September 11, 2010

  • BLACK HOMOHATRED KILLS!!! - A EULOGY FOR SAKIA GUNN

    2003

    (I dedicate this column to young homosexual warriors who are out and proud everywhere. You all are my greatest inspirations. I live for you...AB}


    It is an undeniable and historically proven fact that those who are oppressed often become the cruelest oppressors. The United States were founded by slave masters who wanted to be free from British rule, even as they simultaneously stole, enslaved, dehumanized, and forcibly ruled captive Africans for centuries. As fellow hostages on plantations, mulattos were often the most rabid overseers and treacherous house niggers, and often crueler than many white slave masters.

    In Nazi death camps, Jewish and Polish SS officers who passed as Germans were far more brutal than their actual German Nazi peers. During America’s genocide against Native Americans, Native American scouts and African-American Buffalo soldiers legendarily assisted white men as they robbed and slaughtered red, brown, and black people who looked like them. White gays are usually more blatantly racist than any of their racist heterosexual peers, especially those who control gay media. Closeted gays and gays who feign at being "healed heterosexuals" gaybash more rabidly than any homophobic or sexually bigoted heterosexual...

    Murderous gaybashers exist and are religiously sanctioned in every human race. Yet, I remain convinced that racism and sexism combine to create a uniquely hot hatred of homosexuals within most black gaybashers globally. I have penned many columns, hosted countless talk radio shows, and engaged in heated debates with diverse friends on the subject of black gaybashers for decades. I have elaborated ad infinitum about precisely how racism and sexism combine and degenerate too many black men who regard themselves exclusively as life support systems for penises, and too many black women who regard themselves exclusively as concubines/breeders for these aforementioned black macho men.

    This toxic combination of psychoses fashions turbo gaybashers in blackface, who passionately regard homosexuals as literal nullifiers of their very existences. Their twisted insecurities are expressed as fatal gaybashing/self-defense mechanisms in the paranoid and insane wars that their hatred fuels against sexual truths in general and homosexual persons in particular. Combine those toxins with the additional madness created by the oceans of blood awash upon the hands of droves of black pastors, who continue to preach lies about God and the bible to their mindless and robotic flocks. These evil and bigoted pseudo-christians truly regard gaybashing and murdering homosexuals as divine acts!!! 

    To this toxic mix, blend in the arrogant ignorance of uneducated masses that know and desire to know absolutely nothing about the universal scientific nature of homosexuality in literally every living species. All of these ancient ingredients mesh into a perfect and pervasive recipe for social poison that festers deep within the core of global black cultures and ferments into a potent emotional and psychic venom that the diaspora of African gaybashers spew like legions of deadly cobras.

    When these misogynist morons lash out, they often do so with deadly force. As more young black homosexuals refuse to live lies and dare to live honestly and openly within black communities, their death tolls are rising at the bloody hands of black gaybashers. Sakia Gunn is only their most recent casualty...

    Sakia was just 15 years old on May 13, 2003. She was stabbed to death in Newark, New Jersey because she dared to reject a lewd advance from a gaybasher with an erection and an attitude. Because she refused to respond to his flirtations while being brave enough to say she was gay, Sakia was slaughtered by a nocturnal predator while awaiting a late night city bus. Simply for daring to be herself and refusing to be silenced by bigotry and cowardice, a “brother” monster, who disgraces all real men, murdered Sakia. When denied a chance to ejaculate, he chose to exterminate...

    Sakia is my shero. I admire all of the young homosexual rebels everywhere who refuse to be silent about who they were born to be. They are braver than I was at their age. I lived a lie until I was 21 to avoid the hatred and danger that they courageously endure daily...

    In the press photos I have seen, Sakia appears to be butch. As a femme lesbian, I am often safer than my butch sisters. I can appear to be on a platonic date with a lover at will. I can casually return a harmless flirtation of a male waiter to secure a superior table in a favorite restaurant. I can sincerely appreciate a tactful man’s compliment on a cramped elevator by never complicating my human reaction with the acknowledgment of any details of my lesbian being.

    Perhaps, Sakia did not have the luxury of such safety inside her own space in this cold world. Because she appeared to be masculine, she probably evoked even more hatred in insecure “men” than I do. Such gaybashing excuses for real men fear butch lesbians who dare to embrace the masculinity that eludes their own fragile egos and weak sexual identities. They fear that butch lesbians may be better ideal men than they can ever be themselves. They fear that lesbians possess superior sexual skills with superior sexual tools that do not lie, cheat, infect, go limp, or fail to satisfy. 

    Weak cowardly males hate their own internal and latent homosexuality that butch lesbians may sexually awaken and arouse. They hate all lesbians who co-parent the children they abandon. They hate lesbians that may know more about sports and even play basketball better than they do. They hate lesbians who often cherish and adore the queens that they emotionally abuse by being whorish court jesters who hypocritically, and even comically, whine about being kings...

    Carmen McCrae sang “Only women bleed”...Nina Simone sang “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free”... Women are mortally wounded and hemorrhaging everywhere every day. We are endangered, disempowered, and slain by misogyny and all of its morbid and violent manifestations whether we are homosexual or heterosexual. Irrespective of whom we love, or how we live, women are not safe in this world. We are not safe in any city in any country. We are raped in our own homes by our own husbands. We feel unsafe in our own baths and showers. We are unable to even sleep soundly. We know that we can become prey for any evil bastard with a libido or a switchblade or both. We know that we trust men who may betray us at any deranged moment at the whim of any hostile erection...

