S.F. gay-book slasher put on probation - Vandalism charge also a hate crime

San Fransisco Chronicle ^ | Thursday, September 19, 2002 | Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writer

[weegee]

The hate crime was not book burning, it was book slashing -- 607 books, to be exact.

For nearly a year, someone lurked in the stacks at San Francisco's Main Library and the Chinatown branch, vandalizing books. Almost always they were volumes on gay and lesbian subjects, some of them out of print and hard to replace.

[Paleo Conservative]

HORMEL CENTER HIT HARD Library employees first noticed the slashings during the summer of 2000. About 200 of the damaged volumes were in the Hormel Center, a collection of works of gay and lesbian literature that opened in 1996, thanks to a gift by philanthropist James Hormel.

James Hormel, one of the meat heirs. He was Clinton's ambassador to Luxembourg.

[ItisaReligionofPeace]

sounds like he was a meat heir in more than one way.

[jaz.357]

Just what was his BEEF?

[Chancellor Palpatine]

"It was really kind of insane"

The article could stop there, because it explained the guy in 6 short words.

[Minutemen]

Me thinks the bizarreness of the crime perpetrated upon this collection of perversion sort of cancels each other out, eh??

[weegee]

Yep. I caught that, that's why I put him in the keywords.

[weegee]

They chalk it up as a hate crime. I wonder if they included a charge of "hating pigs".

[Minutemen]

The vandal's antipathy toward things gay didn't stop at homosexuality. He damaged books by Gay Talese and the historian Peter Gay, and he even defaced a book of poetry by Mark Levine titled "Enola Gay," after the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Either he din't know how to properly define his "search" or this man just doesn't like anything "gay"

[Frohickey]

They chalk it up as a hate crime. I wonder if they included a charge of "hating pigs".

Was he an Arab? Aren't we all americans, like the TV commercials the Ad Council put up? Aren't the librarians the ones that should be charged with hate crimes? ;)

[weegee]

They discuss working on the case for years. I wonder if they ever tried setting up a security camera pointed at the stacks to see who was putting up the damaged books.

Many of the books at the downtown Houston Public Library are damaged (many pictures have been cut or torn out). Eventually they get tossed to the "library book sale" where they are sold along with donated books that were never shelved and books on "outdated" subjects.

[csvset]

The book, "The Complete Pig," was meticulously cut up, with the behinds of the pigs snipped from the photos on the cover.

Perhaps the pig butts are on the back cover?