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The Parable of Kitty Genovese, the New York Times , and the Erasure of Lesbianism

2014; University of Texas Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.7560/jhs23206

1535-3605

Marcia M. Gallo,

Cinema and Media Studies

T h e 1964 r a p e a n d m u r d e r o f catherine “Kitty” Genovese in New York city shocked the city, the nation, and the world, but not because a young white woman had been viciously assaulted in public. Media attention instead focused immediately on “thirty-eight witnesses”—men and women living nearby in seemingly safe, semi-suburban Kew Gardens—who allegedly did not want to “get involved” by going to her aid. The New York Times reported that, despite their awareness of the brutal assault that took place just outside their apartment windows, no one called the police. In subsequent articles from the Times the failure of these witnesses to act became symptomatic of a city in a crisis of apathy and an example of a psychic illness threatening the body politic. Unlike other contemporaneous tales of urban crime that offered detailed descriptions of the young women involved, the victim in this case—a twenty-eight-year-old Italian american bar manager who lived in Queens with her female lover—was reduced rhetorically to a chalk outline on the sidewalk: editor a. M. rosenthal’s accounts in the New York Times erased her from the story.