| 14 October 2009
Last Friday, while returning from an early hours trip to a corner store for cigarettes, Jack Price, a 49-year-old resident of the College Point section of Queens was set upon by two men who brutally kicked, punched and drove his limp body into the pavement. The attack, recorded on a surveillance camera intended to deter graffiti, shows the assailants, allegedly, Daniel Aleman and Daniel Rodriguez, 26 and 21 respectively, pummeling Price, dragging him to a curb, kicking and clobbering him, throwing him back into the street and returning seconds later to finish him off with some more blows. Price's family told the New York Daily News that the 130 lbs. victim suffered a litany of wounds, including two collapsed lungs, broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. During a pause in the beating a taxi passed by, the driver perhaps thinking it best not to get involved or even mistaking the men for helping out a drunk who'd stumbled into the street.
The savagery of Price's attack is telling enough, but when one pauses to think that he was left in the street with life-threatening injuries, the callousness of the crime is magnified. If he was not found in time, Price could have died of respiratory failure or blood poisoning all because his attackers deemed his life utterly worthless.
The proverbial wheels of justice have begun to spin. Police arrested Aleman in the city while Rodriguez was brought in by authorities more than 500 miles away in Norfolk, Virginia. Of course, neither have been convicted, much less indicted yet, so it's unfair to say it was them who did it.
One thing however that appears to be the case is that Price was beaten for the sheer fact that he is a gay man. According to family members, Price indicated that prior to the beating, his attackers taunted and stalked him, shouting "faggot'.
It remains to be seen if this was a bias crime, but if Price recalls it correctly, than it most certainly was and the type of crime that begs an important question, which is why would two young straight men get so worked up to the point of murderous indifference to a man's life, simply because he like's men.
What we refer to as bias crimes tend to be carried out by groups of people concerned about an encroachment on their way of life. In 1955, a group of Mississippi hillbillies murdered Emmett Till, a young boy who'd made the grave error of whistling at a white woman. The redneck ethos of the time was that blacks were getting too uppity and would soon come to dominate white life, including white women. In 1977, white families in Boston pelted school bus windows when the city's education department carried out the transfer of white and black students to balance the race ratio in various schools. Similarly, in 1992, blacks in Los Angeles torched Korean-owned businesses and property following the acquittal of police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King. It was the feeling that the verdict was the jump-off point to settle scores against immigrant community who threatened the black way of life.
In the case of Jack Price, one must ask the question of how these young men - if indeed they are the attackers - came to feel so threatened by the presence of a homosexual doing something as routine as stopping by a bodega for some smokes.
Reading about this case reminds me of a psychological study that was performed many years ago to test the sexual arousal in heterosexual men who described themselves as homophobic against a control group of heterosexual men who described no discomfort around gay people. During the study, subjects had a mercury-in-rubber strain gauge attached to their penis to record changes in circumference while watching three types of pornography; man with woman, woman with woman and man with man.
The study yielded some interesting and telling results which speak loudly about the nature of homophobia - that is outward negative behavior directed at or towards gay people. The non-homophobic group recorded arousal in only two of the four-minute videos; the man with woman and woman with woman. The group of self-proclaimed homophobic men displayed circumference increases during all three of the videos, including the man with man clips, indicating an obvious level of arousal at watching two men go at it. The researchers, from the University of Gerogia, concluded that homophobia is associated with homosexual arousal that is either repellent to the homophobe or repressed.
Thinking back to this study, it's intriguing to speculate on the factors that could have contributed to the type of naked aggression visited upon a middle-aged gay man at 4:30 a.m. on an autumn morning. Is it possible that the suspects, Aleman and Rodriguez, if they participated in such a study would show the same arousal at two gay men getting it on? Could Aleman and Rodriguez or many of the other men who carry out acts of violence be secreting away shameful feelings of attraction towards men that they believe they can only exorcize by beating the living crap out of a gay man? The answer is obviously buried deep inside their psyches, developed by their own experiences and emotional makeup. I wonder how these two attackers would have treated Price on an individual basis.
This article is not to cast aspersions on the suspects or in any way belittle someone for having what I believe to be a biological attraction to the same sex. Nevertheless, it takes a lot of anger and indifference for someone to beat someone the way Price was assaulted and left for dead.
And what about those who merely espouse their discomfort with gays? Take for example this comment by NFL loudmouth Jeremy Shockey from several years ago on the topic of gays in football:
[I]f I knew there was a gay guy on my college football team, I probably wouldn't, you know, stand for it...You know, I think, you know, they're going to be in the shower with us and stuff, so I don't think that's gonna work. That's not gonna work, you know?"
Shockey's Neanderthalic comments, punctuated with ‘you knows' was an interesting insight into the mind of someone who may in fact be uncomfortable in his own skin. After all, it was him fixating on the shower scene scenario. I wonder how many times it played over in his head.
Hopefully, Mr. Price will recovery physically and psychologically from the ravaging he took in the darkest hour before down on a cold and grimy city street. As for the men who carried it out, aside from lengthy prison terms, their own issues and personal struggles may last far longer than those of the innocent man resting in a bed in Queens hospital.
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