title:  Two LGBT Men Horrifically Burned During Anti-Gay Hate Attack (VIDEO)
text: Twenty-one-year-old Marquez Tolbert and his 23-year-old boyfriend, Anthony Gooden Jr., were asleep in the home Tolbert shared with his mother and her boyfriend, when the couple was viciously attacked.According to the couple, Martin Blackwell, who was dating Tolbert s mother at the time of the attack, poured boiling water over the two men as they slept.During a March 15 interview with Atlanta s Project Q, Tolbert said Blackwell pulled him up, saying  Get out of my house with all that gay. Tolbert said,  I couldn t stop screaming. The twenty-one year old victim went on to say,  We were just burning. My body was just stinging. Both men suffered second and third-degree burns during the attack. Tolbert spent ten days in the hospital, while the second victim was hospitalized for five weeks.Image credit: Vickie Gray, via Huffington PostBlackwell was arrested on two counts of aggravated battery and held without bail. Although the state of Georgia does not have a hate crimes statute, federal hate crimes charges could still be applied in the case.On March 17, Tolbert spoke with WSB-TV about the attack.Watch the interview below. According to the latest FBI statistics,  7,242 people were the victims of a hate crime in 2013. More than 20 percent of all victims of hate crimes included in the FBI report were targeted because of their sexual orientation.But most advocates believe that hate-based attacks against members of the LGBT community are severely underreported. The facts support this conclusion.As Vocativ reports here, a large number of hate crimes committed against LGBT citizens are never identified or reported as hate crimes.Gregory Herek, a psychology professor at the University of California at Davis who specializes in violence against sexual minorities, explained to Vocativ: The best estimates suggest that the real number of hate crimes are up to 40 times larger than the numbers contained in the FBI reports. For a hate crime to be recorded in the national statistics, it first must be reported by the victim to the police,  Herek said.Most often, this doesn t happen: In fact, the National Crime Victimization Survey found that more than half of hate crimes are never reported. That s only the beginning of the battle.  Then it must be classified by the local law enforcement agency as a hate crime,  he says.  This often isn t done unless the agency has special training for officers and personnel who are assigned to respond to hate crimes. What happened to these two young men is horrific. Yet what can we expect from a society which allows Christian extremists to openly call for the execution of LGBT citizens? What can we expect from a society that grants right wing pastors tax-exempt status to spread homophobic hatred through their churches, or a society that allows republican legislators to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to further an agenda of anti-gay hate? If we want to stop the violence we have to stop the extremists who instigate it, shutting them down in our communities, our churches and especially in our government.Featured image via Vickie Gray via Huffington Post 