Gay Violence Statistics

• L.A. BOARD OF EDUCATION TERMINATES GAY AND LESBIAN EDUCATION COMMISSION

• Gay Domestic Violence "Mirrors" Society at Large  — Let's hope not, because if it does we are in trouble, far worse than any of us thought.

• Gay Lesbian DV Stats — Trends

Press Release

By Walter H. Schneider,  April 1, 1998

The article shown below and my interspersed comments relate to the end of affirmative action in California and to the concerns of the homosexual lobby in connection with that.

Patricia Nell Warren's commentary hardly seems to measure up to the claim of it being news.  It is nothing more than more of the same old and tired G&L rhetoric.  The statistics she quotes are unsubstantiated even by data that the G&L lobby itself is promoting.  I'm sure that the people who have concerns that they have their children subjected to homosexual propaganda in their schools are happy to see Patricia Nell Warren being removed from the position of power that gave her so much influence over the lives of heterosexual families.
 

L.A. BOARD OF EDUCATION TERMINATES
GAY AND LESBIAN EDUCATION COMMISSION

By Patricia Nell Warren

For the past seven years, while LGBT students in many school districts across the nation were struggling for the tiniest toe-hold of acceptance, those in Los Angeles Unified School District actually enjoyed significant acceptance and support from their Board of Education.  The Gay and Lesbian Education Commission — a unique body in American K-12 education — was created in 1991 by the L.A. Board to ensure that these young people could be safe at school and enjoy equal access to education.
    GLEC became not only a pioneering example but a source of how-to information, as gay people and concerned heterosexuals  tried to enlarge their niche in their own districts.   Increasing numbers of GLEC's Project 10 and elementary-school packets were being requested from elsewhere.
    Now, LGBT youth in L.A. are not so sure of their Board's acceptance and support.  In a sweeping move that may jeopardize seven years of pioneering, the Board is terminating all eight of its education commissions, including GLEC.
    As per a resolution now before the Board,  the commissions will be "discontinued" on June 30, at school year's end.   According to openly gay Board member Jeff Horton, who spoke at a March 3 emergency GLEC meeting at district headquarters, the Board will likely pass it.
    It's not clear what the whole reason is for terminating GLEC.

According to Horton, the Board heard its legal counsel's warning about Prop. 209, in which conservative Californians voted to end affirmative action in California.  A subsequent court decision had declared Prop. 209 constitutional.

[Proposition 209 is the legislation that made Affirmative Action practices in California unconstitutional.  It was brought about through a Citizens' Initiative (a plebicite).  It surely is comforting to know that there are some democratic processes that can overturn the lobbying of minority rights special interest groups.  Just imagine what we could do with that if we had it available in Canada.  --WHS]

Legal counsel had advised the Board that several of its right education commissions — Gender Equity, African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-Pacific, American Indian, Armenian-American  — might possibly be in violation of Prop. 209, >because they each serve a single group exclusively.  GLEC and the Special Education Commission are not affected by Prop. 209 because they serve both genders and all ethnicities.  According to Horton, the Board was hoping to avoid 209 lawsuits and demonstrate political fairness.  Dropping the gender and race-based commissions, while keeping GLEC and the special-ed commission, would not have "flown politically," Horton told the assembled members of GLEC.
    However, at the Board's March 23 meeting, as the "discontinuance" resolution was formally introduced, legal counsel told the Board that, Prop. 209 or no, they have the right to ax  the commissions if they so choose.
    Beleaguered by building-contract scandals and political attempts to break up the huge district, as well as controversy over bilingual education and decaying schools, the Board has not yet responded to protests. On 3/25 GLEC chairman Bart Verry sent a strongly worded letter to Board president Julie Korenstein, asking that other legal opinions on Prop. 209's applicability be gotten by the Board.  Angry buzz about Prop. 209 still courses through California, and the new law's constitutionality may be further challenged in the courts.  The Board has also not yet responded to letters by individual GLEC members including myself.
    In place of the eight education commissions, the Board plans to appoint a new Human Relations Commission.   As yet, it is not clear how this new commission will work, or if its members — who may or may not be expert and sensitive in all eight of the demographics previously concerning the Board — can effectively merge all eight umbrellas into one big umbrella.
    Verry's letter addressed this concern.  He said:

