SPEAK HIS NAME: O’Shae Sibley Murdered For Voguing While Out, Black, And Gay
On summer days we do summer things, like taking a day trip down to the shore, to enjoy sun and surf at the beach, just as thousands of New Yorkers did this past weekend. Among the throngs of young people returning to their neighborhoods after an afternoon on the ocean, was O’Shae Sibley, a 28-year-old Black, out, gay man, a devoted student of the arts and free spirit, whose joyful self-expression and creativity made a lasting impact on all who knew him. On the drive home, Sibley and his friends pulled into a gas station in Brooklyn’s Midwood section to fill up. In the sweltering city air, the group was shirtless, carefree and jovial, as befits the young and proud on a midsummer night. Sibley and his compadres were playfully horsing around on the concrete. They were doing an impromptu vogue session, to the sounds of Beyonce’s Renaissance, which attracted the attention of a smoke shop employee who worked next to the gas station. Incensed at their antics, the 17-year-old counterman accosted the group, braying about how the voguing display “insulted his Muslim faith”.
An altercation ensued, during which the suspect, who remains at large, stabbed Sibley amid a barrage of anti-gay slurs. Sibley was rushed to nearby Maimonides Medical Center, but he couldn’t be saved. So ended the life of a promising Alvin Ailey Extension student, a gifted dancer and artist, who had naught but love to give the world through the performance and study of his craft. To paraphrase the late Harvey Milk, a pioneering gay politician (who was himself cut down by an insane act of homophobic violence), as he spoke about a young man of his era done to death by hatred, “the last words he heard in his life were anti-gay vitriol.” To be out, Black, and gay on a New York City street, full of life, still gets you killed out of hateful rage that you dared to be yourself in public.
So, Speak his name: O’Shae Sibley. Speak his name even as our country is swept up in a hideous paroxysm of homophobia and transphobia that has led to anti-LGBTQ legislation in almost every state. Speak his name even as people weaponize their religious beliefs, to justify bigotry, and our Supreme Court stamps its approval on all of it. Speak O’Shae Sibley’s name as states like Florida ban the very word “gay” from being spoken aloud, as if the mere acquiescence of our existence might threaten theirt assertions of social superiority. I recently spoke with my friend, Rev. Kevin E. Taylor, whose ministerial calling has long been to connect the LGBTQ community with God, for an article serries I’m working on about the wave of homo- and transphobia we’re currently dealing with. Rev. Taylor, a wise, scholarly pastor who operates an LGBTQ CommuniTEA Center in Newark, NJ, had this to say about the way faith is perverted into an instrument of hate: “In order for something to be an abomination, it has to be and so acting like people who live and love differently is new is contradicted by using misguided and poorly interpreted scripture to bring down people that some people want to suggest shouldn’t even exist.” That’s how people like Sibley get killed.
Speak O’Shae Sibley’s name, in honor and sorrow for all the LGBTQ+ people whose souls lie unquiet, because they were murdered because hatred spoke with a voice louder than decency or reason. Speak his name for all those who live with the reality that daring to be, act, love, and express your truth is still, in 2023, a life-safety issue. Speak O’Shae Sibley’s name louder every day, because he is a daily reminder that his fate can still befall us, when we’re gay, lesbian, bi, trans, non-binary, gender nonconforming, POC, or any combination thereof. Make his name, alongside countless others who have died by anti-LGBTQ violence, a monument to rededicating ourselves to fighting that hatred everywhere we find it, and to making every midsummer night on every city block, a safe plave for all of us to live as we authentically are. There is no more fitting memorial.
