In the damp, suffocating heat of August last year, I was beating it down to Midwood on a Friday afternoon. I’d seen a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, calling folks down to a Mobil gas station to remember O’Shae Sibley, who’d been stabbed to death there in the final days of July 2023.
Since the news spread of his death, Sibley has been impossible for me to forget.
Halfway there, I texted two different group chats about what I was doing and where I was for my safety and their awareness, because it’s hotter than “Do the Right Thing.” Tensions were high, and fast-growing crowds were all at once uncomfortable, untenable—and easy targets. I’m a planner, and while I’m not necessarily opposed to acting in the spur of the moment, I’d much prefer to always err on the side of caution. Not so when it came to me attending this vigil. The urgency was to remember O’Shae’s name and keep it circulating amongst the masses, and it was something I’d been trying, and failing, to do in the days between his death and that day.
At that time I was working on the digital side of a national news broadcast, managing a team of reporters across the country who produced regular dispatches to our always-updating site, sometimes with corresponding appearances on said broadcast. Although I worked on digital, all staff members were encouraged, daily, to pitch ideas to the broadcast. The news of O’Shae Sibley’s death spread through New York media like wildfire and reached national audiences just as quickly. It needed our utmost and immediate attention, I said in our morning meeting the following day.
As a Black and gay elder millennial, I grew up in the shadow of Matthew Shepard, a young, white gay man beaten to death in Wyoming in 1998. For queer people of a certain age, too young to live through the 1980s AIDS crisis, but not old enough for programs like “Glee” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” to aid our mere existence to the straight masses, Shepard’s death looms in perpetuity. He was not the first victim of gay bashing, but certainly the most recognized. I drew parallels between Shepard and Sibley, even noting a real-life conversation with a Gen Z queer in the wake of Sibley’s death who was unaware of Shepard. In recalling that conversation, I noted that Sibley’s death was fast rising to a hate crime with the same visibility as Shepard’s was back in the day, but perhaps the first of its magnitude centering a Black queer person.
To be clear: Sibley’s death was not the first Black gay bashing or homophobia-fueled hate crime either, and it wasn’t even the first one of 2024. I grew up in Detroit, where Black trans women are beaten and either left for dead or end up dead near regularly in the line of sex work, almost always at a notorious intersection in town. But I tried to lay out how Sibley’s death was a lightning rod for Black violence, queer violence, Black queer violence, protest against Black and queer cultural expression. Fundamentally, he was killed for voguing, all at a time when Black queerness was reaching an inflection point I hadn’t seen in my lifetime, by way of increased visibility of out Black celebrities like Lil Nas X and Janelle Monae, as well as the “Renaissance” album from Beyonce herself, which was playing in the background of Sibley’s demise.
The hard sell did not immediately work for our staff, as there just wasn’t enough room in the program to address Sibley that day, so we’d try tomorrow. And again the next day, I laid out the pitch—this time including an update that NYC Mayor Eric Adams had weighed in. Same response again: No room in the show tonight. This cycle would repeat over the course of that week. Other staffers tried to pitch, introducing new angles. Beyonce weighed in; it was not enough. Along the way, I helped recruit talking heads in the Black queer space who could speak authoritatively to the topic at hand. My list of about a dozen or so names resulted in us auditioning a very prominent Black queer author we were lucky to even get time with, as they were also in the crosshairs of a nationwide book ban on LGBT-themed books, but his pre-tape— that’s some broadcast TV lingo for, let’s say, practice run or audition—didn’t make the cut with our producers, which baffled me because this author had made several televised appearances prior to trying out for us.
So I arrived to Sibley’s memorial with the pent-up frustration that I, one of a relative handful of Black and queer journalists in management, could not push the story of someone who, in many regards, was just like me. I’ve been riding with Beyonce since “No, No, No, Pt. 2” dropped; Sibley’s murder was a reminder to Black queers at any age that it could have been any one of us, singing along to one of her songs too loud in a public place, imitating one of her many tour looks outside, or, in Sibley’s case, just dancing to the newest heat she put out. I took my press pass just in case, still wondering to myself what good would it do if I even tried to report this story on my own and bring it back to the desk the next day. I watched with mixed emotion as I saw news cameras from both local NYC affiliates and national newsrooms line up around the perimeter of the gas station. I was hopeful that Sibley’s story was going to reach a lot of viewers all over the country that night, but disappointed and full of slight envy that my newsroom wouldn’t be among them. Alongside hundreds of mourners, we yelled, we prayed, we cried and we—ok, well a lot of folks did, but I gladly observed from afar and kept my two left feet firmly in place—vogued, all in Sibley’s memory. It was a beautiful, if bittersweet, display of Black queer pride, a sign that we’ve always been here and weren’t going anywhere.
I’d also make a decision about my professional life that day on the ride back home. If I couldn’t get my colleagues—whom I deeply respect, and still do—to care enough about this story, I’d have to do some serious assessment if someone like Sibley, someone like me, was truly able to bring their whole selves in the work, and the issues we have to deal with. We eventually did mention Sibley’s murder as a talking point in an overall piece about queer violence more than a week after Sibley’s story ran its course through the news cycle. The talking head for the piece was a white woman used several times before by the producers. I spruced up my LinkedIn the next day and began putting out feelers that I was ready to hit the market. Sooner than I thought I found myself here at the Amsterdam News, where I’m tasked with doing my part to keep our legacy alive and to make sure we serve all parts of our diverse community. That said, if you’ve got some ideas of what you’d like to see covered, please don’t hesitate to reach out.