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On a recent evening, hundreds of people converged at the northeast corner of Coney Island Avenue and Avenue P, in Midwood, Brooklyn, to remember O’Shae Sibley, a dancer who had been stabbed to death at that spot a few days earlier. They shouted, “Say his name!,” and then said his name over and over, in different ways, sometimes chanting its four syllables, sometimes almost singing. “O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o’Shae! O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o’Shae!” The sound echoed off the glass front of the apartment building across the street and got louder as more people showed up. The name filled the intersection, ringing with unity and power, but you could hear the keening of absolute bereavement underneath.
Sibley and a few friends—dancers, like him, who specialized in the drag-queen-influenced, pose-striking dance style known as voguing—had been on their way back from a day at the beach when they stopped for gas at the Mobil station on this corner. They began voguing by their car. A group of young men standing nearby yelled insults. According to some reports, the young men objected to the dancing and to the skimpiness of what the dancers wore. The dancers yelled back, a confrontation ensued, and employees of the Bolla Market, the convenience store behind the gas pumps, came out and defused the situation. The dancers were getting back in their car when the trouble blew up again, and a seventeen-year-old boy among the young men allegedly pulled out a knife and stabbed Sibley in the side. Sibley bled on the sidewalk and died at a local hospital.
“O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o’Shae! O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o’Shae!” Sometimes rapid drumming underlaid the chant-singing. “O’-Shae Sib-ley, O’-Shae Sib-ley!” “Being gay is not a crime!” “Black, queer, and trans lives matter!” “We will take care of each other!” “O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o’Shae! O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o’Shae!” On Coney Island Avenue and on Avenue P, police were rerouting vehicles. Drivers leaned on their horns. One asked, “What’s going on?,” rolling down his window. “Memorial,” an affectless cop said, waving him to turn left. “Oh, a memorial,” the driver said, as his window went back up.
People were wearing almost anything a person could wear, except MAGA hats. Many of the cops wore the French-blue shirts of the Community Affairs squad. They would not let anyone prop a bicycle against an N.Y.P.D. van parked at the corner but did not try to stop a dancer from leaning back and voguing on the hood of an unoccupied police cruiser near the center of the crowd. Strobe-like, the cruiser’s red, blue, and white flashing lights highlighted the poses. A man wearing a multipocketed vest that said “STREET MEDIC” and “HE/HIM” circulated, handing out cough drops. Monitors of various sorts kept an eye out. There were volunteers in the chartreuse-green baseball caps of the National Lawyers Guild Legal Observer team, and young women in vests that said “ACLU OF NEW YORK PROTEST MONITOR,” and older folks in jackets with “SPECIAL POLICE BRUTALITY UNIT” on the back, who were recording the event, and representatives of Release the Grip, an anti-gun-violence group from the Bronx. Sweatshirts and T-shirts said “UNFUCK THE WORLD” and “VOGUE AS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE” and “BLACK QUEER LIVES MATTER” and “JEWS FOR BLACK LIVES MATTER” and “STRIKE A POSE FOR O’SHAE” and “WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA EAST” and “GOD DON’T PLAY ABOUT” and “DANCE. HERE. NOW.” A man wearing a white dress shirt, black pants, and a yarmulke bent down to get a better angle for a photograph. Two young women pasted a flyer that said “Hate Violence Happened Here” over an orthodontist ad on a bus shelter.
Five or six mourners sat in a circle on the sidewalk, knees up, their long legs pointing toward a middle. Only limber people could sit like that so gracefully. Their faces were downcast or covered by their hands. Their bodies formed spokes from a center that was the irregularly shaped stain on the pavement where Sibley had bled. Noise rose all around, but this circle was quiet. After a few minutes, the mourners got up and dispersed.
Night fell, the streetlights came on, and it started to rain. The police moved barricades and allowed some vehicles through on Avenue P. “O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o’Shae! O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o’Shae!” The voices continued to rise, defiant and triumphant and mournful. The crowd dwindled from hundreds to dozens, the police reduced their own numbers, and the acres’ worth of flowers that people had brought formed a small foothill at the base of the lit-up blue-and-white Mobil gas-station sign. Blocks away, a core group stayed on, standing under the elevated Kings Highway subway-station platform, out of the rain, chant-singing, “O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o’Shae! O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o’Shae!” ♦
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