An Attack Over Vogueing Resonates Painfully With a Renowned Drag Performer
On a Saturday night in high summer, O’Shae Sibley paid the highest possible price for a visibility that, as a 28-year-old gay Black man, he assumed was rightfully his in New York more than two decades into the 21st century.
It was 33 years after Madonna’s “Vogue” became an international hit single, and whatever was being done to limit L.G.B.T.Q. rights in so many other parts of the country, he lived in a place where the City Council had not long ago ousted a Queens Republican from the chamber’s committee on mental health after she criticized taxpayer-funded drag-queen story hours in public schools.
As it happened, Kevin Aviance, a musician, D.J. and pillar of the vogue-ballroom scene, learned about Mr. Sibley’s fatal stabbing later than he might have otherwise.
On the night of the attack, Mr. Aviance was seeing Beyoncé in concert, and he was more than a fan. The singer had sampled one of his songs from the 1990s on “Renaissance,” the album she released last year and the one that Mr.
