Just catching up on back issues of the SGN when this headline caught my eye...

Assault near Tribe men's club investigated as a bias crime

First: I didn't know that Basic Plumbing—the gay-and-bi-and-closeted-and-ordained men's sex club wedged between the Comet and Elliott Bay Books—had changed its name to Tribe. Good to know. And now for the alarming details of a anti-gay bias crime that happened steps from Stranger HQ...

An October 30 assault on a Gay man in the heart of Capitol Hill is being investigated as a bias crime. The victim, Dustin Hamm of Seattle, was injured in the assault, but did not require hospitalization. The assault took place in front of Tribe (formerly Basic Plumbing), at 1505 10th Avenue.

"I guess it was 3:00 am," Hamm told SGN. "I was standing by my car in front of Tribe, waiting for a friend to come out, and I see this man—clearly intoxicated—peeing on the front door."

"So I said, 'Hey, that's a business. You're peeing on the front door of a business,'" Hamm continued. "And he said 'Oh,' and he went over and peed on the dumpster next to it."

Things went downhill from there, Hamm says.

"Then I said, 'You could at least have shown me your cock.'"

"I guess I shouldn't have said that," Hamm added.

I'm a very bad homo, I guess, because I found it hard to sympathize with Mr. Hamm after that "[show] me your cock" business. I do not approve of what happened to him—the guy who failed to show Mr. Hamm his cock attacked Hamm (with an assist from two friends), but Hamm managed to escape into Tribe and avoided what could've been a much worse beating—and I'm terribly, terribly shocked that anyone besides me would use the f-word right here in the heart of Capitol Hill. But while we would all like to live in a world where, say, women were free to wear whatever they wanted to in public without risking verbal harassment and/or physical assault and gay men were free to ask strange men to show us their cocks without first verifying sexual orientation and/or attraction, we don't live in that world. So I found it hard to get worked up over this:

Hamm told SGN that he was impressed by the officer who responded to the scene. "He was so kind and nice," Hamm says. "He told me he has a sister who is a Lesbian."

He is not so pleased with the detective who is handling the investigation.

"She called me a week later and said not much is going to come of the investigation," Hamm said. "She told me, 'Look, Dustin, you shouldn't have asked to see his cock. Those are fighting words.'"

I think we can all agree that drunk men shouldn't punch strange men who ask to see their cocks. But men who ask strangers to show them their cocks shouldn't be that surprised when they do get punched.