The play was produced by Don Morrison, one of the owners of the Spike, who was also partners with Jack Fritscher, the leather luminary behind Drummer magazine.
#THE SPIKE GAY BAR NYC TRIAL#
Doric Wilson, playwright, activist, and participant in the Stonewall Riots, staged his plays there while he worked as a bartender, including The West Street Gang (1977), whose plot centers around a young gay basher being caught and put on trial by patrons of the bar. Durk Dehner, who would go on to co-found the Tom of Finland Foundation, first came across drawings of Tom by Touko Kaaksonen that were circulated by patrons at the Spike. There was a rich culture of artistic activity, too. Lori Bordonaro contributed to this report.The Spike was a leather bar, which means it transcended being merely the kind of place where you could be served alcohol to the kind of place that made it possible to achieve heightened states, life-altering experiences, and find the kind of people you could count on better than family. "There's not easy way to deal with that." Porto was also an acquaintance of Carson. "This sort of stuff shouldn't happen anymore." "It's shattering," said Nick Porto, one of the men attacked near Madison Square Garden. Those include a report last month of a man making anti-gay remarks and attacking a woman with a ketchup bottle at a Village diner a man told police he and a friend were victims of a gay bashing outside a subway station in Midtown Manhattan this month and two men walking arm-in-arm near Madison Square Garden report being jumped by a group of men on May 5, police said. The shooting came after other attacks fueled by anti-gay animus in recent weeks, authorities say. He hasn't yet entered a plea, and his lawyer didn't immediately return a call Monday. The New York City Anti-Violence Project, a nonprofit group that tracks police and other reports of hate attacks against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, says its numbers rose 13 percent in 2011 and 11 percent the previous year.īut officials and advocates can't pinpoint a reason for the recent rash of attacks or even whether it reflects more violence or more aggressive reporting of incidents.Ĭarson was walking with a companion when he was followed and taunted before being shot in the face on a street blocks from the Stonewall Inn early Saturday, police said.Įlliot Morales is being held without bail in Carson's death. Police say there has been a rise in bias-related crimes overall so far this year, to 24 from 14 during the same period last year.
In 2010, authorities said Bronx gang members beat and tortured four people in an anti-gay rage, two men were accused of a gay-bashing beating at the Stonewall Inn itself and a man spewed homophobic insults while throwing a punch at another Village bar - all assaults that happened within little more than a week. In one particularly sinister case, three men connected with a 28-year-old man online in 2006, lured him to a rest stop off a Brooklyn highway with a promise of a date and mugged him, chasing him into traffic he was hit and killed. Yet gay-bashing has continued to flare up in New York at times in recent years. The gay rights movement crystallized in the Village in June 1969, when a police raid at the Stonewall Inn touched off a riot and demonstrations that came to symbolize gays' resistance to being relegated to society's shadows. The city and especially the Village have long been beacons for gay people.
"You feel like you're making headway and then it seems like there's a backlash," he said. He said he looked around cautiously when he got off the subway train to march. especially since it happened in this area." She described her nephew as "a loving and caring person."įabio Cotza, a gay member of an interfaith Bronx church, said the killing "really makes me scared. "The family would like to have justice be served, so that Mark's death is not in vain," she said at a rally at the march's end. One of Carson's aunts, Flourine Bompars, was among the marchers. NY AG, Lawmakers Introduce Legislation to Fund $50M for Abortion Clinics Program