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  Kayla Stone In breaking news from Just Out, it is being reported that 21-year-old Kayla Stone, a musician and activist, was assaulted in downtown Portland in an apparent gay bashing last Sunday July 3rd, according to police.
The previous night a group of men had harassed her outside of Embers on NW Broadway and Burnside, calling her “dyke” and following her for several blocks as she left. She fended them off with strong words but when she returned Saturday night the same group recognized her and began beating her without provocation. The only person she remembers very clearly is the one who threw the first punch, a Latino man with a teardrop tattoo by his eye.
Stone also says that witnesses did nothing to assist her. Even when she made her way to The Escape, the all ages gay nightclub and a stop on the Q Patrol route, Stone says she was mostly ignored. Stone said two police cars circled the block, but neither stopped to help. Eventually she,
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  Meldoy Awesomazing stands above the crowd According to Ernesto Dominguez of Cascade AIDS Project, over 4,000 people braved the the grey and misty Sunday night May 29th, 2011, to hold hands on the Hawthorne Bridge. Active community member Melody Awesomazing caught photos of the swarm of love and support that was held in order to show solidarity for 2 men beaten for holding hands in a hate crime more than a week ago.
A few spoke before the crowd walked across the bridge on both sides, holding hands. Brad Forkner, one of teh 2 vistims in the attack was one, saying, “This is not the first time I have feared for my safety or my life and, sadly, I don’t expect it to be the last. What I want to talk about is a much larger cultural issue we have with making different people feel like they’re worth less than normal people, as if there is such a thing as ‘normal.’ In this instance, it was because we are gay.”
After Forkner’s speech, Basic Rights Oregon Executive Director Jeana Frazzini took to the stage, thanking Forkner and Rosevear (the other victim) for their courage and inviting the crowd to take part in a display of love and affection.
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  Photo by Dan Ostergren from the "Holding hands in solidarity" Facebook page This is the first I’m hearing of this story, but I feel it is important for the community to know, so I’m going to leave it up to the great reporting of Just Out‘s Erin Rook to detail the events on an attack on two gay men this past Sunday night. You cab read more on the Just Out website.
Brad Forkner, 23, and Christopher Rosevear, 25, were walking across the Hawthorne Bridge hand-in-hand after taking in an evening show at Darcelle’s Sunday, May 22, when they were assaulted by three men, Forkner says.
Bias crimes detective Kevin Warren said officers responded to an assault near the Eastbank Esplanade that night around 8:35 p.m. He could not confirm that the incident was being treated as a bias crime because he had not yet interviewed the victims. According to Forkner, however, officers at the scene said the circumstances suggested a bias crime.
“They deemed it a bias crime seeing how the men followed us for so long, nothing was stolen, and there seemed to be no other provocation than Christopher and I holding hands,” Forkner said. He added that the alleged attackers were yelling at them during the assault, but they couldn’t make out what the men were saying — Rosevear thought they could have been speaking another language, such as Russian.
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