Meanwhile, in Donald Trump’s America, a gay man was brutally beaten after asking selfish thugs to wear a face mask
Donald Trump’s administration rolled back LGBT+ healthcare protections on the fourth anniversary of the Pulse shooting. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
A gay man was brutally beaten by two men in Manhattan, New York, leaving him with a severe concussion and needing staples to his head, simply because he asked them to wear a face mask.
In a piece for Advocate, Matt Foreman, a former head of grassroots network National LGBTQ Task Force, described the horrifying moment he stared into his husband, Francisco’s eyes, “seeing blood spill from his nose and mouth, and feeling my hand trying to stop the bleeding from the back of his head.”
Foreman said that while walking along a narrow pavement in the block they live by in early August, he and his Francisco were walking when two men passed them. “Wear a mask!” Francisco shouted.
“In less than a minute,” Foeman described, “my husband was hit in the face and the back of his head with some kind of weapon and laid unconscious on the sidewalk.”
As the face mask becomes a new culture war, a gay man was pummelled into a concussion.
Face coverings, in becoming almost shorthand for the devastating coronavirus pandemic itself, have, in turn, been ballooned to a flashpoint of a culture war.
As much the protocol has been amplified by healthcare chiefs and lawmakers – wear a mask, save lives – small amounts of people, chiefly men, researchers say, refuse to don one.
The excuses anti-makers list are simple – freedom – because it is simply too much to strap on a piece of fabric to not only protect the wearer, but all those around them from a deadly virus, apparently.
Emergency services rushed to the scene, Foreman said, as the New York Police Department and a New York Fire Department ambulance arrived to a scene of a blood-splashed pavement and a man contorting in pain.
Francisco was taken to the emergency room in St Vincent’s Hospital. He has since recovered – “the staples are out of his head (he sports a lovely scar), no teeth lost, and the symptoms of his severe concussion seem to be fading each day.”
Law enforcement said they had taped a clear video of the incident but, at the time of writing, had been unable to positively identify either perpetrators.
