Today is the ninth anniversary of the murder of Sakia Gunn. I’m both vexed and intrigued that what I wrote then, “Thoughts on the Murder of Sakia Gunn”, still seems so relevant. 
Written in a late-night fit of anger at the Indypendent office and published on the newswire under a pseudonym, the piece went on to win an Independent Press Association Award (or “Ippie”) for Best Editorial from the Independent Press Association.
Gunn, a 15-year-old butch lesbian, was murdered in an anti-gay attack in Newark. What particularly rankled me was the tiny turnout at her vigil on the Christopher Street piers, mostly young queers of color. I was concerned then that the mainstream LGBTQ community was more preoccupied with assimilation for some than survival for all – and the ensuing near-decade has only proved my prescience.
The lack of attention given to the CeCe McDonald case, for example, has felt like Gunn’s murder all over again. McDonald, like Gunn, is a black woman attacked on the street, largely for her unconventional gender presentation. McDonald, unlike Gunn, fought back and survived and is now essentially being punished for defending herself – jailed on a second-degree manslaughter charge. As many see it, McDonald “will serve time simply because she managed to survive a violent attack.”
Yet McDonald’s case has received a fraction of the hubbub over Obama’s recent “evolution” on marriage, symptomatic of the mainstream LGB movement’s continuing inability to show up for all of its members. Regardless of how you feel about marriage itself, community survival must come first.
After all, you can’t buy wedding dresses if you’re dead.
two branches of my writing/editing career. I was a member of the Indypendent editorial collective from 2001 to 2003, working on nearly every aspect of bringing the paper to life: brain-storming what to cover; writing, researching and soliciting pieces; editing everyone’s content; and of course proofreading the whole thing meticulously. And from 1999 to 2007, I did much of the same work as an editorial collective member (and poetry editor from 2005-’07) of Bridges: a Jewish Feminist Journal, co-founded in 1990 by Adrienne Rich. It’s an honor to bring these two projects together. 
Check out my review of The Celluloid Activist, Michael Schiavi’s recent biography of ACT-UP activist and film critic Vito Russo, in the latest issue of 
A former student recently emailed me to ask, “What should an aspiring writer do at this point with a Bachelor’s in English Literature?” This is what I wrote. 
“Think we’ll get arrested at synagogue tonight?” I texted M., as I dressed for Kol Nidre services at Occupied Wall Street the night of Friday, October 7th. 