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May 11 marked the third anniversary of the murder of Sakia Gunn, the 15-year-old African American lesbian from Newark whose killing ignited a movement and led to New Jersey's first bias-murder prosecution.
Gunn was stabbed to death when she and four friends were attacked by two men after rejecting their sexual advances by declaring themselves to be lesbians.
In April, 2005, Richard McCullough, 32, drew a 20-year prison sentence after admitting that he stabbed the Westside High 10th-grader in the heart while yelling homophobic slurs.
According to poet, scholar and activist Cheryl Clarke,
"[Sakia's] death was symbolic, or emblematic instead, of the psychic and emotional death of so many of our young people." Gunn did not conform to the expectations of how she should behave, [her killer's] expectations of what women should do. For that ... she was slaughtered."
Like the 1998 murder of Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, the killing of Sakia Gunn gave rise to a movement. However, while the effort to memorialize Shepard garned significant press and public attention even three years after his death, the efforts undertaken in Sakia Gunn's memory have been comparatively modest and little noted by the press.
On May 11, Generation Q, a New York City drop-in center for lgbt youth held a memorial vigil to remember Gunn. So far, the press has not picked up the story.
I recently queried the Lexis-Nexis(TM) database to compare major press coverage related to Gunn and Shepard between the second and third year of their respective murders. I found one story that referenced Gunn (and Google News supplied another, an essay about the gender politics of the Duke rape allegations by Mark Anthony Neal.)
By contrast, there were 107 stories in the archive published between the second and third anniversary of Shepard's murder. A quick scan of these stories reveals that many of them are about benefit performances of music, poetry and drama created in his memory. The artistic production signifies the degree to which Shepard had become a mainstream cultural figure by that time.
Readers of this blog may remember that in the first year after Gunn was murdered, on the 11th of each month, I compared the numbers of stories about her to the number of stories on Matthew Shepard at the same time period after his murder. (The number of Matthew Shepard stories is actually significantly understated because I only counted stories on him from major newspapers.) In the first year after Gunn was murdered, 28 stories appeared on the database. In the first year after Shepard was murdered, there were 735 stories on Shepard, just in major newspapers. The total number of stories is actually in the thousands.
My research into the reasons for the disparity in coverage is summarized in a chapter in the book: News and Sexuality: Media Portraits of Diversity. In that chapter, I concluded that the limited press coverage of Sakia Gunn's story was the result of several factors.
First, the murders of poor people, especially poor people of color, are less likely to receive major press attention than those who are wealthier and white. In contrast, Matthew Shepard -- a likable, attractive, upperclass white male -- seemed a more sympathetic victim to many editors. Second, as an "aggressive," Sakia Gunn dressed like a boy. She was on the streets at 3:30 in the morning. Again these factors made her seem a less universal figure than Shepard, in the minds of some editors and reporters.
African American news outlets focused their coverage on same-sex marriage and the debate over homosexuality in the black church, ignoring stories about violence against black glbt people. In addition, Neal and other scholars have argued that black male violence against black women tends to be downplayed. These observers say that this devaluing of black women helps to explain why Aishah Shahidah Simmons struggled for years to get support for NO! her documentary about that violence.
According to Mick Meenan of Gay City News, the gay press gave scant coverage of the story to Sakia Gunn, most likely because of race and class bias.
This is despite the fact that Gunn's murder led hundreds of Newark's young people to hold vigils and protest rallies in which they told tales of the abuse and harassment they endured in the city's public schools, at
