Aug 10, 2007   | COMMENTS     

ISSUES OF RACE, gender identity and sexual orientation trigger a particular type of news broadcasting on the major networks. With the objective to provide viewers with “infotainment,” rather than fair and balanced reporting, discerning television viewers — straight and gay alike — are most often insulted by the news rather than informed by it.

Case in point: “The O’Reilly Factor” with Bill O’Reilly on the Fox News Channel, which recently tipped the scales of purportedly delivering fair and balanced reporting. O’Reilly carelessly brought defamatory news to his viewers about an alleged national epidemic of black lesbian gang violence terrorizing neighborhoods and schools in large urban enclaves.

According to Rod Wheeler, a Fox News crime analyst, these black lesbian gangs recruit and force kids into homosexuality.

“There is this national underground network, if you will, Bill, of women that’s lesbian and also some men groups that’s actually recruiting kids as young as 10 years old in a lot of the schools in communities across the country,” Wheeler told host O’Reilly on the show.

And the notorious black lesbian gang, Dykes Taking Over, is supposedly a pedophiliac gang carrying weapons and violently attacking and raping the girl victims they recruit. “As a matter of fact, some of the kids have actually reported that they were actually forced into, you know, performing sex acts and doing sex acts with some of these people,” Wheeler continued.

And corroborating Wheeler’s crime-busting story is former lesbian gang-banger and evangelist Linda D. Jernigan, who was asked to speak at a Chicago area public school on the topic, but was turned down because the school wanted her to “de-Christianize” her conversion testimony.

Jernigan nonetheless gives her testimony to all and any who will listen. She told Peter LaBarbera of the right-wing organization Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, “Lesbian girl gangs would drag a targeted female into the school restroom, hold her down and perform oral sex on her to ‘turn her out” by forcibly seducing the poor girl through lesbian rape.”

Although O’Reilly had to apologize for the egregious errors and lies reported on his show, the story has nonetheless achieved the desired goal of “infotaining” its audience by perpetuating both frighteningly racist and homophobic stereotypes.

“We overstated the extent of gay gangs in the Washington area. .... Detective Wheeler has apologized,” O’Reilly stated on his show.

And the report about “Dykes Take Over” offered no evidence to support the allegations.

The story about this purported trend of black lesbian gangs actually derives from a story about several black lesbians coming home late from a night out in Greenwich Village in New York City in August 2006. They defended themselves against an anti-gay attack.

Because of poor legal representation, three of the women pleaded guilty to attempted assault and were sentenced to six months in jail and five years probation. However, these women were depicted in the media as “a posse of lesbians,” “a pack of marauding lesbians” and a “gang of lesbian women,” all created in the imaginative and entertaining world of news broadcasting.

But the real story not told is how little is ever accurately reported about hate crimes against black lesbians — and other gay, bisexual and transgender people of color — and how issues of race, gender identity and sexual orientation trigger the type of violence against them. Nor are the reasons for the silence around such violence often explored.

The lack of mainstream media coverage of this type of hate crime can be attributed to three factors — all dealing with race.

The first is the “politics of silence” in gay communities of color to openly report these kinds of attacks unless it results in death. Reporting attacks against us by other people of color can result in victims being viewed as race traitors.

Secondly, there’s a dearth of gay reporters of color writing for white media.

Thirdly, the media view the topic of violence and people of color as synonymous.

The result is a kind of institutional racism and homophobia.