Terrain Dandridge of the New Jersey Four speaks at Dyke March 2008

Terrain Dandridge was released from Albion Correctional Facility on June 23 after serving close to two years of a three and a half year sentence after she and six other lesbian friends defended herself from a vicious, sexual, homophobic street attack in Greenwich Village in August 2006. . Her appeal is successful, all charges are dropped and she cannot be retried. She is the only one of the four serving a long incarceration. She and her mother, Kimma Walker, spoke at the June 28 Dyke March event. Kimma Walker spoke at length to the crowd, describes Terrain as traumatized by the incarceration. Terrain read a poem written in her cell, which ended with “...yeah, they convicted me with time, but the moral of the story is, I didn’t do the crime”. They thanked the Bay Area Solidarity Committee for their local work on the case.

Renata Hill, convicted and sentence to 8 years incarceration, may have had had her charges dropped within the past couple of weeks, her conviction vacated and sent back to be retried. She may or may not be free. Venice Brown and Patreese Johnson are still incarcerated on 5 and 11 year sentences, with appeals scheduled for Fall. Three others, while not incarcerated, have felony convictions that have prevented them from obtaining employment and public housing. None of the women have prior criminal convictions and two have young children. Hopefully, the momentum has swung from Dandridge’s reversal to eventually have all the women free of convictions and able to put their lives back together. The Bay Area Solidarity Committee attributes Dandridge’s conviction dismissal to international organizing from outraged LGBT people of color.

The conviction is unbelievable, a sort of tabloid justice. The story goes as follows. The seven black lesbian women, ages 19-24 were out partying in Manhattan’s West Village, a commercial nightlife district in gay-friendly Greenwich Village. The logistics and demographics are similar to commercial bar/restaurant strips in the Mission District here in SF. A man selling DVD‘s on the sidewalk, Dwayne Buckle, began following them and making sexual demands ( “I’ll f--- you straight, sweetheart” and asking for “some of that” while pointing below the womens' waist). He continued following and harassing until an argument and fight broke out. Buckle threw a lit cigarette and pulled large clumps of hair out of one of the women’s head. At one point, Buckle was on top choking one of the women. Patreese Johnson, 4’11” and under 100lbs., pulled out a kitchen knife she carried for self defense. A group of men ran to their defense, Buckle was beat up and hospitalized for stab wounds in his abdomen, reportedly from one of the men’s knives. A lot of this was caught on a commercial video camera, so there should have been no mistake in justice but there was.

The case was not handled appropriately from the get-go. The men fled the scene and were never apprehended for questioning. Dandridge’s knife was never tested to determine whether or not used for the stabbing and reportedly wasn‘t. The judge reportedly showed unbelievable bias throughout the trail - which was characterized as an unprovoked “hate crime” attack on a straight man - saying outright that he had no sympathy for the women. He questioned why they would be out at night in NYC and spending money. He recited the nursery rhyme “sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me“ in response to the self-defense claims. The jury was all white women while the defendants are all black women. The media referred a “lesbian wolfpack gang”, "killer lesbians", out to prey on men, and they were tried and convicted as a gang. The New York Daily News called Buckle a “sound engineer” preyed on by a “lesbian wolfpack” and a “gang of angry lesbians”. Maybe the worst was the headline “I’m a man” lesbian growled during fight”, targeted at Hill, who had been taunted by Buckle for her perceived masculinity.

Supporters of the NJ4 have are very upset at left-wing activist groups for a lack of interest in supporting and publicizing the case. Why could this happen in modern day Greenwich Village? I only heard of this story a month ago from literature distributed by Radical Women. While the Village is still an LGBT-friendly area, homophobic attacks have been on the rise since the 1980’s. Gentrification in the neighborhood and adjoining big money New York University is cited as a factor in the bias, with curfews and other heavy-handed police measures more the norm in recent years. Dyke March organizers cite the event as a call for more awareness for public safety and self-defense in the LGBT communities, and report a similar attack in Oakland a week or so ago.