The 2003 killing of 15-year-old Sakia Gunn by a man who had been trying to pick up her girlfriend at a Newark bus stop let the world in on a little-known fact about Black lesbians in Newark: They existed. Furthermore, they were, and are, part of a broader LGBTQ+ community of color with a long history in the state’s largest city.
Those realities are the subject of a new book edited by a Rutgers-Newark professor that provides more complete histories of Newark and the broader LGBTQ+ community nationwide.
Queer Newark: Stories of Resistance, Love and Community, edited by Whitney Strub and published this year by Rutgers University Press, traces the notable people, origins, gathering places, and other elements of the LGBTQ+ communities.
“Newark has always been a working-class city, and for the last half-century, a city with a majority population of color, and that’s not been a way that LGBTQ urban communities have been understood,” said Strub, an associate professor and acting director of the graduate history program at Rutgers-Newark, who teaches classes in LGBT studies, American and women’s & gender history. “So much focus has been on New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, etcetera, and particularly, the neighborhoods within those cities that tend to be more affluent and white.”
“And so in that sense,” Strub added, “I think Newark is a really important corrective to that particular LGBTQ national history.”
“The flip side of that, I think, is that when we look at histories of Newark, they rarely emphasize gender and sexuality at all,” said Strub, 46, a self-described “straight white guy,” who lives in Newark’s Ironbound section. “You know, industrialization in the 19th Century; immigration; the African-American Great Migration; riots, or rebellion; Black Power; and deindustrialization leads to decay. And it leaves out the fact that sexuality is a big part of every city’s history.”
Queer Newark’s publication is one of several events following the 20th anniversary of Sakia Gunn’s death on May 11, 2003, a month shy of her 16th birthday.
Sakia was near the corner of Broad and Market streets, where she and her friends were waiting for a bus after a trip from Manhattan. Men pulled up in a car and made advances toward some of the girls, who told them they were lesbians. A fight broke out, and Sakia was fatally stabbed after trying to intervene. Richard McCullough of Newark, who was 30 at the time, pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Advocates for queer people of color lamented that mainstream news organizations, lawmakers and the white-dominated LGBTQ+ national leadership did not express the same degree of outrage over Sakia’s death as they did after the 1998 killing of Matthew Shepherd, a gay white college student beaten and left to die in Wyoming, reactions noted in Queer Newark.
Attention was refocused on Sakia’s death by a 2008 documentary, “Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Film Project,” which was screened in April at the first annual Newark LGBTQ Film Festival, which focuses on queer people of color.
In October, the city’s LGBTQ+ community took pride in the renaming of the intersection of Halsey and Academy streets as “Sakia Gunn Way,” two decades after the slain teen’s principal at West Side High School resisted classmates’ requests for a moment of silence in her honor.
In October 2023, the Intersection of Halsey and Academy streets in Newark was named in honor of Sakia Gunn, 15, a Black lesbian stabbed to death 20 years earlier at a bus stop a few blocks away.Steve Strunsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Sakia Gunn Way is a few blocks from the new Market Street location of the Newark LGBTQ Community Center, which opened nine months earlier. It hosts support group meetings, yoga classes, a book club and other programs, and sponsors the LGBTQ Film Festival.
The 2024 festival on April 26-28 will screen a pair of short films inspired by the slain teen, made by the two winners of a competition sponsored by Express Newark, a media arts center supported by Rutgers. Winning filmmaker Laissa Alexis said hers explored how to be “a good ancestor” based on ”the way that Sakia’s death has galvanized activism in Newark.”
“She was protecting herself and people around her,” said Alexis, 25, a queer Black woman whose day job is as a researcher for a social justice non-profit. “She was demonstrating a love for her community, a love for who she was. So in that way, she was an ancestor to queer people in Newark, to me, and to queer people everywhere.”
Strub’s book borrows from another local Rutgers initiative, the Queer Newark Oral History Project, an archive of recorded interviews with people telling their stories, available for academic research or listening by the general public.
The introduction starts with a portrait of a portrait, introducing Sakia Gunn via the large mural of her on the stone railroad embankment along McCarter Highway that carries commuters to and from Newark Penn Station.
“If you don’t recognize the face, you might reasonably interpret the mural segment as a general testament to the resilience and joy of young Black Newarkers,” Strub writes. “If you do know the young person pictured, artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s work takes on a different meaning.”
The 11 chapters that follow begin with “Sodom on the Passaic: Excavating Early Queer Histories of Newark,” by Peter Savastano, an anthropology professor at Seton Hall University, and Timothy Stewart-Winter, who teaches LGBTQ history at Rutgers-Newark. Savastano and Stewart mine an early history of the Newark Police Department for evidence of 19th Century lesbian or transgender life, citing the case of “Etta M. Lewais, alias Gertrude Townsend, aged 21, who was arrested in 1885 on a charge of entering and stealing, and was ‘dressed in male attire, and passed at her boarding house as a boy,’ at the time of her arrest.”
The book notes that because law enforcement was used to crack down on gay, lesbian and transgender people and gathering places, police records are valuable sources documenting local LGBTQ life in the 19th Century, albeit from a hostile perspective.
Other chapters include “The View from Mulberry and Market: Revisiting Newark’s Forgotten Gay and Lesbian Nightlife” by Anna Lvovsky, a Harvard Law Professor and Lambda Literary Award winner; “Project Fire: AIDS, Erasure, and Black Queer Organizing in Newark,” by Jason M. Chernesky, a historian of 20th Century medicine and public health.
A chapter titled “At Home in the Hood: Black Queer Women Resisting Narratives of Violence and Plotting Life at G Corner,” by LeiLani Dowell of the Southern Vision Alliance in Durham, N.C. Dowell examines how perceptions of Newark as a violent city have hindered the understanding of its homophobic violence and the development of strategies to address it.
“Newark faces the issue of homophobia,” Dowell writes. But, she adds, “The image of Newark as a site of recursive violence allows the denial of structural homophobia, racism, and their intersections at the levels of discourse, resource allocation, and dispossession.”
Denise Hinds, a local and national LGBTQ rights activist who chairs the Newark community center’s board, applauded Queer Newark’s timely publication.
“I’m incredibly happy that this book has come out,” said Hinds. “There’s so much rich history that I didn’t even know about.”
“I think it’s pretty amazing that all of these things are coming together in the 20th year of Sakia’s death, that we’re finally elevating her story,” Hinds added. “And I think many of us see it as a responsibility to keep her story and her legacy in the media and also in the minds and thoughts not only of LGBTQ people, but all people.”
Rutgers-Newark history professor Whitney Strub holds a copy of the new book he edited, published in February by Rutgers University Press. Ed Murray| For NJ Advance Media
Stories by Steve Strunsky
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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com