By Bob Moser, Texas ObserverBobby Beltran was already having a blue Christmas. Because of his job, the 26-year-old was missing his tight-knit family's
celebration back home in Brownsville for the first time. After work on
Christmas night, to cheer himself up, Beltran joined some friends and
co-workers at Rain, a gay bar in downtown Austin. He was accompanied by
Chris Ortega, an Austin native who'd recently returned to Texas'
supposed beacon of tolerance -- and had, only weeks before, come out to
friends as gay.  
Let Beltran pick up the story: "Leaving Rain about 1:30 or 2 in the
morning, we walked westward to the corner of Lavaca and gave each other a
goodbye hug. At that exact moment there was a car going the same way,
westbound on Fourth Street. The driver yelled, 'Hey, you fucking
faggots, quit that queer shit!'"
Plenty of people would have ducked their heads and pretended to
ignore the slurs. But Beltran, who came out at age 13, says "that's just
not the person I am." He's an activist. He'd joined protests after two
gay softball players were followed last February from another Fourth
Street bar and brutally assaulted by four men outside city hall. "What
came instantly to my mind was what happened to the Shady Ladies, the two
softball players," he says. "They never caught the guys. So that
snapped into my head, and I immediately turned around and said, 'Hey,
get that out of here. We do not welcome that in Austin. Get out of
here!'"
It wasn't long before the five young men were out of the car,
surrounding Beltran and Ortega, yelling more slurs while pummeling them.
With 20 or so bystanders watching, the beating went on, unchecked, for
several minutes before a friend came out of the bar and had the good
sense to call 911 and holler, "The cops are coming!" The assailants
split. An officer finally arrived and said there wasn't much he could
do. He took their descriptions, gave Beltran and Ortega a case number
and said he'd call if anything developed.
As much as anything, Beltran was mystified by the response -- not just
of the police, but of the silent witnesses who didn't lift a finger,
didn't call 911, didn't take down the license-plate number, didn't use
their cell phones to photograph the perpetrators. But again, he did not
keep quiet. He went home, photographed his battered face, and posted it
on Facebook. A few local media outlets took notice and ran stories -- some
outraged, some perfunctory. When I talked with Beltran a week after the
hate crime, he broke down twice as we talked. But he remained unbowed.
While some have criticized him for talking back to the homophobes, he
said he'd do it again.
"I was talking on behalf of everybody: 'Listen, I don't accept you
calling me that. That is not my name; that is not my label. I'm a
person. I'm a human being. Treat me like one." And now, he says, "I'm
not stopping. I don't know exactly how, but I'm going to fight for the
people who it might happen to later, and for people who don't have a
voice, who've already been attacked. Because it will happen again."
In a sense, Beltran and Ortega were caught -- physically, violently -- in
the paradox of being gay in America at this contradictory moment. Queer
folk like them, and me, have more of our rights than we've ever had
before. But with visibility has come a backlash. A recent study
of 14 years of FBI hate-crime data by the Southern Poverty Law Center
found that gay men and lesbians are more than twice as likely to be
victims of hate crimes than Jews, three times more than African
Americans, four times more than Muslims.
It's a long slog yet to full equality -- not merely legal rights, but
genuine cultural respect. A long slog till it's every bit as
unacceptable to call Beltran a "fucking faggot" as it is to call a black
man a "nigger," a Latino a "spic," a Muslim a "terrorist." A long slog
to the time when political hate-mongers like Texas Congressman Louie
Gohmert and Religious Right leaders like David Barton and John Hagee can
no longer bash gays publicly without fear of repercussions.
But when we finally get there -- and we will -- we'll have people like
Bobby Beltran to thank. People who would not silently let themselves be
abused. People who got knocked down and came up fighting for their
dignity. And everyone else's.(Photo via WikiMedia Commons.)