"The needs of GLBT youth are not addressed legally nor constitutionally, as are the needs of persons from different ethnicities, genders and physical challenges.  We demand to have a voice in how the needs of our population will be addressed.  We demand that we will be actively involved in all decision-making processes regarding the Human Relations Commission, so that [GLEC] will have the space, resources and opportunity to exist as we do today.  If this is not accomplished, you need to recognize that there will be considerable risk of litigation so that we can continue to address the needs of the GLBT community."

Already news of the commissions' fate has jarred many people throughout L.A.'s ethnic communities, though the major media have yet to give the news any major headlines.  On 3/23 Frontiers Magazine published an editorial of mine.  In  the city's gay community,  the Board's quixotic move is pondered by students, teachers, district employees, educators, as well as GLSEN and PFLAG groups.
    "What's going to happen to us now?"  one lesbian student asked me.  "Who can we trust?   Why is the Board doing this to us?"
    For better or worse, LAUSD is a bellwether among U.S. school districts.  What happens here, often happens elsewhere later.  With a vast smoggy geography stretching from South-Central slums and "East Los" barrios to all-white San Fernando rural districts — it  is the nation's 2nd largest.  Of its 650,000 students, an estimated 65,000 might be gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered.  Add perhaps 15,000  runaways, who come to L.A. from other cities — many of these are LGBT kids who are homeless because of family hostility and try to get back in school after arriving in L.A.

[Homosexuality is an acquired behaviour for most people who are afflicted by it ("born with it," "genetically disposed to it" -- or whatever you prefer to call it, in the absence of any valid supporting evidence that it is anything more than a choice).  Eliminating the teaching of it in school may do a lot to bring the acquisition of that life style to a more normal level of the 3% or less of the population that practices it.  Think how much that would do to re-establish the rights of the oppressed majority of heterosexual people.  --WHS]

In 1991 the Board did the bellwether thing by creating GLEC to meet the needs of this small army of  LGBT students.  Every year, hundreds of students, both out and closeted, quietly find support in Virginia Uribe's pioneering Project 10, now a counseling fixture in most LAUSD high schools.   They could find information on health, safer sex, suicide, substance abuse, family hostility, transgender issues, getting out of gang life —

[How ridiculous an argument that is.  When we still had more functioning families, before we made homosexuality and other social perversions more important than the creation of new functioning citizens within the confines of families that still were impowered to do that, we didn't have to worry about homosexual support groups providing "information on health, safer sex, suicide, substance abuse, family hostility, transgender issues, getting out of gang life."  --WHS]

or be directed to community-based youth services for such needs as employment, shelters, etc.  They could enroll in one of the four continuation programs for LGBT dropouts, and get their high-school diploma.  They could attend the Gay Prom, or the district-sponsored Models of Pride Youth Conference.  GLEC's growing scholarship fund gets a number of needy young people into college.
    GLEC also held the line on safety at school.  Young people who were openly harassed can go to GLEC for legal networking.  Because of the landmark Jamie Nabozny case — ending in a punitive million-dollar judgment against a Wisconsin high school last year for having tolerated gay-bashing against one student — LAUSD's more reactionary schools are essentially on notice that, in a similar case, a California jury might hold them massively liable for a student's injury or death from on-campus bashing.

