Abstract

It's Still Open Season on Gays

On January 10, 1992, Erik Brown and Esat Bid were sentenced to twenty-five years to life for the July 2, 1990, murder of Julio Rivera, a gay man from the South Bronx. The two youths had bragged to friends about killing the 29-year-old bartender "because he was gay," but nobody, gay and lesbian activists included, really expected them to go to jail for it. Most antigay murders are never prosecuted, and those that are typically result in acquittals or light sentences. But this time a district attorney and a judge had diverged from the criminal justice system's time-honored view of gay-bashing as an offense on a par with jaywalking. In the jury selection, lawyers of both the accused had appealed to potential jurors' homophobia by asking if they'd ever heard of Dykes on Bikes, a lesbian social group completely unconnected to the case.