I don’t know how many people have heard or read about the gay-bashing of a 49 year old man, Jack Price, in Queens a couple weeks ago. You know, sitting here in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan and having this story all over the news in all of NYC, I just realized that the incident barely registered on my radar. I don’t quite know what that says about me – too busy, too expectant of gay-bashing incidents even in New York City, hardness of heart towards or numbness for victims, cynicism about whether our society will ever get beyond such things (and I mean really get be on them, not just having Political Correctness forced upon too many people that brings nothing much more than a shut down in honest dialogue and real education than the changing peoples’ hearts and minds) – I just don’t know.
Well, here I am, and over in Queens a guy had to be put into a medically induced coma in order to survive.
A brief article in the NY Times.
I was going through some old photos on Sunday and came across some old Web addresses. One of them was for a website started and operated by a guy I met years ago through Soulforce, so I tried to see if it still existed. It did, and on the splash screen was an update on the guy attacked in Queens entitled “Idiots for Christ.” Here is the picture from a channel 7 (ABC-NYC) news segment that was posted on the website. Watch the full video of the news piece, with the interview of this guy.

What in the world would possess a straight guy in New York City to be tattooed with this verse? This guy, Gelmy, was defending his friend, one of the guys arrested for beating Jack Price. Why would someone get that particular verse tattooed on his arm? Alright, he may have a thing against gay people, but to go to the extreme of permanently tattooing such a thing on your arm where it will be exposed often is beyond me.
And, yes, this is the natural outcome of all the anti-gay Religious Right rhetoric that has been going on for the past 20 years. When you scape-goat a population, that population gets screwed. As much as the Religious Right organizations and leaders want to claim that their anti-gay stuff is all about saving souls and society, it is about power and money. There are those who have real theological positions opposed to homosexuality, but the Religious Right groups are unprincipled and dishonest and are not made up of these people.
The attack was caught on a surveillance video.