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Gay bashing refers to a crime in which a homosexual man, woman, or other LGBTQ+ person is targeted by a group of people and either beaten, harassed or killed in an unprovoked assault spurred purely by homophobic violence - it is a common hate crime and is actively encouraged by some groups and governments, especially in countries where homosexuality is still considered a crime.
Gay Bashing shares similar elements to crimes such as lynching in the fact it is often done to strike fear into the gay community and send out a "warning" to others - often survivors of this crime are fearful to go to authorities (and in some areas the authorities partake in the crime themselves), making it very easy for those who commit these crimes to evade justice.
Incidents of gay bashing edit
- One of the best known examples of gay bashing is the torture and murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard at the hands of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming in the evening hours of October 12, 1998. The incident would go on to be dramatized in the stage play The Laramie Project.
- 32-year old Scott Amedure, a gay man, was murdered by his neighbor, Jonathan Schmitz, at his home in Lake Orion, Michigan on March 9, 1995, several days after both men appeared on The Jenny Jones Show in which Amedure confessed that he had a crush on Schmitz.
- 19-year old Blaze Bernstein, who was both gay and Jewish, was found dead in a park in Orange County, California, eight days after having been reported missing. He had been stabbed twenty times. Two days later, Samuel Woodward, one of Bernstein's former high school classmates and a member of neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, was arrested and charged with murdering Bernstein.