The 90s were pretty cool. Between the cold war and the war on terror. LGBT started being accepted. Super fast development of computers and video games.
LGBT started being accepted in the 90s??? I live in Cleveland Ohio. We have a suburb Lakewood Ohio.
I don’t know if it’s true today, but in the 90s Lakewood was the second gayest city in the country.
The only place more accepting at that time would have been San Fransisco.
That being said, I can remember in 1994 a guy being killed in Lakewood. He was handcuffed to a fence, and beaten by 4 men with baseball bats.
Niw if you look at a map, you’ll see Lakewood is a very small city. However it does have a huge police presense. The running joke is that for every 4 corner intersection, Lakewood has 3 bars, and 8 cops.
So it’s a small city with heavy police presense. Response time for littering would be around 2 minutes. This would have happened around 2am. So bars are letting out, police strolling the streets looking for drunks causing trouble.
There’s only 3 major streets. There is no doubt in my mind that cops saw a man being beaten bloody with 4 baseball bats. There’s no doubt in my mind that people living along these streets would have heard the screams for mercy.
However, “officially” the corpse wasn’t discovered until 7am, as a mother with her 5 year old son were walking to school. This fence was part of a lot for a catholic elementary school.
The reason they targeted him was because he was gay. And you can say that one targeted killing like that can happen in any time period in any place. And sure, thats right.
But his body, which is in plain sight, during the streets busiest hour. And you mean to tell me, not one person called the police? Not one passerby driving saw him bloody on the sidewalk, arms still cuffed to a fence? Not one person bothered to help?
The reason for that is the mentality at the time was “gay = bad”. People thought he deserved it for being gay.
I went to that school at the time. I never saw the body. But I saw the crime scene aftermath. I was 10 years old at the time. I’m 42 now. The images of that sidewalk still haunt me. Pieces of his brain on the sidewalk. Blood everywhere. It was a brutal beating.
3 years later, different school, and the way kids would bully you was by calling you gay. Gay as an insult. Nothing more. Just being gay in itself being the insult.
I’ve never been gay, but I also have never had anything against it. I also had this strange connection to gay people in the 90s in that I experienced firsthand bullying for “being gay”, even though I wasn’t.
I don’t feel like being gay was starting to be accepted until at least 2003, but argueably more like 2007.
In 1994, the 4 killers had the publics support. Today, I don’t think they would. And I think cops would arrive during the innitial struggle, before they could handcuff him to the fence. He would be beaten up, but he would survive today. In 1994, his corpse was ignored for 5 hours.
Try to imagine that. A corpse left to rot on a sidewalk for 5 hours, ignored, because he was gay. That wouldn’t happen today.
The 90s were pretty cool. Between the cold war and the war on terror. LGBT started being accepted. Super fast development of computers and video games.
Plus back then I didn’t have to pay taxes.
LGBT started being accepted in the 90s??? I live in Cleveland Ohio. We have a suburb Lakewood Ohio.
I don’t know if it’s true today, but in the 90s Lakewood was the second gayest city in the country.
The only place more accepting at that time would have been San Fransisco.
That being said, I can remember in 1994 a guy being killed in Lakewood. He was handcuffed to a fence, and beaten by 4 men with baseball bats.
Niw if you look at a map, you’ll see Lakewood is a very small city. However it does have a huge police presense. The running joke is that for every 4 corner intersection, Lakewood has 3 bars, and 8 cops.
So it’s a small city with heavy police presense. Response time for littering would be around 2 minutes. This would have happened around 2am. So bars are letting out, police strolling the streets looking for drunks causing trouble.
There’s only 3 major streets. There is no doubt in my mind that cops saw a man being beaten bloody with 4 baseball bats. There’s no doubt in my mind that people living along these streets would have heard the screams for mercy.
However, “officially” the corpse wasn’t discovered until 7am, as a mother with her 5 year old son were walking to school. This fence was part of a lot for a catholic elementary school.
The reason they targeted him was because he was gay. And you can say that one targeted killing like that can happen in any time period in any place. And sure, thats right.
But his body, which is in plain sight, during the streets busiest hour. And you mean to tell me, not one person called the police? Not one passerby driving saw him bloody on the sidewalk, arms still cuffed to a fence? Not one person bothered to help?
The reason for that is the mentality at the time was “gay = bad”. People thought he deserved it for being gay.
I went to that school at the time. I never saw the body. But I saw the crime scene aftermath. I was 10 years old at the time. I’m 42 now. The images of that sidewalk still haunt me. Pieces of his brain on the sidewalk. Blood everywhere. It was a brutal beating.
3 years later, different school, and the way kids would bully you was by calling you gay. Gay as an insult. Nothing more. Just being gay in itself being the insult.
I’ve never been gay, but I also have never had anything against it. I also had this strange connection to gay people in the 90s in that I experienced firsthand bullying for “being gay”, even though I wasn’t.
I don’t feel like being gay was starting to be accepted until at least 2003, but argueably more like 2007.
In 1994, the 4 killers had the publics support. Today, I don’t think they would. And I think cops would arrive during the innitial struggle, before they could handcuff him to the fence. He would be beaten up, but he would survive today. In 1994, his corpse was ignored for 5 hours.
Try to imagine that. A corpse left to rot on a sidewalk for 5 hours, ignored, because he was gay. That wouldn’t happen today.
Well, there wasn’t a corpse where I grew up. There were also hungry kids in Africa, I didn’t say it was a utopia, did I?