Keith Mitchell, a 24-year-old with Bambi eyelashes who likes to be called Sparkles, strolled down East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, discussing what he would wear on a date that night. As he rounded a corner, a stocky man with baggy pants and arms covered in tattoos locked eyes on him.
The news had been filled with details of the vicious anti-gay attacks two weeks earlier and just two miles to the west, but Mitchell, breezy as ever, did not notice the stare until the tattooed man called out.
“What’s up, mama?” The man asked with a smile. “How you been?” In the West Farms neighbourhood where Mitchell lives, nearly everyone - the bodega cashiers, the basketball players, even the gang members - know he is gay, and he has rarely felt threatened.
Yet the torture of three men a local gang suspected of being gay has shaken him, as it has people across New York City, and especially in the Bronx, the borough with the city’s highest rates of poverty and some of its most violent crime. In the toughest neighbourhoods, gay residents say, it is possible to live openly much of the time - and then to suddenly pay for it.
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