Filmmaker Brack remembers Sakia Gunn

Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Project -- Charles B. Brack, producer-director. Co-produced with Third World Newsreel. (58 minutes, 2008)

Charles B. Brack opens his hour-long documentary appropriately with clips of brief statements by people--presumably LGBTIQ folks--most of whom do not know who Sakia Gunn was or only vaguely remember what happened to her. Run her name by anyone you know, and most will give similar responses.

Try the same experiment with the name "Matthew Shepard," and you'll quickly see the need for Brack's project, which won the Best in NewFest award in its premiere run.

"It saddened me deeply that this 15-year-old Black lesbian had been murdered on the street, and I hadn't heard about it," said an activist in San Francisco. 

Like the white gay college student in Wyoming--whose grisly torture, brain injury and subsequent death in 1998 got widespread media attention and inspired worldwide protest--Gunn, a resident of Newark, was murdered for being who she was. On a spring night in 2003, after a trip to Manhattan's Christopher Street piers, Gunn--who identified as an "aggressive"--waited with her girlfriends at Newark's Broad and Market Streets bus stop. A couple of men drove up and taunted the kids, propositioning the femmes in the group. Gunn told the men that, as lesbians, they had no interest in them. A fight ensued. Richard McCollough stabbed Gunn, and the teen later died of her wounds.

Dreams Deferred zooms in on the principals involved in the trial of Gunn's 29-year-old murderer, including showing the testimony of Gunn's family members and of the activist Laquetta Nelson, whose group, Newark Pride Alliance, arose in the wake of the tragedy. It is a completely unvarnished, unsentimental portrait in grief and outrage. But, beyond offering these personal statements and some brief views into the milieu of Gunn, her kin and her friends, the film aspires to be a teaching tool. It highlights Gunn's promising life and unacceptable death, yes, but sets her story squarely within the context of American society's homophobia, gender conformity, racism, classicism and sexism as well as our disregard for the needs of youth of color, in particular LGBTIQ youth. Moreover, it does not let queer community off the hook for the ways in which Gunn and other youth like her have been ignored.

This documentary is best approached as a corrective to our collective lack of consciousness and best used to inform about issues, to foster open discussion and to stimulate action.

(Available through Third World Newsreel)

See Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Film Project at Anthology Film Archives on Wednesday, September 29. Click here for information.