EDGE New York City

On April 19, a court finally put an end to a sad saga. The result was jail sentences for a group of lesbians who allegedly attacked a man after he had flirted with them in New York’s Greenwich Village.

The incident happened a year ago, when the women had allegedly beaten and stabbed Wayne Buckle, 28 at the time. They claimed that he hit on them and answered their rebuffs with homophobic slurs, as well as spitting on them and throwing a lit cigarette at them. Both the women and Buckle are black.

Some question the media’s reporting of the events and the subsequent case: The New York Post’s headline screamed "Attack of the Killer Lesbians." Four of the young women were subsequently convicted and face up to 15 years in prison.

Stephen Goldstein of Garden State Equality, the largest gay-rights organization in New Jersey, where the women lived, believes that the coverage is no coincidence. "There’s a bigger picture here," he said. "This is a test of the LGBT community to stand by the African-American community. In all my years as an activist in New Jersey, I have never been so heartbroken as when the hate crimes against Sakia Gunn and Shani Baraka never received the same media attention that Matthew Shepard’s murder received. It’s a double standard based on race and we have a moral obligation to ask about the facts that drove these women to do what they did."

Ironically, the common threads in these cases are that the women are all black and all hail from Newark, N.J. Shani Baraka was a teacher and basketball coach in Newark and was shot while staying with her sister by the sister’s ex-husband. She had been a mentor to Sakia Gunn, 15 at the time of her death. Gunn was a lesbian murdered in Newark in 2003 on her way home from Christopher Street, a popular Greenwich Village hangout for young blacks from the New York Area.

She and her friend revoked the advances of two men. When they attacked, she fought back and was stabbed. She, like the group of lesbians in the Buckle case, came to New York City to hang out at the Hudson River pier at the western edge of Christopher Street.

"A lot of youth do come from Newark, because there isn’t much for them in Jersey," says Bran Fenner, Co-Director of Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment, known as FIERCE. "The population of TLGB youth of color is really large but there aren’t many outlets that cater to their specific needs."

That need for a friendly atmosphere has made the pier a haven for gay youth for decades. However, renovations to the pier, making it part of the Hudson River Park that will eventually extend from the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan all the way to the top of the island in Inwood, have changed the atmosphere. Some say it’s better, but for the minority LGBT youth, it’s probably for the worse.

With the spiffed-up, cleaner, fixed-up pier comes a set of park rules and a curfew. That curfew continues to be a topic of hot debate, a singular point in an ongoing battle between the residents and the kids that hang out there. FIERCE is their main organizational defender.

Local business owners and residents--both straight and gay--have complained about the noise that the teens bring with them at Community Board 2 meetings. They have demanded action, from an earlier curfew to more police presence. FIERCE members attend the same meetings and challenged residents’ claims. FIERCE members argue that the pier is a historic site for LGBT kids to congregate and network.

Many of the kids who come there do so because they aren’t comfortable hanging out in their own neighborhoods. As the Village continues its seemingly inexorable slide to one of New York’s most fashionable and expensive neighborhoods, however, many residents want the piers to change as well. Fenner complains that residents are vocal about wanting an expanded police presence and fewer queer youth of color on the street. "There is a combination of racial and class dynamics at hand," Fenner said. "In New York, the majority of poor people are people of color, so it becomes almost impossible to look at them as two separate issues. White gays and lesbians who are older and appear to have some money will get perceived, treated and talked to very differently." The kids are used to being "disrespected" and talked down to, so there isn’t a push to be really respectful when they are so used to being treated like what Fenner called "leftovers."

No one arguest that these teens don’t make themselves known on the street. One local resident notes in March 2006 in his blog Joe My God (http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2006/03/dollars-vs-gay-youth.html), "When you live in the West Village, you get accustomed to seeing large roving bands of very young queer blacks and Latinos, from across the gender spectrum. Nightly, you see drag queens, stone butches, bangee boys and girls, all sporting the latest in hip-hop-inspired thug fashion, and all startlingly, sometimes heartbreakingly, young."

A few sentences later, he notes an experience of his own with the teens, one that isn’t atypical but alarms residents: "In an instant, half of the them had encircled me. I backed down the sidewalk toward my building’s door, as they threatened to ’cut me’ and ’fuck me up.’"

Founder, organizer and hostess of the Labor Day dragathon Wigstock, Lady Bunny notes in her April 23, 2006 blog, "Imagine how you’d feel if you’d plunked down a fortune on a prestigious West Village condo only to find that not only was the noise of the very loud gay youths keeping you up late at night, but you were scared to access your home--much as the youths are afraid to be themselves in their nabes. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a society which valued the rights of loud and sometimes crime-linked kids who aren’t even from the neighborhood over well-off homeowners who do deserve peace and quiet in their pricey digs. (Not that anyone should really move to the Big Apple for total peace and quiet!)."

With these concerns, the arguments continue over the closing time of the Christopher Street Pier. The city, Parks Department, Community Board and others have weighed in with proposal after proposal. Some argue that an early curfew would force the teens to leave earlier, cutting down on noise. But FIERCE argues the opposite, that extending the curfew from its current 1 a.m. closing time to 4 a.m. would keep the teens from spilling into the roads in one large group and let them leave slowly in smaller bunches, thereby cutting down on the noise.

A counter argument is that letting teens stay out that late only adds to delinquency and their becoming victims of predatory adults. Part of the problem is that some of these kids are homeless. About 40 percent of New York City’s homeless are LGBT youth. And in a community where traveling in groups has become a survival technique, the likelihood of complete dispersal of crowds is rather unlikely.

Not all residents are unsympathetic. Some remember their own difficulties growing up and finding a place to belong at the pier. FIERCE was able to get over 200 signatures from residents in support of their work. But the tension is unlikely to end any time soon. As written in Joe My God’s blog, "this problem raises questions about racism, classism, and gentrification. It’s Gen X versus Gen Z. It’s queer kids from the projects and tranny kids from the streets versus lofts and co-ops and the celebrities living in Richard Meier’s riverfront glass palaces. It’s about the continuing eroding of civility and manners versus the venal world of real estate."

So, while the pier holds an allure to young LGBT youth of color as a place to be themselves, they still have instincts no doubt honed from their home environment as well as being gay. And the mainstream society and thse media feel less of a responsibility to them. This no doubt has a bearing on how the group of lesbians’ story was handled in the media.

"The media coverage has been irresponsible on three levels: it has been insensitive toward the African American community, toward women in general, and toward the LGBT community," Goldstein complained. "I cannot believe that a gay newspaper would jump to the opposite conclusion automatically."