In 2005, a 17-year-old female wrestler and leader of a Marin County, CA, high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance said that mystery antagonists had spray-painted DIE FAG on her car and her school’s wall and had received several threatening phone calls attacking her sexuality. A vigil was held in her honor. Then she admitted she was the one who’d spray-painted both DIE FAGs and that she hadn’t received any threats at all. After the hoax was revealed, a female leader of a “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy group” said, “The next few weeks will no doubt be difficult for everyone involved, and I hope the community reacts with compassion.”

Whatever you say, Toots.

But it’s not only the lezzies. Fags have been known to pull this sort of stunt, too:

This April, gay University of North Carolina student Quinn Matney said that while he was taking a leisurely campus stroll at 3AM, a male who conveniently happened to be carrying a searing-hot piece of metal approached him and held the burning ingot to his wrist while saying, “Here’s a taste of hell, you fucking fag.” Matney described his assailant as a 19-year-old Caucasian with a “large build” who was accompanied by two other hateful Caucasian males. Someone described as holding the weighty title of the university’s “Co-President of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender and Straight Alliance” complained that the “blatant hate crime” wasn’t receiving enough public attention. The victim complained, too. “It just doesn’t make sense to me,” Matney said of an “attack” that had burned all the way through to his tendons. It didn’t make sense to police, either, and within a week it was determined that he’d made up the whole story.

In 2007, Minnesota State University student Paul Marquardt said he was attacked and beaten by four men who pelted him with anti-gay slurs as they rained their fists upon him. As a gay-rights march was being planned in his honor, he admitted to police that although he’d been attacked, no one said anything about him being gay. “He told us that the story had gotten away from him,” said a police officer.

In 2001, gay New Jersey college student Edward Drago was arrested for sending death threats to himself and a gay student group, then filing false reports about these “crimes” to police. In response to the muck-up, which involved a huge gay-rights rally replete with pink ribbons, a college advisor said the experience had been “a wonderfully teachable time to talk about what we face,” whatever the fuck that means.

In 1998, University of Georgia resident assistant Jerry William Kennedy, Jr., told the police he’d been victimized by a whopping NINE hate crimes over the previous three years, including three incidents where homophobes had set fire to “pro-gay literature he put on his door.” While the school’s Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Student Union was using him as a political prop “to have the university create a panel to look into hate crimes,” Kennedy admitted he was fibbing the whole time. He was sentenced to three years’ probation for arson and filing false reports.

In 2000, 38-year-old horse trainer Branson Carroll said that a knife-wielding man kidnapped him near California Highway 101 and took him to a remote trail before proceeding to bind, gag, sexually assault, and make repeated disparaging comments about his sexual orientation. After a series of probing, prodding, and penetrating questions by investigators, Carroll admitted it never happened.

In 2004, 22-year-old Floyd Elliott told the police he’d been attacked by two males in a parking lot who branded his skin, slashed his stomach, and tried carving the word FAG into his forehead. But just as with Morton Downey, Jr.’s infamously backwards swastika, Elliott had carved the word FAG into his own forehead while looking into a mirror, meaning it appeared backward to police investigators.

Despite all this, gay activists insist that all of these hoaxes should not dissuade us from the unblinking, unquestioning perception that anti-gay violence and hate crimes are at epidemic levels.

Are they correct?

According to this PDF, the FBI counted 167,570 homicides in the United States in the decade from 1996-2005. Of these, only 26 were deemed to have been motivated by anti-gay bias. That’s a wee bit over one hundredth of one percent, which would fail to meet most reasonable standards of what constitutes an epidemic.

The truth seems to be that all these presumably objective news outlets jumped on the Gay Girl in Damascus story because they wanted it to be true. Her phony saga perfectly played to their sympathies: She was a tolerant Muslim gash-licker risking her life so that intolerant Muslims would tolerate her gash-licking, all of it woven into the by-now nauseating Arab Spring buzzwords about democracy and freedom and rights and equality and other such intangibles. And they all gobbled it up as eagerly as she claimed she ate pussy.

I believe that if someone’s comfortable with who they are, they don’t need constant validation and endless hugs, pats, and tummy rubs from people who are different from them.

It’s not the gay part I hate about you, at least when you aren’t obnoxiously litigious about it. It’s your dreary self-image based entirely on self-pity and an obsessive need for victimization that is so acute, many of you feel forced to fabricate unholy acts of persecution against yourselves.

I don’t care what kind of genitals you put in your mouth; the problem is that your mouth tells lies. No law on Earth can force me to tolerate a liar. Get it straight. Or get it gay. I don’t care, as long as you finally get it.