Sep 26, 2008  |  By: ZACK ROSEN  | COMMENTS     

Local residents expressed alarm this week over a perceived rise in anti-gay crime, after a Maryland man died of injuries he received while walking to a D.C. gay bar.

Locals gathered at BeBar last week for a memorial for 37-year-old gay Maryland resident Tony Randolph Hunter, who’d died the previous day from injuries sustained in a robbery that happened near the club on Sept. 7. (A candlelight vigil for Hunter is planned for Sunday at Metropolitan Community Church.)

Police say there isn’t enough evidence to declare the act a hate crime, but gay D.C. residents have become frightened and concerned by what they say amounts to another in a string of high-profile acts of violence committed against the gay community.

Some present at BeBar last Thursday were there because they’d known Hunter; others came to show solidarity. A man sitting at the bar voiced a commonly stated concern — the attack could have happened to anyone. While there is a dispute about whether incidents like the Aug. 17 mugging of two gay men outside Playbill Café or the July 13 beating of Todd Metrokin in Adams Morgan are evidence of a rise in anti-gay violence, many local residents believe that even one such attack is too many.

“I actually believe that gays are being targeted, partly out of general homophobia,” says gay U Street resident Chris Farris. “But there’s also a perception that gays are weak, that they’re easy targets, so if you have to mug someone you mug the gay guy. All I know is that I no longer feel comfortable in my own neighborhood, especially after dark, and I want that to stop.”

Hunter’s attack happened close to BeBar, a gay bar near the Convention Center, but police were unable to find enough evidence to definitively rule the assault had anti-gay motives. Similarly, a past case of robbers targeting gay men on 17th Street was chalked up to opportunism, not homophobia. 

“Bias crime is defined by motive, and the way you prove motive is complicated,” says Tom Donegan, who was a founder of Gays & Lesbians Opposing Violence (GLOV) in 1992. “You don’t always have the commonly understood benchmarks.”

Because of that, some are suspicious of police statements that anti-gay hate crimes aren’t on the rise.

“For a city this size, I don’t think the numbers are giving us a clear picture,” says David Mariner, who’s gay and is the interim director of the Center, Washington’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community center.

“We know from anti-violence projects in other cities that a lot of hate crimes don’t get reported and some don’t get classified as hate crimes in police reports.”

Mariner says 80 percent of D.C. hate crimes are committed against GLBT residents and that Washington is the only major U.S. city that doesn’t have a gay anti-violence project.

“I think if we had a hotline and people were calling incidents in, we would have a different basis by which to say what the numbers mean,” Mariner says.

The word “faggot” is used in many attacks against gay men, but Donegan says that violence against lesbians is more often preceded by misogynistic language and the threat of rape.

Farris and several other concerned citizens, including Donegan and fellow GLOV co-founder Tracey Comity, met at the D.C. Center on Sept. 8 to discuss what measures could be taken. Many different solutions were proposed and all led back to the reformation of a group such as GLOV as the best way to proceed.

A follow-up meeting Monday for the public drew close to 50 locals who proposed many different suggestions for how gays could better protect themselves. The first, most obvious suggestion was better police presence.

Donegan said by phone that the “police have to get right and get on top of this investigation and understand the unique nature of hate crimes investigations.”

When he founded GLOV, however, monitoring hate crimes with the police only accounted for some of the group’s work. Other points of outreach involved going into the community to address some of the root problems of anti-gay violence. D.C. public schools are a logical starting point, as the anti-gay bullying that happens there can open the door to violence.

The most recent cases of anti-gay violence also happened in mixed-income or gentrifying areas, which leads some residents to posit hate crime as a direct result of gentrification and racial and class tensions.

“I don’t think there is a class link or a racial link, it is about anti-gay bias.” Donegan says. “Gay ...