A homosexual skilled dancer was stabbed to dying after vogueing with buddies at a gasoline station in Brooklyn, New York, elevating issues a few rise in violence in opposition to LGBTQ+ Individuals.
O’Shae Sibley, an expert dancer and choreographer, was heading residence with buddies after a visit to the New Jersey Shore on Saturday night time. The group stopped on the gasoline station round 11 p.m. and had been vogueing to Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” album earlier than a separate group of males approached them.
“These folks had been like ‘We’re Muslim, I don’t need you dancing,’” an worker of the gasoline station recalled to Gothamist, including: “The homosexual folks, they weren’t making an attempt to combat.”
The group started to name Sibley and his buddies — who had been shirtless and in bathing fits — names and homosexual slurs, telling them to cease dancing, based on The New York Occasions. Sibley started to argue with the boys and was stabbed.
Otis Pena, one among his buddies, tried to cease the bleeding earlier than Sibley was taken to an space medical middle, the place he was pronounced useless.
“They killed O’Shae,” Pena stated in a video posted to Fb. “They killed my brother proper in entrance of me. I’m coated in his blood.”
“They murdered him, as a result of he was homosexual, as a result of he stood up for his buddies,” he added.
The NYPD stated it’s investigating the assault as a hate crime. No arrests have been made. CBS reported Monday that investigators have recognized a suspect.
Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a New York state senator who’s homosexual, stated on Twitter Monday he was “heartbroken and enraged” to study of Sibley’s dying.
“Regardless of homophobes’ greatest efforts, homosexual pleasure shouldn’t be crime,” he wrote. “Hate-fueled assaults are.”
Sibley, 28, was overtly homosexual and had carried out as a part of an all-queer dance troupe at New York’s Lincoln Heart. He studied on the Philadelphia Dance Co. and had moved to New York shortly earlier than the pandemic, based on the Occasions.
“It was a mindless crime,” his aunt, Tondra Sibley, informed the newspaper. “O’Shae has at all times been a peacemaker. All he needed to do was dance.”
A report by the Anti-Defamation League and the GLAAD advocacy group documented a whole bunch of instances of assault, vandalism or harassment in opposition to LGBTQ folks from June 2022 to April 2023, together with mass homicide, reflecting widespread bias. Over roughly the identical interval, a whole bunch of transphobic payments had been launched or handed in GOP-led states.
