Savage Gay Bashing in Western North Carolina Called “Flat-Out Terrible”

Gruesome result of anti-gay hate crime in Asheville, NC [WBTV-News image].

Asheville, North Carolina – A gay couple was harassed, cursed, and then brutally attacked because of their sexual orientation on September 23, but the repercussions are still being felt in this nominally gay-friendly city. The Citizen-Times reports that Charlotte gay men Mark Little and Dustin Martin had anti-gay slurs shouted at them by two women driving a slow-moving car in the early morning hours of a quiet Sunday morning as they walked along Otis street. Martin “had enough” of the epithets, and shouted back at the women to stop. Little said that at that moment, a black male rushed out of the vehicle and attacked Martin, punching him several times in the chest. When Little intervened, the assailant turned on him, beating him to the ground and gashing his face. “I screamed for him to stop, and he hit me in the face on the left side, and blood went everywhere. I was lying on the concrete,” Little told the Citizen-Times. Though three weeks have passed since the homophobic assault, both men say they remain “shaken” and fearful when any car pulls up beside them.

The Asheville Police say very little about the case, since it is still under investigation. Even though there is abundant testimony that the attack was bias-motivated and therefore a hate crime, since North Carolina does not have a gay hate crime provision in the state code, the incident can only be classified as a simple assault. The police do not have suspects in the case, only descriptions of the assailant and the four-door sedan in which he sped from the scene.

According to WBTV-News in Charlotte, Little and his partner Martin are frustrated that the Asheville Police are not taking the attack seriously enough. “I feel like that when the cop first came on the scene he just felt like it was just an ordinary crime,” Little said. “But what had happened is we were hit just because we were gay.” As On Top Magazine observes, this bashing incident occurred only a few months after the notorious anti-gay Amendment One was passed overwhelmingly by the voters of the Old North State.

In an interview with The Citizen-Times, Monroe Gilmour, coordinator of Western North Carolina Citizens Ending Institutional Bigotry, called the homophobic assault “flat-out terrible.” Gilmour went on to say, “Our experience over 20 years of working with victims of hate activity is that we need to make sure the targets of this hate do not feel alone. That is why it is so important that we publicly speak out and take constructive action to show that Asheville is about something very different from the hate of that incident.”

The irony of this hate crime is all the more severe since Martin and Little love Asheville, one of North Carolina’s most gay-accepting cities, and have made weekend getaways there regularly from their home in Charlotte. Now, apparently, no city or town in the state is free of the new tide of right wing, anti-gay hate expressed in Amendment One.