O'Shae Sibley
O’Shae Sibley should be dancing.
But instead, O’Shae Sibley is dead. Killed at 28 years old for being gay.
On Saturday night, July 29, O’Shae and and a group of friends were coming back from a day at the beach. They stopped to get gas, blasting Beyoncé, and dancing. They were approached by a group of men who demanded they stop. After a series of verbal exchanges, O’Shae was stabbed and later died. The person accused, and seen on video, is a 17-year-old high school student.
O’Shae’s friend Otis Pena, who put pressure on his wound to try to stop him from bleeding out, said the group of guys hurled anti-gay slurs at them and said, “We’re Muslim, we don’t want you dancing.” Otis said O’Shae was trying to calmly talk with the guys that “it’s ok to be gay... we’re just listening to our music... there’s no hate. It’s all love.”
August 8 UPDATE: The lawyer for the 17-year-old accused of O'Shae Sibley's murder has since said that he is actually Christian, not Muslim. Several witnesses have verified Otis Pena's account that the group of guys the 17-year-old was with hurled anti-gay slurs at O'Shae and his friends, saying “We’re Muslim, we don’t want you dancing.” So while there are things we don't know about the incident—including more video and witness testimony to be seen and heard—there are important things we do know and there are urgent questions we need to ask.
Along with images of his blood-soaked hand, Otis posted: “They hated us cause we are gay! Screaming we Muslim and we don't like gays!!!!!! As we are innocently pumping gas and y’all decided to stab one of us!!”
Several weeks ago, in “God, Prejudice, Oppression, Terror and the Way Out of This Madness,” the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian said:
It is heartbreaking, and infuriating, to hear this “Anti-LGBTQ bullshit” from people ... who have been so terribly oppressed under this system and should be uniting with others who have also been discriminated against, brutalized and terrorized, and whose very right to exist is being viciously attacked.
O’Shae was an accomplished, professional dancer. He and his friends were voguing—a form of dance that comes out of the Black queer culture from the 1970s. O’Shae was out, loud and proud—refusing to be shamed by the dominant anti-LGBTQ, patriarchal culture and society. In June 2020, at the height of the uprisings against the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, O’Shae took part in a video to “celebrate Pride 2020 and pay homage to the Black Lives Matter movement, this video showcases how Black and Brown queer and trans people can use voguing as a form of protest, and as a source of joy in this political climate.”
Vogue 4 #BlackLivesMatter by Kemar Jewel
The Violence That Comes With Asserting Your Manhood
What kind of society and culture turns a 17-year-old into a killer? What kind of society and culture fills a 17-year-old with such hatred and fear of those whose sheer existence challenges the patriarchal gender norms that they lash out with this kind of deadly violence?
A society that rears men and boys on an aggressive, violent and dominant masculinity. A culture where all the major religions—Islam, Christianity and Judaism—are saturated in and serve to reinforce patriarchy and male supremacy, going back thousands of years. From a very early age, boys are brought up to think that their worth and their power is their manhood—which they have a duty to enforce. Being born—and raised—a man in a male-dominated society comes with certain privileges. And even if you are oppressed in many other ways, at least you have this power over others. You see this in religion, in the culture, in the widespread violence and degradation of porn and music, the dick-grabbing assertion of being a man which means that you’re not gay, and that you have to dominate over and control women. Why else is it that when a man says something nice to another man, they feel they have to preface it with the disclaimer of “no homo”?
But it is felt as a challenge to these privileges, and to the dominant social order, when people refuse to abide by the strict social codes of what’s feminine and masculine. When women are considered “disobedient” or “uppity.” When trans people defy the strict gender roles. When men celebrate their queerness. Violence and intimidation of people who “step out of line” is part of enforcing the social order where you can assert your manhood.
This kind of patriarchal dominance and degradation—which has lasted for millennia—has been fully integrated into the system of capitalism-imperialism. This system needs to be overthrown—overcoming all tradition’s chains embodied in traditional gender roles and divisions and all the oppressive relations bound up with this. But this will not happen without oppressed people—men, women, and differently gendered people—coming together to end all oppression. Breaking with, uprooting and abolishing these outmoded ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman... redefining what it means to be human!
In a video just hours after O’Shae was murdered, Otis said through tears, “We may be gay, but we exist. We're not going to live in fear, we’re not going to live in hiding. Me and O’Shae were always out and loud and y’all killed him.”
To this, we say NO MORE!