four men jumped a guy in Lavender Heights. six days later the block threw a party.

via KCRA, carried on the CNN wire, and Hoodline.

what happened on august 31

Shortly before one in the morning on August 31, Joseph Sais was walking home from a night out in Lavender Heights, Sacramento's gay district, with a friend. Four men started in on them with anti-gay and racist slurs. Then they chased Sais down and punched him, repeatedly. He came out of it with a split lip, a cut forehead and broken glasses, and he got away by running toward the security staff outside a bar.

This happened near 20th and L. Sacramento police took a felony assault bias report. Nobody has been arrested.

the block threw a festival

On Sunday the Rainbow Festival filled 20th and K. One block up.

The festival has been running for more than four decades. This year's theme was Retro Rainbow, which is exactly the kind of thing you plan in February when the worst thing on your mind is whether the DJ lineup is too much disco. It went ahead as scheduled, with live music, food, fundraisers, and a perimeter.

Terry Sidie owns Faces, the nightclub, and started the festival. He did the arithmetic out loud for KCRA. "I have to have a security guard for every 100 people, plus 8 police officers today. About 30 more security." And then the part that costs something to say: "It's sad we have to have so much, but we do."

Steven Murphie, who lives there, was honest about what he had started carrying. "I've gotten to the point where I'm carrying a taser and pepper spray. A friend of mine said, is that where we're at right now? Unfortunately, we have to protect ourselves." He did not sound proud of it. "I don't want to feel like I need to come to this community armed, because people who don't respect us want to attack us."

why the neighborhood counts exits

Lavender Heights has a reason to count its exits. On Halloween night last year, Alvin Prasad, 58, left the Badlands nightclub on K Street with his adult daughter and their friends. A man took issue with his costume. Prasad went down with blunt-force trauma, never woke up, and died on December 28. A 24-year-old was arrested and later booked on homicide. Sacramento made Prasad a posthumous Grand Marshal of its Pride festival, which is the only promotion nobody wants.

So this is a neighborhood that knows precisely what it is standing in, and it put up gates and hired thirty extra bodies and opened at eleven in the morning anyway.

Sidie was not doing defiance for the cameras. Asked what he wants, he said he wants more of it. "I need more people, more gay businesses in Lavender Heights. I want it to be notoriously gay and we accept everybody."

Notoriously gay. Two words, on a block where a man got his glasses broken six days earlier, one street over.

Four men can ruin a Sunday. It takes a whole neighborhood to throw one.