Despite being regarded as “one of the most heinous crimes in the last decade” by black gay activist Steven G. Fullwood, news of Rashawn’s brutal death in February 2005 never made it to the radio. His photograph never appeared on the cover of any local newspapers or any major magazines. Play-by-play updates of the murder investigation were never featured on the evening news. In fact, a haunting silence was the mainstream networks’ only response to Rashawn’s murder.
One of the glaring questions on the minds of concerned activists and community members was, Why didn’t the media pick up Rashawn’s case? In marked contrast, the tragic murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998 quickly made national headlines, and scores of gay activists across the country united in support of the Shepard family. They held both the police and local lawmakers accountable for the investigation into his murder and started a foundation in his honor. On the other hand, Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old black lesbian who was fatally stabbed in the chest by a homophobic man in 2003, barely received any media attention at all. Sakia, who was waiting for a bus in downtown Newark, New Jersey at the time of her murder, never made the cover of any local newspaper, but outrage over the incident among predominantly New Jersey- and New York-based LGBT communities of color did lead to memorials in alternative forms of media. For example, in the Sakia Gunn Film Project, director Chas Brack recounts his motivation for creating a film that highlights Sakia’s sexuality and gender identity. In the film, he explains that when he first learned of Sakia’s death, the television news report failed to mention that she was transgender. Exasperated by the omission, he says, “I’m over sitting around waiting for white people to tell Black people’s stories and for straight people to tell gay people’s stories . . . We have to create a space where we can tell our own stories.”
Similarly, Rashawn received virtually no mainstream media attention except for a few brief newspaper stories with sensationalized titles like “Young Man Hacked Apart” (Gay City News) and “Subway Chop Up Victim ID’D,” (New York Post) which captured only brief snippets of the gruesome murder. While Matthew, Sakia, and Rashawn all suffered tragically because of their sexuality, only Shepard represented the all-American boy, a clean-cut white face that mainstream America could relate to and rally around. On the contrary, Rashawn and Sakia represented a different face of America—one that is marked by the bodily violence of homophobia on one hand, and the symbolic violence of racist neglect by the mainstream media on the other.
In response to the gross underreporting of Rashawn’s slaying, a number of predominantly gay African American cyberactivists began publicizing his case at a moment when the stinging abandonment of the mainstream media was too much to bear. In several entries on Larry D. Lyons’s blog, The Larry Lyons Experience, this black gay scholar and self-described feminist offered a vital space for Internet users to learn about Rashawn’s story and express their frustration and rage at the lack of attention paid to the murder.
In reference to the few headlines that did make it into the newspaper, Larry composed a revealing blog entry that asked his readers “I wonder . . . if the body parts turned out to be those of Donald Trump, would the New York Post still refer to him as ‘Chop up victim?’ If he were a heterosexual member of the white upper middle class, would Rashawn’s story be phrased so indelicately as ‘Hacked Apart’? . . . Please acknowledge that we are more than just some chopped up body parts that litter your subway. We are a life, and a son, and a friend, and a lover . . . We demand the cries for decency, visibility and justice that would surely be afforded to our white counterparts.”
The thirteen pages of responses to the initial posting on Larry’s blog suggest that many shared his concern for the devaluation of black gay life. Comments on Larry’s Web site reveal that bloggers from as far away as Philadelphia, Houston, and Chicago discovered the incident through Larry’s posts and began to post regular updates on their own blogs about the murder, the candlelight vigils, the town hall meetings, and the investigation. Eventually, the Rashawn Brazell Memorial Fund was set up by queer activists of color in order to chronicle these responses, place them within a specific cultural context, and provide encouraging avenues of action for bloggers and other Internet-savvy individuals wanting to join the battle against racism and homophobia.
