Sakia Gunn

Overall, The Sakia Gunn story was extremely heart breaking for me to watch. I honestly fought back tears as I watched it with the class. The fact that Sakia was murder because she was lesbian is disturbing in itself but watching and learning that she was only fifteen years old and killed by a grown man approximately thirty years old and at least twice her size made this even more disturbing. I feel like McCullough did not receive enough prison time to his sentence. Twenty years is way too easy for him. He deserved life in prison at the least. McCullough made a decision to murder Sakia Gunn, a five foot three-inch-tall teenager and his family and defense attorney kept saying he made a mistake. Not only was McCullough wrong for propositioning teenage girls, but he could have easily avoided this “mistake” by taking no as an answer. The only good that came out of Sakia’s murder was that it sparked a Lesbian,

Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning movement in her community. The people of Sakia’s community did not let her die in vain.
One thing I had noticed about the documentary was that they show many pictures of Sakia and talked about how she was a proud lesbian.

This shows great courage for someone of Sakia’s young age. Sakia did not conform to the usual traditional gender roles of being feminine. Typical gender roles for most teenage girls are to be feminine like wearing girly clothes, liking fashion and shopping, and doing activities like dance and cheerleading. Sakia was nothing like this. Part of Sakia’s sexual expression was that wore large manly clothes, she kept a short haircut, she played basketball, and her demeanor seemed very masculine. This is all the more reason why I believe that Sakia’s murder was nothing short of a hate crime. Sakia and her best friend that witnessed her murder did not look like the typical feminine girls. To me, by looking at their appearance it is obvious that they are lesbian. In fact, Sakia was mistaken as a boy by her best friend’s mother’s partner. When McCullough approached Sakia and her friends, he most likely already knew that they were

lesbians.
In addition, I believe that Sakia’s friends and strong support system contributed in why she was so open about her sexuality. As the book states, your peers are a socializing agent to individuals. People naturally seek approval for generally everything from their peers. Peers provide the standards for gender role behaviors. In most of the pictures of Sakia that she had with friends, they all typically had things in common. Sakia and her friends all had masculine characteristics about them. Sakia’s best friend Valencia is also a masculine lesbian and Valencia’s mother is also lesbian. As stated in the documentary, LGBTQ is often not a big topic in the black community. A lot of people in communities like Sakia’s are in the closet about their sexuality. I believe that Sakia was so open and comfortable with expressing herself fully as a lesbian partially because a lot of Sakia’s friends and some family are homosexual just like her. Overall, the murder of Sakia Gunn introduced a movement in her community. This is significant to help all the other LGBTQ men and women have a support system in their community.