ABSTRACT
Hate- or bias-motivated violence has and continues to take a variety of forms, from symbolic to fatal assaults. It also has implicated and continues to implicate a range of perpetrators, from intimates to strangers to institutions such as the state, religion, and medicine. Violence against homosexuals and people presumed to be homosexual has been documented for as long as the lives of gay men and lesbians have been documented. violence directed at individuals because of their real or imagined social characteristics and group membership is as old as humankind. Like other causes of the 1960s, women’s activism in the middle part of the twentieth century evolved in an environment conditioned by the civil rights movement and culminated in the amalgam of groups collectively labeled the women’s movement. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1973 to promote the interests of gays and lesbians in the United States.