[There is money in claiming to be a victim of a hate crime — considerably large sums of money — not just for the victim but also for the lawyers involved in processing the claim through the legal industry.  To what extent do the expectations of reaping large rewards for the status of being a victim contribute to the frequency of hate-crimes? —WHS]

    While the eight commission directors' salaries were paid by the district, GLEC funded its own programs — almost $150,000 in seven years, which we raised by everything from A-list fundraising parties to yard sales.
    Are these programs effective?  Because of them, numbers of students whose histories are known to me are presently happier and more productive in their high schools — like Armond Anderson-Bell, 19, promising writer who is now anchorman of the TV news station at John Marshall High School.  There are LGBT students in college or the workplace today — indeed, who are alive today, even reconciled with formerly hostile parents — because of  LAUSD support and sensitivity at key moments.  At some schools, the programs helped create a buffer zone of gay-supportive straight students and teachers who feel strongly about human rights.  They produced some outstanding teen leaders and activists, including GLEC youth commissioners Louis Harvey and Joel Feldman.
    At her home school, Fairfax, Luna Andrade founded the first gay-straight alliance club in the district.  Dan Harris, a 1996 EAGLES graduate, went home to his conservative high-desert community and forced his former high school to clamp down on gay-bashing.  Another EAGLES graduate, Christine Soto, has begun a promising career in social work.  Yet another, K. C. Barrow, went home to Utah to help start the gay-rights movement in that state.  These are just a handful of kids that I know.  Other commissioners can tell similar stories.
    With the June termination date  a grim certainty, GLEC commissioners are bracing themselves for being "decommissioned", and for trying to interface with the as-yet mysterious Human Relations Commission.
    For the moment, some programs — Project 10, the EAGLES continuation programs — will continue to operate because they were approved directly by the Board.   Friends of Project 10 will still offer its growing array of scholarships.  To better serve dropout youth, the special-ed EAGLES has just merged with the Long Beach EAGLES to form a new program called Oasis.  No matter what happens, Bart Verry says he plans to hold the next Models of Pride at its usual venue, Occidental College, in October.   But it isn't clear what the future holds.
    Will the new Human Relations Commission successfully meet the urgent needs of L.A.'s ethnic communities?  In the city where the 1992 riots and the Watts riots happened, this is a major question.
    Will the Human Relations Commission care enough about the needs of gay youth to shoulder the full burden of GLEC's hard-fought programs?  Or will some members of the new Commission be people who willingly answer to right-wing lobbyists?  To keep our programs going, and launch new ones, will we be fighting anti-gay attitude every time we need a majority vote?  That's another major question.
    Far-righters like Lou Sheldon and Pat Robertson have already targeted LAUSD for major attention.  The Christian Coalition has already actively tried to keep Jeff Horton from being re-elected to the Board.  Lou Sheldon attempted to target our GLEC programs during a 1996 Congressional investigation, hoping to stigmatize GLEC as an example of the "pernicious" influence of homosexuals in education.  Most local right-wingers don't give a hoot for the safety of gay kids -- they have lobbied the L.A. Board about eliminating the district's hate-crimes policy.  Their reasons: the policy "protects homosexuals" and deprives Christian students of free-speech rights to criticize homosexuality on their campuses.  So the "discontinuation" of GLEC might be interpreted by anti-gay elements as a softening of the Board's position on anti-gay violence.
    A recent study showed that Los Angeles has the third highest statistics on anti-gay violence in the nation, with 350 murders, assaults, rapes and intimidations reported last year.

[According to their own sources (quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle) the grand-total of anti-gay violence in 1996 was as shown in the next two tables.  However, consider that her claim is not born out by the data presented in those tables (it's their own data).  L.A. is fifth in total number of alleged victims of twelve cities surveyed, however, if you look at my appended comments pertaining to that table, you'll find that on a per capita basis L.A., with an incidence of anti-gay violence of 1.7/100,000 Pop. ranks eigth out of the twelve areas that the table shows data on.  In relation to violent crimes against heterosexuals, neither the total number nor the per-capita rate of crimes against homosexuals strikes me as being remarkable.  What makes violence against homosexuals so special that it must receive special attention?  Don't we have far more pressing problems to worry about?  --WHS]

GAYS, LESBIANS AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Area	Males	Females	Total
San Francisco	322	211	533
New York	271	198	469
San Diego	213	145	358
Minneapolis	56	222	278
Los Angeles	133	120	253
Boston	52	123	175
Chicago	72	94	166
Columbus	46	37	83
Denver	22	8	30
St. Louis	2	2	4
Cleveland	1	1	2
Little Rock	1	0	1
Total	1,191	1,161	2,352

— Source: National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) [My full comments are appended at the end of this article. --WHS]

Many more go unreported.

