, a gay and African American poet-scholar who died during the nineties. In one of his essays, “I’ll Be Listening for My Name,” he touches upon the kind of doubled death lgbt artists face in the AIDS crisis, as they face racial discrimination in the public sphere that is compounded by the denial of their emotional and sexual lives by families and communities who refuse to recognize gays and lesbians. We have also been reading Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, which is about a teenage boy who is the chosen one, smart and athletic. Also gay, he eventually dies under the burden of homophobia, of being forced to see himself as simultaneously chosen and damned, angel and demon.
Well, this morning I was greeted by a story on crimes against the LGBT community in Newark, NJ, “In a Progressive State, a City Where Gay Life Hangs by a Thread.” The story is by Andrew Jacobs, who’s on the Newark beat at the NYT. It’s not a terrible story, and it does a nice job of outlining a broad picture of options for the lgbt community in lower and working class communities of color in Newark.
The story got me thinking, though, about how difficult it is to talk about sex and race– especially when we barely have language for sussing out race and class. So what happens when, as in most cases, we need to talk about all three at once? Often, it seems, we latch onto the one that best serves our own needs, a need fed by our perceptions “what counts” and “what matters.” But, again, what does this mean for the possibility of
understanding and transforming our social world? And how do we thus honor the lives of those whose death’s motivate such transformations?
As the title suggests, the narrative of the aforementioned NYT story emerges out of a contrast between gays’ lives in Newark and in other parts of the state. The article gets a little murky at times, as it conflates anti-gay bias as a class issue–as a result of a lack of resources for the community in a famously poor city, and as a race issue–as a result of the anti-gay bias endemic to black and Latino communities.
Don’t get me wrong, it is striking that over the past few years our attention has been repeatedly drawn to Newark, and there is something particularly compelling that these crimes against gay POC have taken place in the shadow of the most gay-friendly bastions. But does the fact of proximity mean that there is a larger story here about resources for the poor, and how there is more at stake than we imagine, or is it a story about intolerance in communities of color? Is it a story about insides or outsides? Or, if the answer is both, where do we locate responsibility for change?
I do think that in coverage that comes in the wake of such events, I’m thinking specifically of Sakia Gunn’s murder or of the Newark lesbians case, we often see media and legal establishments unable to deal with the chimera of race, class, and sex, unable to address one bias without enlisting the aid of another. Were the men who killed Sakia Gunn homophobic because they were black, or because they were “street”? Were the lesbians who fought an attack on the streets of Greenwich Village “just” thug chicks from Newark, who shouldn’t have been there anyway, or were they gay women, fighting back against street violence?
Or, if we are to believe reports that the Newark schoolyard killings were also anti-gay crimes, as well as (?) the murders of Shani Baraka and Rayshon Holmes, then there is a sense of hiding the hate crime (hat tip to Kenyon Farrow, who has links to more good posts on this; also a story in The Washington Blade.) It’s like there is a sense that if this were to emerge as an anti-gay crime, then the event would lose meaning as a watershed urban crime– thus also losing its status as a catalyst for both grassroot and governmental action in Newark.
Blue Jersey (”all the news that slips from print”) has put it best,
There are well-meaning and deeply caring people who don’t want any of this public. And they are right to be concerned that talking about this publicly may put the families through additional pain. This is a delicate situation involving young students, and it makes the decision to write this a very difficult one. In the end, because of the possible implications, remaining silent isn’t an option. We need to talk about this.
While it’s important to respect the wishes of the families in their time of grief, it’s also important to determine with certainty whether this was a crime based on sexual-orientation. The challenge we all face is to get to the bottom of things and to ensure these tragic events aren’t repeated. To do otherwise is unthinkable.
We still have vulnerable young people whose freedom we are honor-bound to safeguard. They live in the city of Newark and in every town, city and suburb in this state. How can we ensure they have every chance for a long, free life if we do not do everything we can do now to understand all that happened to Terrance, to Dashon, to Iofemi and to the fragile Natasha. And why.
Indeed. Pursuing the circumstances of their deaths in ultimately about honoring their lives in all their possible meanings. Theyy are listening for their names.
