Gay bars still pouring in wake of ricin threats

[cboy4]

Originally published Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 12:00 AM
By Sharon Pian Chan and Christine Clarridge
Seattle Times staff reporters

Several Seattle bar owners who received anonymous letters threatening to poison customers with highly toxic ricin called the matter creepy but doubted it would hurt business.

"I don't think this community is going to be scared to go out," said Carla Schricker, owner of Re-bar, one of 11 gay bars that were threatened in the typewritten letters.

Still, Schricker and many others have posted signs warning customers not to leave their drinks unattended. They also have asked staff to keep an eye out for suspicious behavior.

<snip>

The letter sent to bars quoted the poem "A Display of Mackerel" by gay writer Mark Doty, leading many to speculate the letters were written by someone who is gay or lesbian. The poem was recently published in his book "Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems," which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.

The letter mimics the poem in the line, "The targets won't care much that they'll be dead and nearly frozen, just as, presumably, they didn't care that they were living."

Doty, who lives in New York City and is currently teaching at Stanford University, said Wednesday he was appalled that his poem had been used in a threat.

"It's just deeply repellent," he said. He wrote the poem in 1994 as a meditation on the nature of the self and mortality after his partner died of AIDS.

"It was a poem that would have helped to address the suffering of gay men, and here it's being used to instill fear," he said.

Dan Savage, editorial director for The Stranger, suspects the letter came from someone in the gay community who was frustrated with going to bars. If it were a hate letter from a straight person, he speculated, the letter would have used epithets and contained references to God.

"It's a gay self-hater," Savage said.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008602195_ricin08m0.html

[mitchtv]

1. Savage's logic is flawed

many hatefull freeps are not religious. That however is beside the point. Is the FBI considering this to be terrorism. Gay or not this perp belongs in Leavenworth.