Check It is a gang, a 200-strong pack of teenagers and twenty-somethings, who are black and gay or lesbian or bisexual or trans. They say they’re the only documented gay gang in America. They live in some of Washington, D.C.’s most violent neighborhoods, places that are exponentially more dangerous for LGBT youth who are out and poor, which is to say, people like everyone in Check It.
Just because there are so many of them and they’re young — you know teenagers, always showing up and disappearing and coming back again — doesn’t mean the whole enterprise is some kind of free-for-fall. There’s a hierarchy, with the founders, the leaders, that’s Skittles and Tray and Day Day and Alton, at the top. There’s the Dom Check It (dominant lesbian Check Its) and Chi Chi (she calls herself the First Lady of Check It; she’s the first trans member) and there’s the Baby Check It (those are the 12-year-olds, mostly). Plus it’s only the police and the press who call Check It a gang. Ask Check It what Check It is, they’ll tell you it’s a family.
It all started back in 2005, when a bunch of victimized gay ninth graders decided to band together; strength in numbers turned the disenfranchised into the almighty. “It’s crazy,” Mo said. “They say that someone who is bullied becomes a bully; in some ways, that’s what they became.” It wasn’t like they could join up with just anybody. “I don’t see straight gangs wanting a bunch of gay people hanging around.” So Check It formed and grew in size and strength: “They built up a reputation. You couldn’t scare them, and most of the time, you couldn’t beat them. They weren’t afraid to use knives or brass knuckles or anything.”
It’s almost miraculous that some of these kids are even here.
Mo is an ex-con-turned-community-mentor who is helping Check It channel this wild, bruised, beautiful teenage energy into something more creative than criminal. Because even though everybody in Check It has a rap sheet, even though they’ve been stabbed or shot or worse, even though they’ve all had the kind of childhoods that do not as a general rule portend promising adulthoods, they are working on something, together. They’re designing their own clothing label; they are strutting down runways of their own making, trying to build new lives for themselves on a foundation of fashion.
Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer have spent three years shooting a documentary, Check It, about this crew. The film will be executive produced by Olive Productions, a company formed by Steve Buscemi, Stanley Tucci and Wren Arthur. But the film is not done; the film, at press time, is in the late stages of editing. Flor and Oppenheimer are trying to fundraise $60,000 through an Indiegogo campaign, 10 percent of which will go directly to materials for Check It’s fashion line. With less than two weeks to go, Check It has raised just over half of its goal.
“Part of the reason that we’re doing this story is this is a population that’s the marginalized of the marginalized,” Flor said by phone. “People don’t know about these kids. They don’t even know they’re there.”
Mo, too, is eager to introduce Check It to the world. “I felt this was a story that needed to be told… The thing about this is that the story is going to really let people know that we’ve got a lot of work to do with our children. There are so many who need help right now, as we speak.”
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Mo (real name: Ron Moten) has been working with at-risk youth in Washington since he came home from prison in 1995. He grew up in Upper Northwest D.C. but got kicked out of school and started living on the streets.
“Idle time,” he said by phone. “You know what that means.” He was arrested for selling drugs. “Thank God I got locked up, because a lot of my friends got killed. My brother got killed. I just decided to make a change. And when I came home, there were people who helped me transform that energy into doing something positive in the community.”
In 2008, Mo reached out to Check It through some girls he’d mentored in the past who were part of the Gallery Place scene. “I said, I’d love to work with y’all,” said Mo. “I don’t care if you’re gay or not. I work with all children.” He believes “all children have strengths” and asked the founders, “what do you like to do? What do you want to do with your lives?” The answer: fashion.
Around this time, Mo was meeting with Flor and Oppenheimer. The filmmaking team was at work on their first feature documentary, The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, which followed the phoenix-like destruction-resurrection-repeat cycle of the four-term Washington D.C. mayor. While shooting the HBO film, “We spent a lot of time in Ward 8, the worst neighborhood in D.C.,” said Flor. They also met “a lot of Marion Barry’s constituents, [who] were ex-convicts,” she said, as well as community leaders and mentors and, in some cases, both: people like Mo.
“One day, Mo said he was heading over to see the Check It,” said Oppenheimer by phone. When he and Flor asked what Check It was, Mo said, “This gay gang that’s putting on fashion shows.”
When did you decide that you just wanted to wear dresses and makeup and say, ‘fuck it all’?
As you can imagine, that got Flor and Oppenheimer’s attention. The news of the day was that teenagers in gangs “were raising hell” around Gallery Place. The Washington Post covered the growing pains of what was then D.C.’s newest retail and entertainment district, a stretch of Seventh Street from Chinatown to Penn Quarter. “The night scene has grown increasingly tense,” a 2010 story reported. “Large groups of teens clot the sidewalks, threaten passersby, and confront one another with harsh words and frequent fisticuffs… Their misbehavior ranges from loud, obnoxious clowning to vandalism and muggings.”
