A Rally To Reclaim "A Sacred Queer Space"

Approximately 25 gay men, most of them from the militant group Queer Nation, held a protest rally on July 27 [1991] in Central Park's Ramble section to show their support for the victims of a recent rash of anti-gay shootings there as well as to reclaim "a sacred queer space."

The three,possibly four, shootings, which occurred over the last nine months (the first was on October 7 [1990] and the most recent on July 20), took place during the late evening or early morning hours, when many gay men, the majority of them black and Hispanic , are in the longtime popular cruising area.

The assailant, described as a black man in his late 20s or early 30s, reportedly shot his victims, all white men in their 30s and 40s, from behind clumps of bushes. He is still at large.

Since the shootings, which the police have declared bias-related, many who frequent the park nightly have stayed away even though there is now a heavy presence of uniformed and undercover cops.

While some in the park welcomed the beefed-up patrols, feeling that the police were "backing us up," others felt otherwise. One Queer Nation member told a TV news crew: "Most of us don't know who to be more afraid of--the cops or the bashers. We can't trust the police because they are bashers themselves."

As the tiny procession, who wore, looped around their necks or wrists or waists, a pink plastic fluorescent string, trekked along muddy paths to the dark, heavily wooded rally site deep inside the Ramble, they periodically stopped to attach reward posters and the pink ribbons to park lampposts.

At the rally site, the participants formed a circle and held hands as several took turns expressing what the Ramble meant to them and to the gay community in general.

"Part of what's important about the Ramble," said one protester, "is that when you come here, you see all kinds of gay people who you might not see anywhere else in your usual rounds."

Another added: "The way in which the police have always dealt with gaybashing, if they didn't ignore it, was to clear out the queers [from Central Park] as a way to prevent violence. The message you've got to send is that's not the answer. We have a right to be here. We must push [for] that right."

And said still another: "I've never been in the Ramble before tonight. I regarded it as this furtive place. Not anymore. I began to realize that all through history there have been cruising places like the Ramble where gay people can discover who they are; where they can discover that there are other people like them."

As the circle broke up, and the demonstrators, a handful of whom were black, followed their respective leaders to the east or west side of Central Park, they chanted, with a mixture of assertiveness and rejoicing: "We're here, we're queer, welcome to our park."

This article was originally published in the Philadelphia Gay News (August 9, 1991).