Even liberal NYC not immune to hate crimes

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Every morning a large, bespectacled, older man wearing a neon yellow safety vest hands out the daily NY Metro newspaper to people swarming up the stairs to the subway. He knows me by now and we smile at each other as I take a paper. The exchange is one of the small weekly instances of feeling some vague connection to this crazy city.

The Metro is nice because it offers brief snippets of big national stories, the occasional exclusive feature, previews of NYC entertainment and a high concentration of local news. There are also inexplicably graphic ads for things like varicose veins and open sores. These same image-heavy advertisements also appear on posters on the subway and on local commercials. I don’t really get the marketing value. They make me nauseous.

Sometimes the paper has amusing stories about thwarted attempts to jump off the Empire State Building (one guy poised himself on the sight-seeing ledge and then, when he knew everyone was watching, hurled himself off  but - Wile E. Coyote style - only fell one story to the wider platform below). But today it was really, really depressing.

First there was the story about a 14-year-old girl riding on a bus in Jamaica, N.Y. killed by mysterious stray bullets, another about a cyclist killed by a taxi in Brooklyn, another about someone who fell between the train tracks and then the worst – a man shot in the face in the WestVillage for being gay.

As most of you are well aware, I’m not thrilled about living in a concrete jungle with 8 million people – a glowing target for terrorist attacks, derelicts, spit on the street and a gazillion other possible dangers and revulsions not typically found in the pristine mountains of Colorado. But I am thrilled to live in a place that not only allows but celebrates same sex marriage, diversity and equal rights. 

I was reminiscing back to Friday night when my girlfriend and I passed through the West Village on the subway on the way home from a concert in Brooklyn, her asleep on my shoulder. I was thinking about how, had we gotten out at one of the West Village stops with the mob of people who typically flock to this young, cool, high-energy epicenter of diversity and acceptance that we would have probably been in very close proximity to where Elliot Morales followed Mark Carson and his friend down a busy street and without skirmish, shot Carson in the face because he was gay.

I realize that one takes a risk any time one leaves the house. Shit, even in your house, who knows when an airplane could suddenly fly into it or an anvil could land on your head the minute you lean out the window. Still, there is clearly a higher risk when you live in a place with such a high density of people. You never know when you can board some form of public transportation with a wall of people and fall victim to a gangster’s stray bullet or a terrorist’s carefully placed explosive. And there comes an even higher risk when you choose to ride a bicycle on the NYC streets (more terrifying, as I have mentioned before, then any steep, loose, rock-filled mountain bike ride I have ever been on. I do believe some of the taxi drivers actually TRY to hit you. Remind me to write about the time I got lost in a really shitty area of the Bronx and resorted to riding with one trembling hand on the handlebars and the other clutching my pepper spray).

But I never want to think that I’m taking a risk by allowing my girlfriend to fall asleep on my shoulder on the subway or by holding her hand as we walk down the street. I thought we had moved passed all that. Especially in New York. But I have to admit this story makes me very sad. And scared.

A part of me wants to march in the streets with all the gay people I know wearing rainbows, daring all the haters to come get up in my grill. The other wants to hunker down at home … taking my chances with falling anvils.