As Judy Shepard, mother of Matthew Shepard, stated soon after Sakia Gunn’s murder in 2003:
It is as if we are living in two Americas — one that tunes in to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy but turns a blind eye to the injustices gay and lesbian people still face.
“It is evident that with progress comes inevitable attack by those who are threatened by our work. In 2003, more than 30 cities and towns reported crimes against gays. Most of them do not garner national headlines like my son’s murder did. Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old lesbian, was fatally stabbed in Newark, N.J., on May 11 this year. F.C. Martinez, a Navajo, transgender 16-year-old, was murdered in a hate-motivated attack in 2001. The list goes on and on…
(Curtsy for the quote above to Professor Kim, who also has a post on the differences in media coverage of the Shepard and Gunn stories, and a chart thereon.)
According to an AP report at the NYT, it looks like the six West Virginians arrested for the kidnapping, rape, and torture of a young African American woman, Megan Williams, may soon appear in court. There is concern, however, that the trials may be delayed, as at least two of the defendents’ lawyers in the case have had to recuse themselves, because they have already worked as public defenders in past cases involving the defendents, who have been brought to court on a total of 108 charges since 1991.
I have been trying to decide if these are the most disgusting people on earth, because this really is the stuff of nightmares. We all talk about racism, and hate, and the persistence of our violent national past, but this is nonetheless an exemplary crime. Not unimaginable in its occurrence, but, still, the worse of the worse: a group of people who kidnapped a black woman, with no intention but to harm, degrade, and destroy. Leonard Codispoti, the local Magistrate in this jurisdiction,
“It was the worst case of human abuse I have seen since I have been a magistrate.
“Something like this is so horrifying it makes you want to puke. They got this girl out of Charleston and took her to Big Creek, threw her in a shack, raped and stabbed her, put a rope around her neck, made her eat animal feces and did other horrifying things to her” (Charleston Daily Mail, hat tip to Rikyrah).
And, I must say, I am a little bit surprised at how slowly the national has been on the story, despite pretty heavy coverage in the southeast. The AP only put out a video today (below), and Reuters hasn’t gone near it. CNN was shying away, though the story did eventually appear on CNN international. (In case you didn’t get the memo, outside the U.S., all the “news” is different. Even on CNN!) And indeed, why talk about a real sexual assault when we can instead obsess over Vanessa Hudgens in the nude? Why talk about a hate crime when we can instead debate Michael Vick’s racial victimhood?
My guess– and yes I am being snarky but I also really believe it– my guess is that as the defendants become more recognizable and categorizable as monsters, as exceptions, the story will spread. Until then, a slow burn, because the story is too ugly, too painful, and too real.
I struggled with putting their pictures on my site. Even though I think of my site as a space I share with you, a public space, even looking makes me feel dirty. So how to talk? More later.
Falwell was also so sinister because of how he cleared the space for hate “after racism.” By “after racism,” I mean that shift in our culture and political life after which outright, honest, plainspoken racism was just untenable. This created a real crisis for conservatives. Falwell and the Moral Majority made hate possible again. Or at least transformed racial hatred, giving it a code.
To me, part of what is so interesting about Falwell’s politics is the way its encoding of hate is actually quite pre-racism– if we imagine what John calls “fifties” racism as a post-civil war phenomenon. Prior to emancipation, racial difference was already heavily encoded as that which exemplifies all that is hateable. Slaves were simply thus slaves because they were not the chosen.
What we think of as racism today, however, is heavily influenced by the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, for instance describing racism as the denial of rights justified by skin color. The CRM took the humanity of blacks as a given, and moved the conversation to the question of rights and privileges. By helping America forget that language, the CRM trumped slavery’s rhetoric of blacks as the explicitly unchosen. I’m not saying it went away; I’m just saying that that way of thinking about race fell out of public consciousness.
By reinvigorating the language of being chosen, Falwell’s ministry “avoids” racism by taking away intent. We aren’t racist/homophobic/sexist, they might say, because we don’t have any intent against “them.” It’s not our fault that they don’t do what it takes (e.g. renouncing homosexuality) or have what it takes to be chosen too.”
Free from intent and thus released from any sense of culpability, hate is unmitigated by any sense of relation. There is something of the fallen, from the social fabric and even from the religion it professes, that makes Falwell and his ilk very, very scary to me.