[So what?  Many cases of heterosexual violence go unreported too.  What is unreported more than anything else is the rape of imprisoned men, who are the largest group of people in our population being subjected to rape.  The number of rapes of male prisoners is estimated by some people to exceed by far the total number of all rapes in the rest of the population. --WHS]

Nationally, violence against LGBT young people is on the rise.  These figures are augmented by growing violence even against students  who are gay-friendly, or who  might merely be perceived as gay -- or who who are the butt of cruel student pranks (it's the "in" thing at some schools to start a rumor that so-and-so is gay or lesbian).

[Nationally, violence against all people is on the rise.  It is not a homosexual privilege to experience an increase in violence. --WHS]

    Yesterday's shooting spree at an Arkansas high school,  in which two young teens clad in camouflage killed 5 people and wounded 11 in a pique over a girlfriend problem, points up a stark reality.

[The stark reality of that shooting has nothing to do with homosexual issues, but rather a lot with the fact that at least one of the boys was forcefully and against his wishes removed from the loving care of his father and grandparents and moved into the care of his mother and her boyfriend who was convicted and served time for possession of and dealing in drugs and for illegal transportation of firearms.  The stark reality is that the shooting is a manifestation of the destruction of our families and traditional social values and that the rampant promotion of alternative non-traditional life-styles has done very much to bring about that destruction.
—WHS]

The media is doing the usual handwringing about how TV violence and the firearms industry are to blame — yet we must look to others who are responsible for violence at school.  That certainly includes school boards everywhere, who — for better or worse — set the tone for their districts.  If a hail of gunfire can be perpetrated by one angry heterosexual boy because he broke up with his girlfriend, a similar hail of gunfire is possible over gay issues at a school where there is any level of permissiveness on anti-gay violence.
    In gun-happy L.A., home of the drive-by shooting, the Board of Education's future performance on safety and welfare of its gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students needs to be closely watched.

Copyright 1998 by Patricia Nell Warren.  All rights reserved.
______________

ACTION ALERT:

The L.A. Board of Education needs to know that the nationwide gay community, and concerned students and straight people everywhere, are watching.
    So far, only a few letters of support have been received by GLEC.  It is vital for concerned Americans to pressure for GLEC's continuance, and a positive performance by the new Human Relations Commission.  Contact GLEC's executive director Kathy Gill at 213/625-6392  (phone) or 213/626/5279 (fax).
    The Board itself may be contacted by writing or phoning: Los Angeles Board of Education, Room A-201, 450 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90012, 213/625-6386 (phone) or 213/626-2815 (fax)
    For more information on GLEC programs, its web page can be still found at http://www.lausd.k12.ca.us/lausd/offices/glec/
_______________
Patricia Nell Warren is a widely read commentator, as well as author of bestselling fiction like THE FRONT RUNNER, HARLAN'S RACE and BILLY'S BOY.  She is a member of the Gay and Lesbian Education Commission in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where she helps raise funds for the scholarship program.  Her publisher is Wildcat Press, whose web page is located at www.wildcatcom.com.

This message has been forwarded to a list of individuals interested in lesbigay youth and/or higher education issues.  Please do not publish, or post in a public place on the Internet, copyrighted material without permission and attribution.  It's fine, of course, to publish information in press releases.

