It was midnight. I could sense a car slowing behind me as I walked toward a gay bar.

My friend John walked about 10 feet behind me, the freezing temperature slowing him down and speeding me up.

A voice called from the slowing car and I turned around, thinking the driver was lost, looking for directions.

He wasn’t lost. He and his friends found exactly what they were looking for. And in that instant of realization, that moment when your heart stops and your feet take off, you understand, profoundly, what it means to be the object of unbridled hate.

Everything happened in a burst – all four doors in the car flinging open, fours sets of hands gripping tire irons, bats and pipes.

We took off, John and I, without a word uttered between us. In the horrifying first few seconds of attempted escape, it dawned on me that they were more likely to catch John because I had been walking ahead of him.

Suddenly I heard the dull thud of metal on flesh and knew they had gotten him. My heart was pounding so loud, my body was moving so fast and yet I could hear some little voice inside me saying, “You have to help him. You can’t abandon him. Even if it means dying in the process, you have to help him.”

I stopped. Turned around. We were outnumbered two to one and we had no weapons. What would I do? What could I do?

I never had to answer the question. By some miracle, they had only grazed John with the tire iron, and he managed to keep on running. We reached a main thoroughfare and the oncoming traffic scared our attackers into retreat. We had escaped.

John didn’t say much and didn’t stay long at the bar. I realized only later that he had gone into mild shock. The next day he knocked on my door and showed me something repulsive. The backs of his legs, from his hamstrings to his calves were a sheet of swollen black and blue bruises. A common result, his doctor had said, from the trauma of a full and sudden sprint from a standing position.

To be the object of careening disgust, to be hunted for sport, these are the shadows cast by America’s darkest values. It would be easy to dismiss our attackers as violent thugs but that would miss a larger point. The men who chased us weren’t monsters; they were attentive pupils sitting at the foot of America’s great institutions.

Whether it’s the military banning gay recruits, the Boy Scouts enshrining a policy of exclusion, or the church ex-communicating us for loving the wrong person, many of America’s institutions teach a very un-American lesson: Hate thy neighbor.

Our attackers weren’t a cause of physical violence. They were the effect of a dark consciousness. A few years ago, Judy Shepard told an Oregon paper, “Do I blame the two young men who murdered my son? No. I blame society for giving them permission.”

Society gave our attackers permission, too. They were simply taking the next logical step laid out by so many churches, families and institutions. What comes after exclusion, expelling and ex-communicating?

Elimination.

Sometimes the lessons of America’s intolerance ends with helpless boys left to die on rural fence posts; other times it ends with grown men left to the luck of their instincts.

Fortunately, the numbers of those lessons are shrinking. America’s social curriculum is changing, much like its science curriculum changed when evolution replaced creationism. It is increasingly possible to be different and live a good, safe, productive life in America.

As long as you’re fast enough.