Reports of an event on the night of May 30 have surfaced amidst rumors that a group of straight people marched through Lakeview’s North Halsted Street, and then set upon and attacked a group of gay individuals. What is known is that a gathering involving a large group of people resulted in several arrests.
The Chicago Dyke March moved to Pilsen last year in an historic attempt to take the event to neighborhoods outside the mostly white gay enclaves of the north side. The Dyke March Planning Committee envisioned that the march would rotate between the city’s various ethnic neighborhoods, to show that queers are, indeed, everywhere.
Chicago gay activist Andy Thayer, of Gay Liberation Network, was in Moscow recently, for a May 16 event that Russian gay-rights activists planned as Moscow Pride. In Russia, gay-related events have been stalled by repressive state policies that do not permit citizens to rally in public, and by what many consider to be a climate of widespread social and political homophobia.
Two school students as young as 11 years old recently committed suicide within 10 days of each other after enduring anti-gay harassment. Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover of Springfield, Mass., killed himself April 6 and Jaheem Herrera of DeKalb County, Ga., hanged himself with a cloth belt April 16 after similar taunts. The incidents have created waves of shock and dismay and generated a public conversation about such instances of bullying.
