One homophobic actor who has an extreme distaste for gay people and homosexuality decides to take out this rage by harming gay people in the place where they usually feel safest. And more recently, in 2013, there was another attempted arson attack on a gay bar in Seattle.Īnd so you see this pattern. Three years later, there was an attack on Backstreet Cafe in Roanoke. We saw an attack in an Atlanta lesbian club in 1997. In the intervening years, we've seen more attacks. And, in fact, the case today remains unsolved. MARK JOSEPH STERN: And the tragedy was really compounded by the fact that this went largely unnoticed and uncommented upon aside from jokes that were made at the time by talk radio hosts about all of the fruits in the bar. He sees the attack as the latest chapter in a long history of violence against gay clubs and bars, the most famous being a 1973 arson attack at a New Orleans club called the UpStairs Lounge. But Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern views it through a different lens. The massacre at an Orlando gay club is being talked about by politicians as an act of terrorism.
