NOTE: Many of you may have heard of Blake Hayes before. As he mentions in his story, the hate crime he was a victim of was widely publicized last fall.

He can currently be heard across the Tri-State area on 95.5 WPLJ-FM, a legendary New York radio station playing Adult Top 40 music. He’s also recently become Scott Shannon’s back-up guy on the syndicated True Oldies Channel, which broadcasts coast-to-coast on over 60 AM/FM stations in major cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Tampa.

Blake also does some correspondent work for ourscenetv.com, an LGBT entertainment and lifestyle video content site.

If you’re interested in being in a Video Story, just let me know and we’ll set up a time and place to meet.

Watch all the IFD Video Stories here.

For the transcript, Continue Reading.

I’m Blake. I’m from Madison, Connecticut, but I live in New York City. And I had read about people being assaulted for being gay, I think we’ve all been called names before, but it really hit me for the first time when me and a couple friends were walking down 9th Ave in Hells Kitchen which is a very gay neighborhood, and a guy started calling us names and ending up pushing a friend, slapping me in the face, pushing another one into a parked car. It was ridiculous at the time, I was like, this doesn’t happen in this neighborhood. But it did. And then the police didn’t really do anything about it. We called them and then they showed up.

So it turned into a story and it spread like wild fire around Facebook and around blogs and we did interviews with TV stations here in New York and the police called us right back after that and started investigating it, as they should have in the first place. It was a lesson in…you have to talk about it. Whether it’s talking about whether it happened so you can tell people that issues like this still exist, or talking about that it happened to make the response to happen that needs to happen. Whether it was the investigation or so that the police don’t neglect stuff like that in the future. But nothing would have come of it if we hadn’t talked about it.

There was a kid who read about it, I guess on Facebook, in California and he sent me a message and he said, “Listen, I’ve never come out to anyone before. It took me a lot of courage to send you this email. I’ve never dated a guy, I’ve never slept with a guy, I know I’m gay but I haven’t come to terms with it myself. And the reason I wanted to tell you, even though I don’t even know you, is because you stood up for it and you’re proud of who you are and you guys are advocates. And you made me realize it’s okay. And that I could be happy to be this person that I’m figuring out.

He sent me a message a couple weeks later. It was amazing, he said, “You’d be so proud of me. I told my sister and she was totally fine with it just like you said she’d be, and I came out to her roommate who’s gay it turns out.” And he’s now in the process of coming out to his mom. And I didn’t really do anything except be me. So it’s pretty amazing the power that you have just by putting ourselves out there and letting people — random people on Facebook or people in our family — know that, hey, this stuff affects me. So it affects you, too.

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