EDGE Chicago

Reports of the brutal attack of a gay youth on Chicago’s South Side - the 17th reported this year - last month have largely flown under the mainstream media’s radar. LGBT activists in the oft-overlooked part of the city say this lack of attention represents a much larger issue.

A group of five men attacked the 19-year-old, whom media reports identified as Prince, near the Conservatory/Central Park Green Line stop in the evening of Nov. 10. The men threatened Prince with a gun before they beat him so badly both his eyes were swollen shut. The group also robbed him.

Frank Walker, president of Youth Pride Center, a LGBT advocacy organization in Hyde Park, of which Prince is a member, said he is disappointed in the lack of resources for organizations such as his and their efforts to build a safe, affirming environment for local residents.

"If the same story would have happened elsewhere, it would have been on TV and everywhere, but the city could care less about anything that’s gay or lesbian that’s not happening on the North Side," Walker told EDGE. "When you only support one side of town and leave the rest to fend for themselves, this is what happens."

Anti-LGBT violence on the city’s South and West Sides is not a new trend, nor is it the only concern facing area residents. Kim Hunt, executive director of Affinity Community Services, a social justice organization serving LGBT women of color, said access to health resources, such as STI prevention and testing and domestic violence, is also a major issue. She noted African American women had among the city’s fastest-growing HIV infection rates.

And while Hunt noticed progress on some of these issues, she admitted she and other activists, including the YPC, Pow-Wow and the Coalition for Justice and Respect, still had much work ahead of them while also facing funding and societal obstacles.

"I think for a lot of us, there hasn’t been the infrastructure to do the outreach we need to do and there’s a gender lack of awareness that these organizations exist and are doing great work," Hunt said. "Still, there’s disproportionate attention to providing resources to the South Side to sustain initiatives. That has not changed as much as it should."

A number of stereotypes also appear to be built into the shambled infrastructure for supporting LGBT-focused endeavors on the South Side. Walker said she feels chief among them is the perception of the North Side as the city’s only gay Mecca and the South Side as an unsafe, unwelcoming place for LGBT Chicagoans. It is a powerful dichotomy leaving many - particularly LGBT youth of color - without anywhere to turn for support that increases their risk of experiencing violence in their own neighborhoods and meeting with tension in "gay-friendly" parts of the city.

"We’ve promoted the idea that you can only be gay on the North Side, and that’s what the city backs. It’s institutionalized now," Walker said. "Until people are willing to take an affirmative action approach and have everyone at the table, I’m afraid I don’t know what to tell you."

One initiative aimed at diversifying the faces of those "at the table" is GenderJUST’s COURSE (Committee on Urban Resource Sustainability and Equity) campaign. The campaign is committed to expanding funding and accessibility to health resources to LGBT people of color, transgender people and youth in under-served parts of the city, namely the South and West Sides.

The committee is particularly focused on addressing access to HIV/STI testing with the city’s Department of Health, an effort member Janel Bailey said they were having some difficulty.

"If you know that lots of Latino men who have sex with men on the West Side and young black women and queer youth of color on the South Side are at huge risk, why are you concentrating all your money into the North Side?" Bailey said. "The way things are currently set up is not working."

Bailey said she hoped an added message of urgency to their, and other activists’ message, might be what it takes to gain traction in their fight.

"This is our youth out there contracting these diseases," she said. "This is our community dying because they don’t have access to these resources. We need to get mad."

For both Walker and Hunt, the bottom line remains to improve the situation for the South/West Side LGBT residents. Walker said a new initiative under works by YPC, "Flatline the Violence," would build public awareness around the issue of safety for LGBT youth, but it still needed foundational support for the campaign to truly take wing.

And for Hunt, she added she feels coalition-building between people working on similar issues in all parts of the city was important in addition to challenging the damaging, polarized perceptions of both the North and South Side LGBT communities.

"I think that perception can paralyze us and make us think so negatively about communities that we don’t give them a chance," Hunt said. "There will always be limited dollars in any endeavor like this, but there’s certainly ways we can work to assess these needs in a more comprehensive way so we can all find ways to get where we want to be."