gay white male multi-millionaire CEO are very different. But we all grow up in a society that still treats us as if we are inferior: we have all repeatedly encountered homophobic abuse, the stress of coming out repeatedly, or the fear of holding hands with a partner in public. To imagine LGBT people who may have endured distress and internalised prejudice – just because of who they are – spending their last moments in terror as a homophobic terrorist hunted them down is just unbearable."

Orlando Attack Roils Gay Community, Painfully Accustomed to Violence; New York Times, 6/12/16

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times; Orlando Attack Roils Gay Community, Painfully Accustomed to Violence:

"The gay rights movement, of course, is no stranger to the fear of violence. That includes the days when gay people worried about being branded “faggots” and beaten, whether in small towns or in gay centers like New York; the 1973 arson attack on a gay bar in New Orleans that left 32 people dead; the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. All are cultural touchstones for the community.

In 2015, the F.B.I. reported that 18.6 percent of the 5,462 so-called single-bias hate crimes the previous year were attributable to sexual orientation; 47 percent were attributable to race. But Jay Brown, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, said that hate crimes against gay people were underreported, and that finding accurate statistics was “extremely challenging.”

Movement leaders, speaking anecdotally, said they sensed an increase in violence against gay people this year — perhaps, some said, because of the divisive presidential campaign, or because of high-profile policy fights like the one over the Obama administration’s recent directive requiring schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice.

“I sincerely believe that this is following a trend, that we often see an uptick during presidential elections — particularly when the vitriol increases about our community,” said Lorri L. Jean, who runs the Los Angeles L.G.B.T. Center, a nonprofit advocacy, health and social services organization."