A colour clash in Blenheim
So do we have this right? A pink shirt to a homophobe is like a red rag to a bull?
Apparently so, to judge from the attack on a Blenheim bartender walking home after a night’s work.
If anything, the brutish bull might be the more sophisticated thinker. It’s a myth that bulls are inflamed by mere colour. They’re red-green colour blind and as far as bullfights go their aggression is due to the movement of the matador’s cape, and perhaps the small matter of the torments they have endured from those lances in their back.
Whereas the snorting oafs who cried out to Kent Morgan that he was a ‘‘pink shirt wearing homo’’, then when he ignored them came up on him from behind, restrained and started hitting him, had less excuse.
Bruce Springsteen once wrote of young men who head into small towns ‘‘wearing trouble on their shirts’’.
But this wasn’t a case of gang colours. Or some in-your-face T-shirt slogan. It wasn’t any sort of provocation.
Morgan, a married man, wore it because he liked the colour.
The attack does seem to have been spur-of-the-moment rather than anything sprung from the sort of resentments indulgent drinkers can build up against bartenders.
This, in turn, suggests that it was what our American friends are given to calling a hate crime.
Granted, there wasn’t a lot of love behind it.
Hard to say, though, whether this was truly the result of the sexual and social fears that tend to underpin homophobic attacks.
What actually puckered the sphincters of these attackers might even have been that this was a townie look. A bit metrosexual.
Even down in Southland, you can on occasion see big, strapping footy-playing family men wearing pink shirts; though if the topic comes up they’ll probably gruffly correct you that the colour is mansalmon. It may have been that the issue in Blenheim was essentially one tediously familiar the length of the country; puffy, belligerent young men spoiling for someone to lash out against. In which case any lazy trigger would have done.
Like a wrong-branded sports jersey. Or a fashion look.
The reason Morgan came forward only now to report the October 14 incident was that another spasm of violence happened at the same intersection last week, when a man was held up at knifepoint. Whatever their underlying motivations for the pink-shirt assault, the fact these young men chose a perceived sexuality signal as their excuse shows that indulgent violence isn’t their only ugliness.
Morgan, and good on him for this, will continue to wear pink on occasion.