By 2011, Check It was making headlines. The Post described the teens as a black gay gang that identified both as oppressors and oppressed: vulnerable because of their sexuality or all-powerful due to their massive numbers and aggressive nature. At the time, D.C. police counted about 20 “members” and between 50 and 100 “associates.”
“A lot of times, the perception is that gay people would never be violent,” said Mo. “But the fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter what your sexual preference is. It’s the circumstances that you’re raised in.” This group of kids gets overlooked, Mo said, because “there’s never been anything put in place to deal with this particular segment of this population. They’ve been neglected.”
“Almost all their mothers were casualties of the crack epidemic,” Flor said by phone. “Most of them don’t know their fathers. Many were sexually and physically abused. Many if not all have done time in juvie or in jail. It’s almost miraculous that some of these kids are even here.”
“When you’re talking about a group of gay children who have responded in a negative way in society because of how they’ve been treated, it’s like, nobody wants to touch this,” said Mo. “The system wants to have no part of them.”
But Flor and Oppenheimer were all in. The filmmakers were immediately struck by, as Flor put it, how “supremely cinematic” these kids were.
“Their love for fashion is how they’ve been able to distinguish themselves from everyone else, to visually proclaim who they are, be it gay, trans, whatever it might be,” said Oppenheimer. “It’s the best language for them to express themselves when they go outside their doors and they’re out in the streets.”
“Fashion is their life,” said Flor. “They’re fabulous dressers, and they are very obsessed with hair and nails and clothes and shoes. They have a really wonderful style . They’re very unique, very extravagant and colorful.”
The standard Check It aesthetic is that there is no standard Check It aesthetic. “That comes out in cutting edge combinations of clothes and hair color that changes every day, and extreme makeup, and Hello Kitty short-shorts and moon boots and lacy tops,” said Oppenheimer. “I think when they’re in a pack together, and they’re in a group, [fashion] helps galvanize them, too. It helps them find identity. They have this positive tool that they’re using that helps them stand up tall and feel good about themselves, just by being who they are in a community, in a world, that they’ve been shown is oftentimes very much against them.”
“For them to be as talented and joyful as they are, it’s amazing,” said Flor. “These are kids that have been through a lot and have risen above it and still have hope and go about their lives.”
Flor and Oppenheimer didn’t take their cameras out for the first four-to-six months of face-time with Check It. “We take baby steps,” Oppenheimer said. “These are kids that have been let down by every adult in their entire life.” During that introductory period, “They were just waiting for us to go away. They have that ‘fuck you’ attitude a lot of the time. ‘You’ll be adult number 374 that promised they’d help me go to school, get a job, tutor me for a GED, and then disappeared.’ So we were people who they learned — after trying in a way to get rid of us — that we are going to be there.”
“They don’t really trust people because they haven’t been shown they can trust people,” said Flor. “But they did trust Mo,” and Flor, who has children the same age as some of the Check It kids, “sort of became a surrogate mother.”
D.C. is a very gay-friendly town in some ways. But it’s really not for these kids.
Fair to say that Flor and Oppenheimer did not exactly maintain a reporter’s-arm’s-length from their subjects. “We fell in love with these kids and we were fascinated by their stories,” said Oppenheimer. “We weren’t out to make a gay film, a black film, a poverty film. We were out to make a character study of their world. And as it progressed, these three years, it became something else. Those walls did break down. You can’t do something like this without being there for them. The only way to tell these stories in a truthful, honest way is to spend a lot of time with them. The idea of an objective journalistic wall being built between us and these kids, yeah, that crumbled pretty fast.”
“What was exciting about this is, because they’re so marginalized and come from such unstable and unsupportive homes, no one’s ever asked them these questions we were slowly beginning to ask,” said Oppenheimer. “What was it like to first realize you were gay or trans? What was it like growing up here, on these streets, and having to deal with the persecution or the anger that you deal with, just going out and being who you are? When did you decide that you just wanted to wear dresses and makeup and say, fuck it all?”
“They lit up,” he said. “They’d never answered those questions before.”
Oppenheimer and Flor chose Indiegogo to raise the money they need to finish the documentary “because it’s not just a film,” said Oppenheimer, pointing to the $6,000 Check It will get for their fashion line if the campaign reaches its goal. “This is a way to help at-risk LGBTQ kids in a very concrete way. And it’s a chance to create a dialogue about a situtation that really is not big on people’s radars.”
Debates around gay marriage are “front and center in the news,” he said. “But in terms of certain marginalized communities where being gay is really not accepted, there’s a whole other struggle going on.
“D.C. is a very gay-friendly town in some ways,” said Flor. “But it’s really not for these kids. That’s really the purpose of the film: to help create that awareness, and to point [out] that these kids have fallen through every crack there is to fall through. How did that happen? This is the nation’s capital. D.C. has a responsibility. We’re the petri dish for so many things in America, this beacon of democracy and all that. The kinds of things that go on a mile or so from the White House, it’s pretty stunning.”
“I think when people see the story, they will have a lot of sympathy for the population,” said Mo. “Whether you’re gay or straight.”
“We’ll show you something that you haven’t seen,” said Flor. “I guarantee.”