Black Women Vilified as a ‘Lesbian Wolf Pack’ Speak for Themselves in a New Film

[ismnotwasm]

Just before 2 AM oN an August morning in 2006, seven gay black women were harassed as they walked down a street in New York City’s West Village. A man seated on a fire hydrant outside a movie theater called them “dyke bitches,” according to one of the women. He told them, “I’ll fuck you straight.” Dissatisfied by their response, he spit at them and threw a cigarette.

What happened next, a confrontation which led to four of the women being convicted on felony charges and spending years in prison, is the subject of Out in the Night, a documentary streaming online until July 23 and which premiered on PBS and Logo TV last week.

In short, the man—who was discovered to have commented online that “women should welcome your advances because that’s how the race should propagate itself” and that “80 percent of serial killers are homosexual”—sustained stab wounds after one of the women pulled a knife in the midst of the melee that followed. The women, who had traveled to the Village from New Jersey that night, suffered among them a bruised eye and busted lip, a fistful of dreadlocks pulled from the scalp, and choke marks on the neck, among other injuries. The women maintain that their harasser swung first, and that his aggression eventually drew the attention and involvement of onlookers.

But in the eyes of many of the corporate media outlets that reported on the incident, the women were the savage and bloodthirsty aggressors. A New York Post headline called the incident “Attack of the Killer Lesbians.” Other headlines read: “The Case of the Lesbian Beatdown,” “Gal’s Growl: Hear me Roar,” and “Girls Gone Wilding.” Even the staid New York Times ran a headline that implied that a benign encounter had gone wrong because some woman couldn’t lighten up: “Man is stabbed in attack after admiring a stranger.”

http://www.thenation.com/article/black-women-vilified-as-a-lesbian-wolf-pack-speak-for-themselves-in-new-film/

[malthaussen]

1. See, now, if all the participants had been white, it would have been good clean fun

I've always considered that brawls like that should result in equal penalties all around. True, it fails to address the question of who started it, but there's no way one can impartially determine that when everyone is saying "he said, she said." I have no doubt, personally, it went down much as described by the women, but proving it in court is problematical. Maybe if there was video.

-- Mal

[brer cat]

2. Fear of the "other"

is even stronger when it is both black and lesbian. Of course, they must have been the aggressors, after all they are different.

[AuntPatsy]

3. How many such abuses have been either ignored or faced such ridicule, sad that we need

video and even then it does not ensure justice for the victims..