A gay-bashing downtown

Tip of the hat to David Lauri for posting on this over at Esrati:

Some national exposure for Dayton....from Huffington Post:

A Hate Crime You Won't See In the Statistics

"...The past two months have seen a surge in brutal attacks against gay, lesbian and transgendered people, or those just perceived to be so. Moses "Teish" Cannon was shot and killed in Syracuse, NY, for being gay and identifying as female in November. In December, Ecuadoran immigrant Jose Sucuzhanay was beaten to death with a baseball bat in Brooklyn by three men yelling anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs. A 28-year-old woman in San Francisco was assaulted and gang-raped by four men for being a lesbian. And just after Christmas, in Dayton, Ohio, Nathan became a target..."

Nathan being Nathan Runkle, an animal rights activist who apparently is known in the animal rights/vegan circles. He founded a group called Mercy For Animals, that takes undercover films of industrial animal breeding.

For some reason he was in Dayton, at Masque, and was gay bashed either in or outside the bar in the early morning hours:

On Saturday, December 27, 2008, Nathan was brutally attacked and severely beaten. His assailant went for his face. Nathan suffered facial fractures, a broken nose, a deviated septum and severe bruising.

Guess he was lucky they didn't go after his eyes.

What shakes me up about this is that this happened in what seemed to me to be a pretty safe part of downtown. I've been to this area many many times and nary a problem (a very solid knock on wood). So I wonder if I've just been lucky so far.

Or Nathan was just very unlucky.

On edit, Runkle's press release here.