Sakia Gunn lived in Newark, N.J., forging a defiant but ultimately innocuous teenage existence as an out lesbian. On the night of May 11, 2003, Gunn and her friends were waiting for a bus at a Newark street corner when two men approached and propositioned them from a car. The girls rebuffed their advances, claiming to be lesbians, but the two men emerged from the vehicle and initiated a scuffle. The confrontation evolved violently, and one of the men, Richard McCullough, pulled a knife on Gunn before stabbing her in the chest. Valencia Bailey, one of Gunn’s friends at the scene, flagged down a motorist to take Gunn to the hospital, where she died that night.
The 15-year-old’s slaying ignited outrage in Newark, as LGBT residents lobbied the mayor’s office and proposed a number of initiatives, including an LGBT community center. The Advocate and The New York Times also ran stories on Gunn's death. However, reverberations from the crime proved finite, or at least obscure, as only 21 articles about the murder were published in newspapers nationwide. Comparatively, the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in 1998 yielded more than 650 national newspaper stories.
Brooklyn-based filmmaker Charles Bennett Brack, in his first independent documentary, Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Film Project, takes viewers inside the courtroom with Richard McCullough, who came forward and pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter. The film focuses on those close to Gunn, who give tearful, infuriated, and startlingly articulate insight into their loss. But another major collective voice of the film, which Brack takes to Syracuse, N.Y., and San Francisco next, stems from outside the courtroom -- the activists and everyday citizens who ponder racism, classicism, and homophobia within the media and American society.
Such a daunting list of topics requires filmmaking experience. After graduating from Antioch College in Ohio, Brack moved to New York and eventually worked on AIDS-related safety and prevention films sometimes played for patrons at gay bars. Working for both the Gay Men's Health Crisis and the Commission on Human Rights as well as cofounding the Lavender Light gospel choir helped Brack acquire an indispensable sense of both community and disjoint within the gay populace.
Brack showed his film in Oak Park, Ill.'s St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, which devotes itself to progressive social activism, including issues regarding LGBT people of color. The Advocate caught up with Brack, a native of Chicago's south side, after the film screened and its several dozen viewers filtered out of St. Martin’s. While Brack intends for the film to strike a chord with viewers, the documentary’s subject has already provided him with buoyancy and hope in facing complications in his own varied, often difficult life.
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