Author explores homophobic violence in Canada

Journalist began quest to expose the roots of hate crime after a gay friend’s brutal beating

by Kurt Heinrich

It was a mild night in 1992 when a young gay man strolled through Stanley Park in Vancouver. The young man’s evening went from pleasant to terrifying when he was intercepted by a group of gay bashers, some of whom were armed with metal pipes.

The attack lasted several minutes before witnesses were able to intervene, and the victim was beaten bloody and senseless. He spent the following weeks recovering in a body cast in a Lower Mainland hospital.

When Douglas Janoff visited his friend in the hospital the day following the attack, he was overcome with feelings of angst and confusion.

Both the ferociousness of the attack and its seemingly irrational motive made Janoff feel the need to “make sense of what it all meant.”

It was these feelings that would propel Janoff, a journalist and gay rights activist, on a decade-long search for answers. The search forced him to delve into the sordid and varied cases of gay bashing and homophobia—a trying and often emotional journey.

The result of his quest is the thought provoking criminological examination Pink Blood, one of the first books to address the generality of homophobic violence in Canada.

The author visited UVic on Oct. 7 to promote Pink Blood, and to speak about the social ills associated with homophobia. This was Janoff’s first stop in a book tour scheduled to take him to cities across Canada.

“This is an invisible violence,” Janoff said of gay bashing. “This is a violence that simmers below the surface.”

While there have been few reported cases of queer bashing in Victoria (Janoff’s study mentions only one brutal stabbing over a decade ago), Becky Cory, a member of UVic’s Committee on Sexual and Gender Diversity, says many local queer youth are continually hassled and threatened, both in schools and on the street.

“There is probably homophobic violence on a daily or weekly basis, though it’s rarely reported,” Cory said.

Janoff says the unseen nature of the problem is one of the more daunting issues he has to deal with when trying to educate the Canadian public about homophobic violence. This problem is exacerbated by his difficulty in finding a common, universal set of criteria that police officers, queer groups, non-government organizations (NGOs), and other concerned citizens’ groups can use to categorize such hate crimes.

Despite such constraints, the author has come up with a single definition for the term “hate crime” on his own: “an attack against the perceived other, be it a physical, verbal, symbolic, or systematic assault.”

“Homophobic violence is a reaction to the violation of gender norms,” Janoff said.

It is ultimately through defining and exposing the problems of gay bashing and gay murder that Janoff hopes to increase awareness of the issues and create a dialogue between gay and straight communities by “putting a public face on the issue.”

In the long run, Janoff is hopeful that eventually a large national organization might form to monitor and chart offenses, particularly in rural areas, to support victims of the attacks and to lobby for legislative change.

For further information on Pink Blood and the book tour, visit www.PinkBlood.com