Gay Domestic Violence Mirrors Society at Large

Battering as Common Among Gays as Straights 1 in 3 Gay Couples Suffer Battering, Study Finds

Elaine Herscher, Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
Monday 6 October 1997

Most of the following article snipped.  For full text of the article refer to:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1997/10/06/MN61230.DTL

Quoted from the article:

…"Locally, we are probably way ahead of any other city in developing services," Merrill said.  Several other agencies in San Francisco have beefed up support services in the past two years.  More counseling and support groups have become available for gay and lesbian victims, and new agencies have formed, including Queers United to Eliminate Abusive Relationships and Rape, and Women's Alliance to End Same- Sex Domestic Violence Inc.
    The San Francisco district attorney's office says there has been a 50 percent increase in reporting of same-sex domestic violence cases in the past year.  To handle such cases, the office has hired staff members, including Crystal Weston, who is serving as an advocate for victims of same-gender violence.
    The cities that reported cases for the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs' study were San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Denver, St. Louis, Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, and Little Rock, Ark.

[The following table is from the article.  The friend who forwarded the article complained that the article lacked discussion of the causes of the missing help for men who are victims of violence.  He's right, but most of all I wonder why so much of the article was devoted to a trivial issue and so little of it to one that is far larger.  Have a look at what I came up with.  My comments are right after the following table. --WHS]

CHART (1):

GAYS, LESBIANS AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Area	Males	Females	Total
San Francisco	322	211	533
New York	271	198	469
San Diego	213	145	358
Minneapolis	56	222	278
Los Angeles	133	120	253
Boston	52	123	175
Chicago	72	94	166
Columbus	46	37	83
Denver	22	8	30
St. Louis	2	2	4
Cleveland	1	1	2
Little Rock	1	0	1
Total	1,191	1,161	2,352

—Source: National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP)

My Comments:

How much funding do these people receive?  Whatever it is, at least a good portion of it is wasted.  Just imagine what could have been done with the funds that went into all this.  The following chart displays the data with additional columns, to see the data in relation to the over-all population in the areas.

GAYS, LESBIANS AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE --  Reported Incidents

Area	1990 (per 100,000 Pop.)					Population 1	Males	Females	Legal Status 3
	Males	%	Females	%	Total
San Francisco	322	60	211	40	533	3,686,600	8.7	5.7	2
New York	271	58	198	42	469	17,990,500	1.5	1.1	3
San Diego	213	59	145	41	358	1,110,500	19.2	13.1	2
Minneapolis	56	20	222	80	278	2,264,100	2.5	9.8	2(S)
Los Angeles	133	53	120	47	253	14,631,530	0.9	0.8	2
Boston	52	30	123	70	175	4,171,600	1.2	2.9	2(S)
Chicago	72	43	94	57	166	8,065,000	0.9	1.2	2
Columbus	46	55	37	45	83	623,900	7.4	5.9	3
Denver	22	73	8	27	30	1,848,300	1.2	0.5	2
St. Louis	2	50	2	50	4	244,410	0.8	0.8	3(S)
Cleveland	1	50	1	50	2	2,500,000	2.0	0.04	3
Little Rock	1	100	0	0	1	175,800	0.6	0.0	3(S)
Total	1,191	51	1,161	49	2,352	55,367,540	2.1	2.0

Notes:

I'm not certain that the population figures relate to the "Area" mentioned in the article.  I used figures shown for metropolitan areas shown in Websters' Multi-media Encyclopedia.

Estimated population figure.  I couldn't find current data.  I did find a figure of 2,225,000 from 1975. (No figure for Cleveland was given in Websters' Multi-media Encyclopedia.

From CHART 2 in the same article: LEGAL STATUS OF GAY RELATIONSHIPS and how each state treats same-gender relationships in legal matters.

 1) Excluded - Same-gender relationships do not qualify as `Domestic'.
 2) Uncertain- Same-gender relationships may qualify as `Cohabitation'.
 3) Uncertain- Same-gender relationships may qualify as `Dating Relationship'.
(S) SODOMY LAW Currently on the books.

If the population figures that I used should be low, the ratio that I described at the end of my comments becomes larger.  There are a lot of grey areas in the article.  It is stated "The group estimated that 25 percent to 33 percent of partners in such relationships suffer verbal, physical or sexual abuse. It based its conclusions on academic studies conducted from 1986 to 1997."  The percent figures sound soooo much more scientific than to say simply: "We believe that 1/4 to 1/3 of couples become involved in violence."  It isn't said what the "academic studies" were that they based their estimate on, nor is is stated what degree of severity was involved in the 2,352 cases of gay domestic violence that the table relates to.  However, most importantly, it isn't said what time-frame these figures relate to.  Are these life-time risks or do they relate to annual risks?

