Memorial for a gay murder – and the New York Times looks the other way

We asked Scott Rose to review a concert commemorating Lou Rispoli, the music administrator who was murdered on the streets of Queens in what police regard as a gay hate crime. You might have thought the Times, which failed to report the murder or publish an obituary for Lou, might have covered the concert…. But of course they couldn’t. That would mean admitting they were in the wrong.

Here’s Scott’s review.

Death of a Gay Father

By

Scott Rose

Not all gay bashings end with a death but when a victim does die many scoldingly allege that we can’t really tell whether a hate crime occurred.

“As soon as Lou Rispoli came back from lunch, he knew he was in for it,” is the first sentence of Anthony Tommasini’s excellent book on Virgil Thomson, whose composition Louis Rispoli: In a Boat – a gentle barcarolle — was lovingly performed by pianists Jenny Lin and Louis Svard on Thursday evening at Greenwich House. Jenny told us she was a friend of Lou’s without giving details about what happened, but another friend of Lou’s – New York City Council Member Jimmy Van Bremer – previously said: “To see Lou in his hospital bedroom is to see a level of violence and depravity that you could not imagine exists.”

Lou’s name remains in The Greenwich House Music School’s promotional materials, for when he was attacked and then died in October he was still in the employ of that school. A school booklet shows children practicing and saying such things as “We love Ms. Beth, and can’t wait to perform for our friends and family!” which I mention because Lou Rispoli adopted and raised two children with his husband Danyal.

Gay Parent is successfully published in Queens where Lou was attacked and killed but the New York Times has never written about that magazine or its editor-in-chief Angeline Acain. Gay parents, a tiny minority, are targets of a war which the New York Times has helped to wage.

Mark Regnerus’s hoax study on gay parenting was booby-trapped in its design by its malicious anti-gay funders and there is solid documentation for that but when the Times first reported on the study in June, 2012 they quoted Penn State’s Paul Amato about it and said he was “not involved with the study” even though he was a paid consultant on it and had apparently been allowed to peer review it despite that conflict of interest. The anti-gay groups that sponsored the hoax then went around saying that the “independent” scholar Paul Amato has spoken favorably about the study to the New York Times. I showed the Times a copy of one of Paul Amato’s Regnerus study consulting contracts which I obtained through a long struggle over a Freedom of Information Act request but the Times decided there was no reason to publish a correction for its false statement that Amato was “not involved with the study.”

Ross Douthat of the New York Times cheerleads for a Church that had a power-sharing agreement with Mussolini and that participated in demonizing WWII-era homosexuals and then getting them deported to concentration camps but that didn’t stop Douthat from reporting on the Regnerus study by parroting Regnerus’s deliberate lies about it and then concluding that there should be no rush to give equal rights to families like that of Lou Rispoli.

The haters subsequently told everybody who would listen that the Regnerus study has been praised in the pages of the New York Times, (which has never reported on the solid documentation that the study is a hoax, ultimately orchestrated in large part by kingpin bigot Princeton Professor Robert George, about whom the Times has written glowingly).

The Queens Chronicle reported that police did not immediately hang fliers around the neighborhood for Lou as had been done in another case, and that an “evidence vehicle” did not arrive on the scene where Lou was bludgeoned until the day following the attack. Three perpetrators were involved in the deadly attack and one of them might say something incriminating to somebody – as Tim Page has suggested -- and that is as good a reason as any for the New York Times to [redacted] finally do a story on Lou, who doubtless would have enjoyed Thursday’s Greenwich House recital, for the room was filled with bonhomie as well as the dedication and virtuosity of the fine pianists and extraordinary paintings on the wall by a young man from Gabon and I managed to absorb every detail with some pleasure even as I sat there the entire time burning with intensest outrage over the unsolved murder of gay father Louis Rispoli.