Jack Price and College Point

Had I known about yesterday's march, I might've gone over to College Point and joined all of those people who were showing their solidarity with Jack Price.


Last Friday, two young men beat him while taunting him with anti-gay slurs as he left an all-night deli in the neighborhood. He's still in the hospital with a broken jaw, collapsed lung and shattered ribs.


The good news is that residents marched alongside LGBT activists and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. The interesting thing is that they were outraged over the fact that Price was attacked for any reason and that such violence should occur in their neighborhood. Most of them knew him, or knew friends or relatives of his, and were upset that he would meet with such violence in their neighborhood.


In other words, they weren't necessarily marching out of sympathy for gays. Rather, some were marching for someone they knew, and possibly loved. Probably others were marching out of a sense of justice: that no human being should meet with such violence. One of the more gratifying things I've learned is that there are many more people than I imagined who feel that way, or, at least, can have that sense evoked in them. Still others were worried about their neighborhood "going down the tubes."


The bad news is that many more people didn't go to the rally because they feared, not necessarily the attackers themselves, but the homophobic and otherwise bigoted "element" they all know exists in their neighborhood, as it does nearly everywhere else. Some of that "element" was penned up by cops in one of the parks: They chanted their slogans and held up their signs but weren't allowed near the march. I wonder if anybody had a sign that read "God Hates Fags," as the Most Right Reverend Fred Phelps sported in a rally that followed the murder of Matthew Shepard.


Speaking of whom...It was around this time in 1998 that he was left to die in the cold Wyoming desert night. I remember that time well: Tammy and I were taking a weekend trip to a town near Syracuse, where I would meet her family for the first time. We heard about Matthew on the way up. She was shocked, in part, because two of her best friends were gay men; I felt my skin crawl, as it did in those days whenever I heard about a "hate crime," because I wasn't "out of the closet" about my own identity or the gay-bashing I committed when I was a teenager.


Places like Wyoming are often dismissed as "flyover country" and neighborhoods like College Point are often derided by denizens of more affluent and trendy arrondissements for being too far away from downtown or not having enough trendy cafes or nightlife. I can't speak for Wyoming, but I have spent enough time in College Point to know that, prior to the attack, it was no more or less likely to have had one like it occur on its streets than any other neighborhood I know of--including Jackson Heights.




Unlike Jackson Heights, where three young men beat transgender woman Leslie Mora as she left a club in June, College Point has never been known as an LGBT enclave. Much of it is industrial; the rest of the neighborhood consists mostly of small houses occupied by their working- and middle-class owners and their families. Narrow streets wind between those houses and some old churches; all of those streets follow or end at the shore of Flushing Bay.


Another difference between Jackson Heights and College Point is that the latter neighborhood is very much like it was twenty or even forty years ago. Most of the residents are white, mainly of Irish, German and Italian ancestry. There are more Hispanics and Asians than in years past; still, one is struck by the absence of people of color, particularly blacks, when walking along College Point Boulevard or any other thoroughfare in the neighborhood.


Some would expect narrow-mindedness, if not outright hatred, in such a place. Certainly, one can find it there, as one could find it anywhere inhabited by humans. On the other hand, the neighborhood's constance means that many people there grew up and work with, and even married, each other. Given that, according to whichever researchers you believe, anywhere from one out of every twenty to one out of every five human beings is not heterosexual, just about everyone knows someone who is. The thing is, in a place like College Point (which, in the aspect I'm about to describe, is much like the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bensonhurst and Borough Park were when I was growing up in them), people not only know that you're gay; they've seen you grow up gay. So, even the most conservative people come to realize that, yes, some people are indeed "that way," and that some of those people are in fact their children, neighbors and friends.


Of course, not everyone embraces their "difference." Again, as in almost any other community that comes to mind, there are families who exile their gay children and others who harass and terrorize them. But many other residents understand something that most of them never articulate, mainly because they never have to: That their gay children, siblings, aunts, uncles, classmates and co-workers are a part of their community and that an attack on any of them is a "black mark" on the neighborhood. In other words, if their gay children, siblings or neighbors are attacked, it means that the neighborhood isn't "safe." To blue-collar and middle-class people, who are nearly all of College Point's population, that is no small consideration, as, for most of them, the homes in which they live are, along with their cars (The nearest subway station is about three miles away.), are the sum total of their wealth. If the neighborhood goes "bad," they lose and have nowhere else to go--at least not locally, anyway.


And, if they lose their neighborhood, they lose not only their investment, but their entire way of life and sense of who they are. Even if crime rates don't go up and property values don't go down, they still feel that an attack against one of their own is a reflection of some failure or inadequacy on their, or the neighborhood's, part. In other words, such an attack shatters their sense of security, which many of them cite as one of their neighborhood's assets.


If that's the reason why some people were marching, well, that's as good as any. And, in the end, those people are as important as earnest activists for calling attention to our need to feel secure in our persons and the right to be the persons that we are, whatever that may mean.


One of my history profs said that all effective revolutions begin with the middle class. Of course! The rich have no reason to revolt (If they want lower taxes, they find havens rather than take to the streets.) and the poor, who often have reason to, can't--for all sorts of reasons--mount as effective a movement as those who have a bit more time and money. Those in the middle are the ones who have everything invested and nowhere else to go. When they see no recourse through the very institutions they have used to gain whatever they have, then no one else has that recourse, either.


And, it seems that at least some people in College Point know what is at stake, at least for them, with Jack Price's beating.

