SADNESS: Dionte Greene was killed in his own car likely by man FROM A hook up!
Victim's mother and others believe he was murdered because he was gay and his killer wasn’t sure if he wanted to be
The killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, has dominated the news in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, another shooting death on the other side of the state, in Kansas City, has gotten scant attention beyond the local news.
The victim was a 22-year-old gay, black man named Dionte Greene.
Greene was shot in the face while sitting in the front seat of his car, the engine still running, on the morning of Halloween.
It is believed by Greene's family and friends that he was killed by a man on the down-low who is struggling with his attraction to other men.
'Being that he wasn’t a street person, and didn’t have enemies, I lean towards it having to be someone who was on the down-low or someone so against gay people that they would do this,' the victim's mother, Coshelle Greene, says in an interview with the US edition of The Guardian.
There has not been an arrest in the case or a known suspect. On the last day of his life, Greene has planned to attend what is known as a 'turn-about' party where people show up dressed as a gender different than what they are.
Friends tell the Guardian that the victim had been chatting online with a man who was 'on the down low,' a term used within black communities to describe a man who secretly has sex with other men but is not known to be gay by friends and family.
The man reportedly was conflicted about having sex with men and had trouble deciding whether to meet with Greene. He did not want to be found out but in the end did agree to meet with Greene in a residential area near the victim's home.
Greene was on the phone with a friend when the man approached the car and he allegedly said to the friend: 'He looks just like his Facebook picture.'
The friend then reported hearing yelling before the line went dead. If an arrest is made and there is evidence that the man he was chatting online with is the killer, is it a hate crime?
The city's police department LGBT liaison does not think so.'If someone is actually engaged in "the act", then these are not hate crimes,' Rebecca Caster, an out lesbian, said. The Greene murder is one of at least seven similar cases involving LGBT people in Kansas City since 2010 that were also not classified as hate crimes.
Caster bluntly describes the criteria this way: 'The thing is, hate crimes need to be, "I can’t stand the fact that you are gay so I am going to drag you behind a truck. I don’t know you, I don’t care."'
Jack Levin, professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University, points out why the hate crime distinction is important in a case like Greene's murder.
'Hate crimes are message crimes, and hate-crime laws send a message back,' he tells The Guardian. 'They send a message to the perpetrator that we do not encourage or support him – that we don’t agree with his intolerance.'
There really is no night life for Black LGBTQ people in Kansas City. Missie B’s is a gay bar that’s usually full of white people, but two Fridays ago, as the grand jury in Ferguson announced it needed another weekend to announce its decision, a couple dozen black LGBT people milled around watching a drag show.
“It’s been really tough,” said Star Palmer, a 34-year-old black lesbian woman, looking exhausted. “This shouldn’t have happened to him. Not Dionte.”
There are deep divides between the police and the large LGBT community in Kansas City, but also within the gay community itself. “These bars will maybe let us throw an event here or there,” Palmer says of nightlife in the city, “but we always have to be gone by 10 so the white patrons can have the bar back.”
So Palmer and friends throw club nights around town for black LGBT people who want a safe space – who need a place where they are welcomed, rather than having to meet up with strangers on late-night street corners.
Dionte Greene was a member of the House of Cavalli, a kind of second “family” of the type that has emerged especially within black and Latino LGBT communities – which is rooted in ‘Ballroom’
Hooking up with “trade” is a hot topic across the country – but the dangers of the trend often get left to whispers as faint as a police officer who would rather not find out if a homicide victim was gay.
“We need to educate the kids,” Palmer says – that it’s never a victim’s fault, that it’s OK to hook up with someone who’s unsure of his sexuality (“It’s a conquer thing,”), as long as you take the necessary precautions. Given the deep racial segregations in the LGBT community of this city and so many like it, leaders like Palmer and Korea Kelly, the mother of the House of Cavalli (Kansas City Chapter), need to lead in safely navigating a culture that is open about sex but protective about the potential risks of certain practices. Because American cops sure aren’t doing enough to lead.
As a transgender woman, Kelly knows all too well the potential violence people face when you’re LGBT and you’re having sex with someone who doesn’t identify with that community. “You’re playing with fire,” Kelly told me over lunch. “This is someone who is not cool with this, so you’re taking a chance. Yes, it could be death, [or] he could think, ‘Ah, he’ll just bop me’, or it could be more. You never know.”
As little as parents and police choose not to know about the sometimes dangerous subcultures of America’s gay community, trust me: this is not a black thing.
While the subculture of the “down-low” has predominantly been framed within the context of black men, trust me: having sex with men who don’t identify as gay is not a black thing. All sorts of men do it.
Dionte Greene is not to blame for his own death – but it does mean we need to account for the danger. It means that crimes of confused passion must be hate crimes, just like cases that involve someone being dragged behind a truck, as in Officer Caster’s banal fantasy of violence, because both have to do with being LGBT. The complex hate crime and its rulebook cousin are both motivated by the insidious ways in which homophobia still exists – that someone would rather kill than be outed or caught getting a blowjob from another guy in the front seat of his car.
That is what a “very progressive” city should do. That’s what “pushing the envelope” means. That’s what justice looks like to Coshelle Greene, a modern mother who rose above stereotypes and circumstances that have pushed so many other parents to turn their backs on people like her son.
Sitting there with Coshelle on the couch where Dionte slept, I thought about my own mother, who never cast me out of her own life, and how we both had mothers who loved us, Dionte and me, and families that took care of us, and how we as black gay men can do everything right – and still end up dead for being gay and black anyway.
This video was recorded at a “celebration of life” fundraiser party the night before Greene’s funeral.
Just plain SAD! If anyone has any information contact Kansas City Police!
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