This piece was picked up by The Daily Beast, thanks to Melissa Petro of Becoming Writers and including suggestions from TDB editors and several friends.
Read it here, or contact me for the archived version.
Article: Post-Orlando Truth For You: Gay Bars Aren’t ‘Safe Spaces’
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Greggor Mattson, PhD 
2 responses to “Article: Post-Orlando Truth For You: Gay Bars Aren’t ‘Safe Spaces’”
[…] Gay bars have always been sites of danger, Terrorists and gay bashers have long used gay bars to find LGBTQ people- only last weekend, my boyfriend and I had “faggots” shouted at us from a speeding car outside a Columbus, Ohio gay bar. The massacre at Pulse’s nightclub is the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, but it is not an aberration: the crime blotters of the gay press have always been punctuated by attacks on patrons at gay bars. In 2013, nine gay men were assaulted during a four-month period outside Cocktails Cleveland. In 2009, three cousins stormed Robert’s Lafitte in Galveston with rocks and chunks of concrete, sending two men to the hospital. Lance Neve was beaten unconscious in 2008 outside Snuggery’s Bar in Spencerport, New York by Jesse D. Parsons. Former Army Seargeant Tony Hunter was beaten to death in 2008 outside Be Bar in Washington, D. C. by Robert Hannah. Activist Nathan Runkle was severely beaten outside Dayton’s Masque in 2008. Sean William Kenney was beaten to death in 2007 outside Brew’s Bar in Greenville, South Carolina by Stephen Andrew Moller. Recording artist Kevin Aviance was severely beaten by four men in 2006 after leaving a bar in NYC’s East Village. And these are just the assaults at gay bars that made mainstream news headlines. […]
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[…] In the wake of the attack on Pulse nightclub, many LGBTQ writers have characterized it as terrorism because they understood gay bars as safe space…. Does the place of an attack help define what counts as […]
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