7,000 Hate Crimes on Gays Reported in ’89 : Bigotry: The total reflects a slight decline from 1988. California ranks first among states in physical assaults.

More than 7,000 hate crimes against homosexuals were reported last year in the nation, according to a report released Thursday by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

California ranked first in reported incidents of physical assaults.

The finding of “widespread anti-gay violence and victimization” was based on formal but unscientific surveys of 119 gay-community organizations in 40 states.

Incidents included, for example, the beating of a homosexual man in Kentucky by two men with tire irons. The victim was then locked in the trunk of a car with a live snapping turtle as the two tried to set the vehicle on fire. The man suffered permanent brain damage.

The report also noted an incident near Yosemite National Park, where three teen-agers in a car shouted slurs and hurled beer bottles at a car with gay men inside, forcing their car into a guard rail near a cliff. In another incident, a high school student from Greensboro, N.C., suffered a broken arm when his parents beat him after finding gay literature in his room.

The 7,031 reported incidents included 62 murders and 4,709 threats. The overall total reflected a slight decline from 1988, when the group documented about 7,200 such incidents. The task force emphasized that the study provides only a sense of the magnitude of the problem and that the real numbers likely are higher.

Of the 563 anti-gay incidents reported in California, 198 were categorized as physical assaults--by far the highest total. The state with the next highest number of physical assaults was New York with 103, followed by Illinois with 82.

The highest number of reports of all categories of incidents, including violence, vandalism and harassment came from North Carolina with 1,204 cases and Texas with 997.

“Although we have made remarkable strides . . . we remain a community under siege, battling an epidemic of bigotry and violence,” said Kevin Berrill, author of the report.

The correlation between fear of AIDS and attacks on gays continued in 1989, with perpetrators citing AIDS during their attacks. About 15% of all reported incidents in 1989 were “AIDS-related,” the report found.

About 19% of all the reported incidents occurred on college campuses. They included physical attacks on UCLA lesbian sorority members and protests of a gay-rights meeting at Fresno State University campus in which people in Ku Klux Klan-style robes bore signs that said “queers go home.”

The group’s report comes amid unprecedented federal and state government efforts to document the level of hate-crime activity against homosexuals and religious, racial and ethnic minorities.

On April 23, President Bush signed into law the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, which requires the federal government to collect data on such crimes. Twenty-two states have hate-crime laws, but 13 of those exclude gay-related incidents. California includes anti-gay crimes in its hate-crime law.

“The more we bring these crimes to light, the less they will be tolerated,” said Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), who called assaults on gays “attacks on all our constitutional rights.”

Michael Lieberman, associate director of the Anti-Defamation League in Washington, D.C., emphasized that the goal of hate-crimes activists is to convince state and local law authorities “that these crimes are not pranks, that they will be reported to the police and that they will be treated seriously.”

Berrill contended that the public not only accepts but even embraces gay-bashing. He cited as an example the boast of Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Director William Seidman, who said that his forcefulness would make “Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”

Considering such attitudes, said Berrill, “it should come as no surprise that anti-gay attacks are widespread.”