Violence against queer people: race, class, gender, and the persistence of anti-LGBT discrimination
Violence against lesbians and gay men has increasingly captured media and scholarly attention. But these reports tend to focus on one segment of the LGBT community - white, middle class men - and largely ignore that part of the community that arguably suffers a larger share of the violence: racial minorities, the poor, and women. In this book, the author offers an investigation of anti-queer violence that focuses on the role played by race, class, and gender. Drawing on interviews with forty-seven victims of violence, the author shows that LGBT people encounter significantly different forms of violence - and perceive that violence quite differently - based on their race, class, and gender. The author's research highlights the extent to which other forms of discrimination - including racism and sexism - shape LGBT people's experience of abuse. For instance, lesbian and transgender women often described violent incidents in which a sexual or a misogynistic component was introduced, and that LGBT people of color sometimes weren't sure if anti-queer violence was based solely on their sexuality or whether racism or sexism had also played a role. Many feel that the struggle for gay rights has largely been accomplished and the tide of history has swung in favor of LGBT equality. This book, on the contrary, argues that the lives of many LGBT people have improved very little, if at all, over the past thirty years.--description from back cover.
