Brooklyn DA Aims at Hate Crimes

By: DUNCAN OSBORNE
Gay City News


In successfully prosecuting four men on hate crime charges in the 2006 killing of Michael Sandy, a 29-year-old gay man, Charles J. Hynes, Brooklyn's district attorney, was able to do what he could not in the 1987 killing of Michael Griffith.

"The other thing that I came away with was a sense of helplessness that we couldn't charge what this crime was all about," Hynes said of the Griffith prosecution at an April 28 town meeting. "He was killed because of the color of his skin."

Both men were struck and killed by cars as they fled their attackers. Griffith, an African American, was pursued by a racist mob. Sandy was selected not out of anti-gay animus, but because his assailants thought a gay man would be an easy robbery target.

"We proved someone was killed because of his perceived vulnerability," Hynes said. "That was Michael Sandy."

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When Straights Take Over the Gay-borhood

Last month, my girlfriend, Jackie, and I went on our first vacation together. We went to New York to visit a Santa Barbara friend who moved there to broaden her professional horizons and, for an added bonus, date a few ladies.

But New York would be different. My friend lived in Park Slope in Brooklyn, and practically every travel book Jackie and I read used some variation of the phrase, “Park Slope, or Dyke Slope as it’s referred to because of the high concentration of lesbians, is a lovely brownstone neighborhood …” Plus, two New York natives swore it was lesbian heaven, and one of my coworkers, who lived in the city for seven years, actually said, “You’ll be in paradise; you won’t ever want to come back.”

Ah, the pang of disappointment: nary a lezzie in sight. In fact, quite the contrary; we were surrounded by straight couples and sat next to two gay fellas who spent a large portion of their morning trying to get their adopted child to say “Dad.”

It’s happened before in other zip codes. Last March, the San Francisco Chronicle described the outrage of many gay and lesbian residents in the Castro, who felt their historic part of town was being taken over by heterosexuals seeking safe neighborhoods in which to raise their children.

Such a shift happened in our fair city not so long ago. Remember the days of Hades, or Chameleon, or Gold Coast, or Fathom? With all those long closed, Paddy’s in Ventura is the only seven-days-a-week gay bar in the tri-counties. And while Robert Mendez’s six-year-old Red Room on Sunday nights at the Wildcat is fabulous, it’s only one night. What happens if I want to dance to Kelly Clarkson on Friday or Saturday?

If gays don’t need a special part of town, that means we’re not all that special or, more importantly, different from anyone else. People are starting to realize what we gays have known all along: We’re just like you, and you are just like us.

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