    Living as a woman in a sexist world is to live in constant danger and fear via venomous words and vicious glances. Every woman knows this perpetual fear as deeply as she knows the taste of her own saliva. Men only taste this fear when they are imprisoned. Only then do they experience the curse of being sexual prey for 24 hours of every day. Only then do they know how every lewd glare can render them naked. Only then do they know the sexual harassment that women endure daily. The world is a prison for women. We are all sentenced to consecutive lives of misogyny without parole.

    This constant fear breeds rage. This rage is real whether we embrace, ignore, or defy it. This rage is never as hot as when a sister is slain by a sexist dog. We calm the fires of our rage with the water of our tears for Sakia. She is an eternal warrior whose spirit is now pardoned and released from this sexist prison yard that still traps us...May Sakia find peace in a superior place where honesty does not evoke murder and homosexuality does not evoke hatred...


    {Dear Sakia: Rest in peace baby sista. Your life is eternal. God Bless You Always...You are respected, revered, and remembered...We love and admire your indelible warrior spirit just as we love and admire your defiance... We promise you that your death is not in vain.}


    Postscript:


    2003


    Mourn Slain Black Lesbian Teenager

    By Leslie Feinberg

    On May 16 a crowd of some 2,500 people united with the family of Sakia Gunn at the funeral for the 15-year-old Black butch lesbian. She had been stabbed to death in Newark, N.J., five days earlier.

    The turnout was unprecedented: predominately Black, largely high school students, mostly lesbians.

    The day before, hundreds of youths had marched with Gunn's family to the steps of Newark's City Hall to express their anger at the killing. Throughout the week, hundreds of high school students and others turned out for vigils at community-built memorials outside Gunn's West Side High School and the site where she was killed.

    Sakia Gunn was killed at a Newark bus stop on May 11. She was on her way home from New York's Greenwich Village with four friends. According to the other women, two men got out of a car, made sexual advances and physically attacked the teenagers. The women fought back. Gunn was stabbed in the chest. She died a short time later at a local hospital.

    Richard McCullough turned himself in to the prosecutor's office five days later, after reports that the police considered him a suspect in the stabbing. He was arraigned May 16 in Superior Court on murder, weapons and bias charges. His lawyer entered a not-guilty plea.

    McCullough's mother expressed her deep condolences to Sakia Gunn's family. She argued, however, that she does not believe her son is anti-gay. She said his grandmother, who helped raise him, was a lesbian. (Newark Star-Ledger, May 17)

    A June 3 protest rally on the steps of Newark City Hall was set after members of the Newark Pride Alliance explained that they had been unable to secure a meeting with Mayor Sharpe James to deal with issues of community safety. They also reported official insensitivity in response to Gunn's murder.

    The Pride Alliance, formed after Gunn's death to support lesbian, gay, trans and bisexual youth, is putting forward five demands:

    --Grief counseling for Gunn's fellow West Side High School students.

    --Support for gay and straight alliance high school clubs to educate parents, school administrators and other students about the LGTB community.

    --Development of and support for a Newark LGTB community center--a safe space to get together.

    --Posting of at least two police officers on round-the-clock patrol on the Penn Station-Broad Street Corridor where Gunn was killed.

    --That city legislators take responsibility to improve the quality of life for their LGTB constituency "that they have neglected and ignored for so long."

    --That the school board be held responsible for the lack of compassion and concern exhibited by the principal of West Side High School, and allow for an independent investigation into allegations made by the students.

    West Side students report that the principal made anti-lesbian statements about Sakia Gunn after her death, according to Laquetta C. Nelson, founder of the New Jersey Stonewall Democrats.

    Courage and pride

    On the afternoon before Gunn's funeral, several hundred people--mostly teenaged Black lesbians and gays--marched from the site where she was killed to City Hall. Police lined the street.

    Toni Gunn, Sakia's mother, told the crowd, "My daughter did not die in vain. She will be remembered."

    Sakia Gunn's uncle, Anthony Hall, led the chant, "No justice, no peace." Protesters also sang "We Shall Overcome"--the anthem of the African American civil rights struggle waged in the United States long before many of the young demonstrators were born.

    The outpouring of Black youths flooded the streets and parking lot around Perry's Funeral Home on May 16. Many wore t-shirts emblazoned with Gunn's photo or rainbows--symbol of the modern LGTB freedom movement.

    A number of the teenagers outside the funeral home were from West Side High, waiting to say goodbye to the friend they knew as "T," who aspired to be a Women's National Basketball Association player and an architect.

    Many in the crowd spoke proudly of the way Gunn lived her life--and affirmed their own pride as well.

    Inside, Sakia Gunn lay dressed in a white sweat suit. A rainbow symbol--the assertion of her sexuality and of LGTB pride--lay just above her head.

    Her parents, LaTona Gunn and Gerald Gadson, sat together among what was described as literally hundreds of relatives.

    Her mother said of the sheer numbers who came in solidarity, "All this love, that's what's keeping me strong. I love my daughter so much. I'm so proud of her."

    Gadson said he was also emotionally moved by the support for his daughter, with whom he was reunited last year.

    Sakia Gunn's grandmother, Selma Gunn, is in cardiac intensive care. She suffered a heart attack after hearing the news of the stabbing. She said of the lesbian granddaughter she raised: "I knew about her and I accepted her. I loved her. And she loved me."

    City officials, including the mayor, were reportedly caught off guard by the response. "They weren't prepared for how many people showed up," observed Gary Paul Wright, director of Newark's African American Office of Gay Concerns. "It wasn't until gay activists cornered the mayor as he went into the funeral that he realized the depth of feeling the murder had caused."

    The mayor did not attend the May 15 vigil on the steps of City Hall. And his office had made plans for only several hundred mourners the next day. But as the crowd of thousands marched from the funeral parlor to nearby Essex County College, the mayor joined in.

    Reprinted from the June 12, issue of Workers World newspaper (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via email: ww@wwpublish.com. 



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