LGBT Americans face a steady threat of hate and violence

In the first few minutes of 2014, a man named Musab Masmari started a fire inside a historic Seattle gay nightclub as 750 people rang in the New Year.

A security camera caught him pouring gasoline in a rear stairwell and lighting it on fire. The fire was quickly put out, and no one was injured in the attempted attack. Authorities said Masmari was motivated by an “intolerable hate” of gays.

This March, Martin Blackwell of Atlanta was charged with several counts of aggravated assault for pouring boiling water on two gay men as they slept.

One of the men was his girlfriend’s 23-year-old son. “Get out of my house with all that gay,” Blackwell allegedly yelled at the men as he dragged them out the front door.

The father of mass murderer Omar Mateen, who killed 50 people in an Orlando gay club Sunday morning in America’s worst mass shooting, said his son might have been motivated to kill after seeing two men kissing each other.

Reports have surfaced that Mateen might have scoped out at least one other gay club in the area before deciding to attack Pulse Nightclub.

The shooting was “a tragic illustration of the legitimate safety fears that those in our LGBT community live with every day,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said Sunday in a statement as his city assigned extra police to the neighborhood hub of the local gay community.

LGBT Americans face more hate crime than almost every other minority group in the country, and community leaders think it’s been on the rise in recent months.

“Despite the stunning growth of Americans’ acceptance of the LGBT community in recent decades, years’ worth of data on anti-LGBT violence prove that it remains unsafe to be gay in America,” Fusion wrote on Sunday as it reported on anti-gay crime.

FBI statistics show that hate crimes in the United States motivated by sexual orientation are second only to those attributed to race. Of 5,462 “single-bias” hate crimes in 2014, 18.6 percent of were motivated by sexual orientation; 47 percent by race, the FBI reported.

Twenty percent to 25 percent of lesbian and gay people experience hate crimes in their lifetimes, according to current data from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs.

Attacks and threats against members of the LGBT community happen on the street, at school, in their homes — and in broad daylight.

In May 2015 a group of men, some of them wearing New York Knicks gear, attacked a gay couple during the day near Madison Square Garden in New York. The attackers reportedly shouted homophobic slurs at the two men during the attack.

In March 2014 a 30-year-old Minneapolis man was hospitalized with a shattered jaw after he was attacked while leaving a popular gay bar. The attack came a month after a Minnesota high school senior received death threats after coming out as gay on Facebook.

Not all the crimes are reported — some people, for instance, don’t want to out themselves by filing a police report — which makes keeping accurate statistics “extremely challenging,” Jay Brown, a spokesman for Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy group in the country, told The New York Times.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented a rise of anti-LGBT groups in recent years.

“LGBT people have been vilified for as long as any of us can remember, and vilified in a particularly nasty way,” Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the center, told The Atlantic.

“They’re described as perverts, as people who seduce children, as people who engage in horrible, unnatural practices. There’s all kinds of hatred in this country, but it’s rare to have a group described in such incredibly demeaning terms.”

LGBT community leaders told The Times that they sense an increase in violence against gay people this year, attributing some of that to the heated discussion over transgender bathrooms and the divisiveness of the presidential campaign.

March was a particularly brutal month for the LGBT community. On March 2 a transgender teen was murdered in Burlington, Iowa, shot several times and left in an alley. The teen’s mother called it a hate crime.

Also in March, Shehada Khalil Issa, 69, was charged in Los Angeles with shooting to death his 38-year-old son, Amir Issa. CNN reported that Amir’s sisters had contacted the Los Angeles LGBT Center for help because their father was upset that their brother was gay and had repeatedly threatened to kill him.

LGBT advocates in Los Angeles called the incident “gut wrenching.”

“When we won marriage equality, so many people thought this was the end of the battle and LGBT people were equal, but this (alleged) murder is a stark reminder of the violence that the LGBT people can face even within their own family,” Jim Key, a spokesman for the LGBT Center, told CNN.

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that reported homicides in the LGBT community have risen since 2007, though some of that might be due to increased reporting.

People of color are the largest targets of anti-LGBT violence, the coalition reported, with Latinos making up 43 percent of survivors and black LGBT people representing about 23 percent of survivors.

Most attacks against LGBT people — nearly 57 percent — are carried out by strangers, according to the coalition.

In Idaho four men are charged for their involvement in the April 29 murder of Steven Nelson, an openly gay man who was brutally beaten during a planned robbery, stripped naked and left for dead. The Idaho U.S. Attorney’s Office is investigating the possibility of charging the men with a hate crime.

Fear spread through the Boise LGBT community on Sunday as news of the Orlando massacre broke, said Chelsea Gaona-Lincoln, who helped organize a rally there to honor the Florida victims on Sunday night.

She could see the fear in online posts and comments from people in the area.

“A friend who works with the Human Rights campaign said: ‘We’ve got to take care of each other, look out for each other. Also, have exit plans for your pride activities,’” Gaona-Lincoln told the Idaho Statesman.

“And just letting that sink in and thinking that we need to have exit plans for a festival, for something that’s a celebration. That’s gut-wrenching. It’s disheartening. It’s disappointing.”

This story was originally published June 13, 2016 at 11:24 AM with the headline "LGBT Americans face a steady threat of hate and violence."