Pair Form Unlikely Team To Fight Prejudice

Theirs is an unlikely friendship.
Timothy Zaal is a former neo-Nazi skinhead who served time behind bars on hate crime charges for assaulting an Iranian couple.
Matthew Boger is a gay man Zaal once beat unconscious on a street corner in Hollywood.
More than two decades later, Zaal, 42, and Boger, 39, were brought together by their work at the Museum of Tolerance to fight hatred.
After their initial shock, the two men have become friends, even turning to each other for advice and consolation. On Sunday, they sat next to each other on a museum stage and shared their story of reconciliation.
Zaal, a stocky man with a goatee and tattoos, turned to Boger during the program and apologized for what he had done when they were teenagers.
Boger, a much smaller man in a blazer and jeans, smiled awkwardly and responded, "But you are a good guy — now."
That night in 1981, Boger was hanging out with a few friends at a hamburger stand when a group of skinheads ran toward them shouting obscenities. He remembers trying to flee to an alley, where Boger said he was trampled, punched and kicked.
"I came to, and all I saw was blood," Boger said.
Raised in a conservative suburb of the Bay Area, Boger said his mother kicked him out of the house after he told her he was gay.
He jumped onto a bus to Los Angeles. After the attack, Boger decided not to call the police or go to the hospital because he was homeless and a teenage runaway and feared he would be sent to juvenile hall if his parents refused to come get him.
"I healed eventually, over time, physically," Boger said of the assault. "But emotionally and in every other way, it took much longer.
Boger eventually went to trade school and became a hair colorist, but said he still struggled with his own prejudices against anyone who wasn't gay. To deal with those feelings, Boger said, he began volunteering as a docent at the museum two years ago. He was later hired as the floor manager, responsible for the day-to-day operations of the museum.
For his part, Zaal grew up in a "wholesome" suburban neighborhood in the San Gabriel Valley and said he learned racism early in life from his parents. Then his brother was shot and wounded by an African American and Zaal became a leader in the neo-Nazi movement.
"I breathed, I ate, slept, drank white power," he said.
Zaal remembers beating up Boger and his friends, describing it as "very, very brutal." He felt a rush that night, like he often did when he and his friends got into fights.
"Violent confrontations made me feel good about myself," he said.
In 1990, he was sentenced to time in Los Angeles County jail for his involvement in the attack on the Iranian couple, whom he mistakenly believed to be Jewish.
The former skinhead said his transformation began after he had a son.
One day, Zaal said, he was at a grocery store when his son called a black man "the n-word" and several customers looked at him with disgust.
from The Los Angeles Times