The LGBTQ+ community is in mourning after the killing of a gay Black man at a Brooklyn gas station, where he was targeted for vogueing, a form of dance that comes from New York’s Black queer and trans ballroom community.
Late Saturday night, professional dancer and choreographer O’Shae Sibley, 28, stopped for gas at the station with friends, where he got out to dance to Beyoncé’s Renaissance, which was playing in their car. In an incident captured on surveillance video, Sibley and his friends were then accosted by a group of men who “told them to stop dancing” and started using slurs, according to reporting from The New York Times. During the attack, Sibley and Otis Pena, a best friend of Sibley's, responded to the slurs used by the other men: “Stop saying that. There is nothing wrong with being gay.”
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During the confrontation, one of the men stabbed Sibley, who was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead soon after. Pena, who tried to stop Sibley's bleeding after the stabbing, posted a video to Facebook following his friend's death: “They murdered him because he’s gay, because he stood up for his friends… His name was O’Shae and you all killed him. You all murdered him right in front of me.”
Sibley's family — he was one of 11 siblings — is devastated, The New York Times reported. (A GoFundMe, allegedly established by Sibley’s father, is circulating on Twitter, intended to raise funds for a funeral.) Sibley's aunt, Tondra Sibley, told the Times that her nephew had moved to New York from Philadelphia for career opportunities. “It was a senseless crime," she said. "O’Shae has always been a peacemaker. All he wanted to do was dance.”
Others who knew O'Shae Sibley have said much of the same to the press, remembering him as a constant, dancing presence.
The New York Police Department is investigating the killing as a hate crime. Law enforcement believe the suspect is 17 years old.
According to CBS, Sibley was a known member of NYC’s modern ballroom community. Vogueing entered the white, cishet mainstream through media, like the 1990 documentary film Paris Is Burning. That film spotlighted the drag queens and ballroom families of Harlem; within two years of its wide release, in 1991, five of its nine protagonists were dead, one whose murder is still unsolved.
The double-edged sword of visibility has never been more apparent than in the wake of TV shows like Pose, which make Black queer and trans people very visible — but without ensuring their safety. This summer has set the scene for raised alarms in response to anti-LGBTQ+ acts and sentiment nationwide, with one advocacy group declaring a “national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people.”
The knowledge that Sibley and his friends were dancing to Beyoncé’s Renaissance, an homage to the artist's Black LGBTQ+ fans, was particularly painful, as that night New Yorkers were watching the performer’s first of two dates at nearby MetLife Stadium. Some people are demanding Beyoncé make a statement about Sibley’s death, given that her album's popularity has been informed by and promoted queer aesthetics, particularly from ballroom culture.
An LGBTQ+ neighbor of Sibley’s, Beckenbaur Hamilton, told NBC 4 New York that he had texted Sibley that morning out of fear for his safety, and described their neighborhood as “very homophobic.”
"There is no progress. Progress? Yes. But we here don't see it. We have to live stifled," said Hamilton. "We live here in a community where we have to pretend to be somebody else."
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