Due to overwhelming evidence of the crime, Grace and Nathan's testimony, and later a confession from one of the participants who gave the names of the others they were all sentence to seven to ten years in jail for assault and hate crimes. We are all, gay and straight together, hurt by this prejudice. Grace, Jack, and Karen were hurt by seeing what it did to a friend, and Will was physically injured. Both Jack and Will have been affected by it emotionally in many ways, and if you look at your own life I'm sure you can find the effects of homophobia as well; if you can not because you don't know anyone who is GLBT (Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender) then that alone is evidence of it.
Authors Note:
I'm a lesbian from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, and since I wrote this some of my friends have been the victims of GLBT focused hate crimes. The gay community in Pittsburgh is very small and we all know each other, when something happens to one of us it affects us all. I was hoping I could give some sense of how hate crimes cause pain far beyond the one person they hurt. If you are straight and reading this then I hope I've shown you a little bit of what homophobia can do to people, and for those of you who are GLBT and reading this I want you to know that you are not alone. I wrote this several years ago and I went back re-upload it (now that I'm no longer on Mac the document isn't full of computer errors like it was before) and I made some basic editing changes. Now that I'm a college student my writing skills have improved significantly compared to when I wrote this in tenth grade. If I can find the time to work on this further I may update and/or extend it more.