Leslie Mora and Jackson Heights

As much as my life as a woman has brought me so much more joy than living as a man ever did, I realize there is a risk of violence that I never faced when I was a man. Part of that has to do with the dangers that any woman faces.

For example, when I was living as a male, I almost never thought about where or when I was going. I walked through abandoned alleys in the wee hours of morning; I stayed out late for parties and such and never worried about getting home safely, even when I lived in a couple of urban combat zones.

But now I am more careful. When I'm riding my bike, there are places I avoid. And, when I teach night classes, if I miss the bus after getting off the subway, I don't walk: Along one stretch of the route from the subway station to my place, there's a stretch of auto body shops and such that's deserted after sundown. Other women advised me not to walk through that area late at night.

I was reminded of the perils we face when I received a message about Leslie Mora from an organization in which I volunteer.

A week and half ago, on the night of the 19th, Leslie was walking home from a nightclub on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. Two young men called her "faggot" in Spanish as they beat her with a belt. This attack left her with bruises all over her body and stitches in her scalp, and ended only when a passing motorist threatened to call the police.

The stretch of Roosevelt Avenue where Leslie was attacked is about three miles from my apartment and bisects the neighborhood of Jackson Heights, which is believed to be the third-largest LGBT community in New York City as well as the largest or second largest Indian and Pakistani community. In addition, thousands of immigrants from various Latin American countries live there.

The #7 train of the New York transit system rumbles and screeches on tracks several stories above Roosevelt Avenue. One can take this train and, on a good day, be in Chelsea within half an hour. However, about the only thing Chelsea and Jackson Heights have in common is their large gay (male) population.

Not so long ago, Chelsea was a working-class Irish neighborhood. Today, it's not defined by any ethnic groups or races: Today, almost everyone refers to it as a "gay" neighborhood. You will find more rainbow flags in store and apartment windows along Eighth Avenue from 14th to 23rd Streets than you would find in most states or countries.

You will find scarcely a rainbow along Roosevelt Avenue, or along 34th or 37th Avenues, the other main "drags" (pun intended) of Jackson Heights. One reason is that most of the gay men are older than the ones living in Chelsea. They're also more likely to be in couples and many of them live in the garden apartments or the mini-Tudors that line many of the side streets. These houses are nowhere to be found in Chelsea.

And, as you may have guessed, the couples in Jackson Heights, for the most part, don't want to draw attention to themselves. Part of the reason for that is that like most heterosexual couples in their 40's, they want to live quiet lives. Many have dogs, and a few of the couples have children they've adopted.

But probably the larger reason gay couples in Jackson Heights seem to live an almost subterranean existence is the fierce and often violent claim each ethnic group--or, more precisely, its gangs--have staked in the neighborhood. Even on the major thorouoghfares, there's practically no mingling between each of the groups I've mentioned. The Indians "own" 74th Street; the streets in the 80's and 90's are the territories of people from one Latin American country or another.

In an eerie way, this mimicks the Jackson Heights in which my father's aunt and uncle were living around the time of the Stonewall Rebellion. Then, most people thought of Jackson Heights as a Jewish neighborhood, although many blocks were home to second- and third-generation Italian and Irish Americans. One almost never found an Irish person walking on an Italian block, or a Jewish person on an Irish block. And they practically never shopped in each other's stores or ate in each other's restaurants. Today, people like me who don't live in the neighborhood go there to eat, but one doesn't find Latin Americans in the Indian restaurants or vice-versa.

A foodie or other tourist is not likely to notice the tensions I've described. Such people also don't normally frequent Roosevelt Avenue, mainly because it's seedier and grittier than the other streets and avenues of the neighborhood. The stores, restaurants and even the bars and night clubs along Roosevelt are frequented mainly by local residents, and those who work in them are recent immigrants who speak little or no English.

When I was writing for a local newspaper, other journalists and cops referred to Roosevelt Avenue as "Vaseline Alley." It still has a mostly-deserved reputation as a little Times Square--or, at least, Times Square before it was Disney-fied. The sex trade is as strong as it ever was; as you might imagine, it exploits the most vulnerable people--namely, immigrant women who don't speak English and young transgender people, many of whom live on the streets.

Now, I'm going to convey one observation I made while I was writing for the newspaper: Exploitation and violence are each other's evil twins. First of all, there is the violence that is employed against exploited people by their exploiters. Second, those who are exploitable are, far too often, the victims of violence by those who are looking for violence. It's the same relation as the colonizer to the colonized: One sees the other as not quite human, only as labels (whore, tranny, puta, maricon), and can thus rationalize violence against them.

Worst of all, some people--mostly adolescent males and young men--go to places like Roosevelt Avenue (and parts of Chelsea or the Village) for gays and transgenders to beat up or even kill. Those same young males also go to places like Roosevelt Avenue and commit the same kinds of violence against immigrant day laborers. They are the people "no one will miss," so they are easy targets.

As was Leslie Mora. Any young woman leaving a club on a place like Roosevelt Avenue is vulnerable; that she is trans practically made her a target. Her attackers, who shared her ethnicity, didn't see her as one of their own; she didn't belong on "their" turf. And, ironically (at least to anyone who has not spent time in these communities), she also didn't belong in the "gay" areas: She is younger than they are; she is poorer. She is a woman--a transgendered woman. And she got caught in the middle of a ethno-socio-economic battlefield whose barbed wire and mines consist of sex and gender expression.

I hope you recover well, Leslie Mora.