![]() “When they realized we were women, they went crazy.”Singleton said some of the men in the group began yelling obscenities and eventually attacked her 5-foot-2-inch, 105-pound girlfriend.”It was dyke this and dyke that, and then one of them punched my girlfriend and put his arm around her neck to pull her to the ground,” Singleton said. ![]() “My girlfriend and I are masculine looking, and at first they thought we were men, until we started yelling back and forth with them,” she said. She said when she and her girlfriend got out of the car to get the name of the man who had broken the mirror, they were mistaken for men. However, women who are attracted to the same sex have also faced biased attacks in Columbus.”I was driving on Pearl Ally with my girlfriend and two other friends when I was attacked,” said Brandye Singleton, a 20 year-old Columbus State Community College student.Singleton said a group of people were walking in the way of her car, and when she beeped for them to move, one of the men hit and broke a mirror off her car door. The month of September follows close behind, which the report suggests may possibly correspond to the start of the school year.With recent media attention focusing on motivated hate crimes due to sexual orientation, such as the gruesome 1998 murder of 21-year-old University of Wyoming student Matthew Sheppard, one may believe that this type of crime is aimed exclusively at gay and bisexual men, or transgenders. According to the report, the month of June, with its high visibility gay pride events and warm weather, continues to be the most violent month locally. BRAVO’s report also showed that the majority of perpetrators of violent crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are predominantly white males between the ages of 18 and 22, and more than half of reported offenders were strangers to the victim. “He tried again to get me out of my car to fight, and when I wouldn’t, the man punched me twice in the face.” Even after his nose began to bleed, Smith said the men continued to scream at him, trying to coax him out of his car.”Everything happened so fast, so it wasn’t until after I got hit that I began to piece everything together,” he said.Smith eventually drove away, and the men in the maroon pick-up truck did not follow him.In an annual hate crimes report released by the Buckeye Region Anti-Violence Organization (BRAVO), the Columbus based anti-violence organization claimed that in 1999, the number of localhate crimes reported to BRAVO were 214, and the national was 1,969. ![]() “I wasn’t really paying attention to them until one of them was at my open window and screaming obscenities and threats,” he said. “They kept threatening me to try and get me out of my car so they could fight me,” he said.Smith believed the two men may have followed him from the local gay night club he came from earlier that evening. Kevin Smith had just spent an evening with friends at a local night club, and on his way home, he decided to stop at his favorite fast-food restaurant.That’s when the trouble started.”I was at White Castle waiting in line at the drive-through and a maroon pick-up truck with two men pulled up near my car and started screaming derogatory terms at me… such as fag,” said Smith, a senior majoring in psychology. ![]() Some residents suffer pain and fear of gay hate crime
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