It is incongruous that the frequency of gay domestic violence should vary to such a large extent and for no discernible reason from one metropolitan area to the next.  The reported rate of gay domestic violence per capita is 475 times greater in Los Angeles than in Cleveland.  Surely, some factors were overlooked or deliberately ignored in the studies somewhere.

The legal status of homosexuality in a given state doesn't appear to play a large role.  If it were the controlling factor, there wouldn't be the large variations from one area to another in the same state.  So, why the long list of the states showing their individual attitudes with respect to the legal status of homosexuality within each state?  What has that got to do with gay domestic violence, unless that information is used to illustrate the lack of any correlation?

What may have played a larger role in the variations is how a violent incident was classified and by who.  Could it be that the attitudes of the reporting organizations had something to do with the outcome of the tracking effort by "the 12 agencies that track violence against gay people"? Did the "12 agencies" use a common standard for measuring?  Did they use the same type of sources?  Did they all make the same distinction in determining degrees of severity or to classify an incident as violence?  How was the determination made in each individual case?  Who made it?  Was it unbiased?  Why didn't Elaine Herrscher ask any of these and other questions before she wrote her article?

In view of the extremely large variance in the numbers reported it is very likely that we deal with advocacy numbers that are biased to varying extent at each locality by the people who are doing the reporting.  If the rate of "inter-spousal" violence is really as high as it is claimed, why make an issue out of the extremely low rate of Gay domestic violence (on average 2 per 100,000 of population during 1996)?

Advocates of special rights for homosexuals claim that perhaps as many as 10% of the population has the "homosexual gene."  Not all of those practice the various homosexual life-styles, which range from abstinence, through long-lasting commitments between same-sex couples, to liberal promiscuity (as was the case with Patient Zero) that may involve 250 and more sexual partners in a year with a thousand or more copulations or sexual acts in total.

The advocates of special rights for homosexuals claim that as many as 3% of the population are practicing homosexuals.  Without knowing the proportions of the three subclasses I identified, let's just assume that the 3% figure is true.

What we have then is that 3 percent out of 55,000,000 people are homosexual.  That works out to 1,650,000 homosexuals
   The rate of reported gay domestic violence is 2,352/1,650,000 = 0.001425 or 0.1425 %, or about 1.4 cases per 1000 homosexuals in the year of 1996.  Is that a big problem that requires a lot of concern?  Considering that no figures were provided to support the concerns about gay-bashing in the first article above, should we really worry about gay-bashing as an overwhelming concern at all?

Why worry about a problem that is virtually non-existent in comparison to other far greater ones?  The answer is:  "To manufacture concern!"  Dr. Tana Dineen described the process of using advocacy numbers in, and gave it a name that is the title of, the book that contains the examples she used: "Manufacturing Victims."
 

Gay Domestic Violence —  An escalating Problem?

If the data collected by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) is accurate, then gays comprise the sector with the fasted growing rate of domestic violence by far of all sectors of the population.

Gay DV Incidents Reported in 12 American Cities

	1996*		1997**		Increase
Male	1,191	51%	1,746	52%	555	46.6%
Female	1,161	49%	1,581	48%	420	36.2%
Total	2,352		3,327		975	41.5%

*Source: NCAVP, as quoted by Elaine Herscher in the San Francisco ChronicleMonday 6 October 1997
** Source: NCAVP, as quoted by Susan Holt in an article in the Washington Blade 16 October 1998.

See also:

Feminism For Male College Students — A Short Guide to the Truth, by Angry Harry (Off-Site)

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Updates:
2001 02 01 (format changes)
2005 01 22 (format changed to new page design)
2006 03 04 (added link to Feminism for Male College Students)