Photographer Uses Camera to Fight Back After Gay-Bashing

Art photographer Iannis Delatolas says he was gay-bashed at a Brooklyn, N.Y., bar while dozens of onlookers did nothing to help.

Delatolas told the story to Michael Musto of The Village Voice. He said he took his dog, Tulip, to Mission Dolores, a hipster bar in Brooklyn, where a "frat boy" in his 20s cut in line in front of him.

"I told him to wait his turn and he mouthed off some 'fuck you, you fucking queer,'" Delatolas remembers. "I had some loud words with him, and he took his beer and left. I was shaken, I go there all the time, I never thought this would happen there."

A security guard asked the man to leave, and that, Delatolas tells Musto, is when the shouting match really began. One of the man's friends, he said, suddenly attacked and punched him nearly a dozen times before the security guard could stop it. After all that, the moment Delatolas says haunts him is when he asked for help.

"I get up in a daze," he tells the Voice. "I ask for a witness as I am dialing 911. The courtyard is packed with about 30 mostly white hipsters. No one comes forward."

Delatolas shot the self-portrait you see here the next day and says it's "helped me take back my dignity, it was my way of fighting back."

Learn more about Delatolas's art on his website.
Read the complete first-person account as told to Musto.